Golden Jiao.
Combat tier: Heavyweight.
Projected Peak Breakthrough tier: Super-Heavyweight.
Current evolutionary stage: Mature Stage (Lv0.691, Activity Value 1.987H)
Individual Talent: Two-and-a-Half Star (2.874H)
Description…
This was the Golden Jiao’s entry in The Science of Activity Evolution: Evolved Beasts Volume. The original Classification Chart had been revised and expanded by the Research Institute and formally incorporated into the camp’s educational curriculum under the title The Science of Activity Evolution — 《活性进化学》, or The Huoxue for short.
The Huoxue was organized into six chapters: Activity, Evolved Beasts, Evolved Plants, Evolved People, Bone-Gold, and Mysteries. The final chapter covered phenomena that remained unexplained — things the camp’s researchers could document but not yet account for.
Whether The Huoxue was the first systematic treatment of Activity produced anywhere in China — or the world — since the catastrophe was impossible to know. But it was reasonable to say it would earn a place in history.
Before the first print run, Research Institute Director Zhang Kan came to find Shen Cong. He wanted a dedication.
Tedious thing to ask. Shen Cong agreed anyway.
So every copy of The Huoxue opened with a single line:
“The gates of the new world have already opened.”
Signed: Edge of Evolution, Originator of Activity Nomenclature, Colonel Hu Ge of the Anhui Provincial Garrison.
When Zhang Kan handed Shen Cong his personal copy, he’d said, with feeling: “Activity has brought changes beyond anything we imagined. Civilization is showing us another path of evolution. I hope humanity can seize this opportunity — to rebuild our society and reclaim our freedom.”
Perhaps that was right.
Humanity’s circumstances were dire — existence itself was under threat. But cross this barrier, and a future worth having was still possible.
Shen Cong was in the process of crossing one such barrier himself: the Lv1 threshold.
Shortly after returning from the Golden Jiao hunt, the camp delivered what he’d asked for — the crane truck’s primary metal, a three-meter by two-meter section of Golden Jiao hide in good condition, and a container of snake blood, still warm.
The Golden Jiao’s hide was in a different class from the Dog-Croc skin he’d worked with previously. Tougher, more elastic, and simultaneously thinner and more breathable. He planned to incorporate the hide into his Half-Activated Armor’s reinforcement layers, and to use it on key structural points of Vajra 2.0. Amalgamated hide outperformed metal on defensive properties by a significant margin.
Activity functioned something like a specialized tanning agent — it transformed fragile raw skin into resilient, processed leather. While active, the Violent Ape King and the Golden Jiao could shrug off artillery rounds. Strip away the Activity after death, and a sharp knife cut through the same material without effort. By the same principle, only Activity-sharpened bone-gold weapons reliably penetrated Activity-reinforced defenses — raw kinetic force, however great, lost a substantial portion of its effectiveness against an Activity barrier.
Activity hadn’t overturned human physics. But it had come close enough to matter.
Every survivor in camp — Shen Cong included — was still learning how to work with it.
A snakeskin suit would actually be quite something. He shook out the hide, yellow-white with a natural sheen, and let himself have an uncharacteristically indulgent thought.
Going without clothes under the Half-Activated Armor meant metal against skin — friction, discomfort. Wearing clothes under it meant heat retention and stuffiness. A fitted underlayer of thin, breathable snakeskin solved both problems, and would provide a modest layer of additional defense when needed.
He decided immediately and started that night.
The first attempt was lopsided and unwearable. He used Vajra’s amalgamation ability to progressively reshape and refine it until the Jiao-hide bodysuit fit cleanly and comfortably.
The next morning: bodysuit on first, then the Half-Activated Armor over it.
Immediately, considerably more comfortable.
Breakfast: snake blood pudding, Bee Treasure, braised snake meat sections, Crimson Mangoes, and assorted Activity fruits. Not the widest variety, but the quantities were substantial. Snake meat in particular — his Silver-tier ration was thirty jin of evolved meat daily, and while other Silver-tier evolved people received at most ten jin of snake meat in their thirty, his Edge of Evolution designation came with preferential allocation.
Resource prioritization wasn’t an empty phrase. It was thirty jin of actual snake meat.
Another benefit had materialized as well: killing the Golden Jiao had earned him 500 points outright, bringing his total to 2,314. He noted, not without some frustration, that he hadn’t been formally part of the camp when he killed the Violent Ape King — otherwise that would have added another 200 or so on top.
Regardless: over two thousand points. Enough to fund the Vajra overhaul.
He stopped taking field assignments.
His full attention shifted to waiting for the Automotive Lab to finish his blueprints. Since his Edge of Evolution designation, the Lab had set aside most of its other work and dedicated the bulk of its time to his commission. Shen Cong had contributed two laptops from his own stores to improve their efficiency.
“Reporting, Colonel. The Computer Lab team has arrived with the component parts.” A regular soldier saluted.
Shen Cong nodded.
The Computer Lab was one of the Research Institute’s working groups — its mandate was assembling and repairing computers and electronic equipment. Digital operations were simply more efficient than manual ones, and the camp had enough salvaged components to make it viable.
Vajra 2.0 would need full electronic systems integration — at minimum a closed-circuit camera network and radar, providing continuous interior and exterior monitoring. That meant a significant volume of computing hardware. As an iron person, Shen Cong could work with the Computer Lab to coax functional units out of salvaged components that would otherwise be scrap.
The situation was grim in that regard. The camp had people in short supply and salvage in abundance — piles of degraded components, with metal corroding faster than iron people could maintain it.
Standard preservation methods had largely stopped working under Activity’s corrosive influence. At best they bought time.
This corrosion wasn’t simple oxidation. It was a composite chemical and electrochemical process that resisted conventional countermeasures — oxygen exclusion, desiccation, electroplating — all of them failing to prevent the underlying material change.
The cause could only be attributed to Activity radiation.
More striking still: corroded metal lost measurable mass in the process. The Research Institute had conducted a controlled experiment — monitoring iron corrosion in a sealed container. A one-kilogram iron sample, fully corroded to powder, weighed only 0.82 kilograms afterward.
A loss of 180 grams.
“We hypothesize that these 180 grams of mass are escaping into the surrounding environment through some unusual reaction pathway — and it is possible that Activity itself is generated through metal decomposition reactions. Our laboratory equipment isn’t precise enough to investigate further, and this can’t yet be treated as established evidence. It’s recorded here as a reference point.”
This passage appeared in The Huoxue‘s Mysteries chapter. The Mingfa Camp’s research capabilities couldn’t take it further. Perhaps someday another survivor organization would pick up the thread and find the answer.
Work continued.
“Colonel Hu, if you can reshape these components to these tolerances — the acceptable variance is marked on the diagram — I can show you how to preserve each part properly.” The lab researcher walked Shen Cong through the specifications.
Under professional guidance, Shen Cong found he could restore moderately precise components without difficulty.
(End of Chapter 160)