The overhaul proceeded far more smoothly than anticipated.
Shen Cong’s willpower was the key factor. Guiding metal through extension and reshaping, his speed on the major structural work was faster than any manual fabrication process could match — and the precision was better too. Six years of solitary work on a heavy truck, every component handled and rehandled until he understood it by feel, had given him a structural intuition that no other iron person in the camp could replicate. They could push metal around, but they couldn’t hold a three-dimensional model in their minds while doing it. The result was always rough, approximate, more abstract art than engineering.
Shen Cong worked like a skilled draftsman — a few deliberate strokes and the shape was there, exactly as intended.
In a day and a night, the primary structural frame was complete — extended, reshaped, and amalgamated.
Alongside the frame work, he melted down the crane truck’s primary metal using an electric welding torch. The sample was small — roughly shoebox-sized, not a complete primary metal deposit, just the fragment he’d managed to partially absorb before the process stalled. As he attempted to amalgamate it, he ran into the same resistance: partial absorption only, and then nothing further.
Vajra’s Talent — the Activity Source ceiling — rose from 2.511H to 2.518H.
2.518H. That was the wall.
Not as impressive as the Golden Jiao. He noted the ceiling with mild frustration and moved on.
Rather than waste the remaining fragment, he offered it to his Half-Activated Armor instead.
The Half-Activated Armor was a failed metal lifeform — no autonomous will, no Talent in the conventional sense, only its current Activity Value of 0.9H. But for a brief moment after the crane truck’s primary metal was absorbed, Shen Cong felt something shift. The armor’s Activity seemed to… quicken. Become more fluid, more responsive. And he could sense something like a Talent reading — around 1H, a One-Star baseline.
Then he reached for it again and it was gone. The armor had returned to its usual inert state. The Talent impression had vanished.
Try again when more primary metal is available.
Vajra handled extension and amalgamation. The Half-Activated Armor handled component fabrication. Between them, Shen Cong functioned as a one-person industrial production line, working through the days and nights without stopping. During the brief rest intervals, Blackhead kept watch — she’d reached the Metamorphosis Stage now, Activity Value at 0.235H, which put her in respectable territory for an insect. Her stinger’s Super-2 Ant Acid gave her Featherweight-tier combat capability at minimum.
But what Shen Cong valued most was the warning function. Through the perceptual link, she could rouse him instantly from sleep. Without Blackhead, he wouldn’t have been able to close his eyes at all.
Two days of unbroken high-intensity work. Vajra was transformed.
The new form was raw and unfinished — visible weld lines, sharp edges, no cosmetic treatment. But the dimensions were there: 15 meters long, 6 meters wide, 5.5 meters tall. The cab and cargo body were semi-separated, the cab occupying 3 meters of the length. The old multi-wheel configuration was gone, replaced by six oversized specialty tires, each 2 meters in diameter.
The old multi-wheel setup had been necessary to distribute load weight. Now Activity could reinforce the chassis rigidity and tire strength directly, making configurations that would have been structurally untenable before entirely viable.
It was genuinely enormous.
Three engines had been expanded in output under the Lab team’s guidance, which brought the inevitable trade-off: increased fuel consumption. No way around it.
“The vehicle is very wide.” Liu Yanbing reviewed the power systems without excessive optimism. “Until a better engine solution is found, I’d strongly advise avoiding narrow or rough terrain — the fuel draw will be severe. Main roads and provincial highways are ideal; smooth surfaces reduce consumption significantly.”
Shen Cong took this calmly. He’d been working to break his dependency on Vajra as a mobile fortress, pushing himself to operate independently in the field. Vajra 2.0 was a mobile base, not a combat vehicle he hid inside. It didn’t need to ford rivers or climb ridgelines. It needed to hold the road.
His own growing capabilities had given him confidence in that model.
The exterior armor ran in two layers — alloy steel plating on the inside layer, solar panels on the outer. The solar panels provided continuous power generation while Vajra was moving, addressing the energy supply problem. The original spike array had been removed — it had never been particularly useful — and replaced with a full-perimeter bumper system. Protection where it mattered, no obstruction to solar collection.
The front end was fitted with a purpose-designed dozer blade, drawing from the PLA’s GCZ-112L tracked armored engineering vehicle for inspiration: a V-shaped blade on articulated arms. Controlled by extension rods, it could fold into V-configuration for obstacle clearing or flatten to a straight blade for pushing. The thickness had been substantially increased so it could double as a battering ram.
At Vajra 2.0’s projected fifty-ton operational weight, that much mass moving at speed would break a Heavyweight evolved beast on impact.
Another two days passed. The scouting team hadn’t returned. Command’s expectations for the Chuzhou relocation had been quietly revised downward with each passing day. Work crews were already being organized to dig trenches around the Mingfa Camp perimeter — preparations for a defensive hold, contingency plans taking concrete form.
Meanwhile, Vajra’s cab control systems came online.
Dual modes: automatic and manual.
Automatic relied on radar sweep from all four directions, combined with camera feeds, feeding terrain data to the onboard computer for driving mode selection. For now, the radar and cameras were physically installed but the integrated system wasn’t yet operational.
Manual was the current mode. As a veteran driver, Shen Cong had calibrated the manual transmission himself.
The exterior solar panels were fully installed. The full-perimeter bumpers were welded and complete. Shen Cong had begun guiding Vajra to amalgamate the entirely new frame structure into a unified whole.
The cargo interior was still a mess — compartments had been roughed out and dimensioned, but the detailed fit-out remained. That work could continue in motion. He could sleep on the floor in the meantime.
The external weapons platforms were all configured as retractable mounts: one military battlefield radar unit, one howitzer, two heavy machine guns. No rotary cannon — the camp didn’t have one. Ammunition: empty. All positions would wait until a survivor organization somewhere had the manufacturing capacity to produce bone-gold rounds at scale.
For current operations, Shen Cong himself was the primary weapons system. He’d installed a large crossbow on the roof platform — twenty dan draw weight, firing bone-gold bolts the size of javelins. Within a hundred meters, Lightweight-tier evolved beasts would be cleared without effort.
His personal composite bow remained unbuilt. Nobody in the camp knew how to make one, and his own bowyer’s knowledge was limited. A proper ten-dan warbow would take time to develop.
Something to work toward.
When the last armor panel completed its amalgamation, Shen Cong stood inside the bare shell of Vajra’s cargo section and felt the familiar sense of safety flood back through him — the feeling he’d been missing for the past several days of overhaul.
Interior fit-out next. And parallel to that: the push toward Lv1.
He ran a full status check.
Absorbing the crane truck’s primary metal, combined with the ongoing amalgamation work over these past days — Vajra has grown. Lv0.532, Activity Value 1.339H, Talent 2.518H. The repeated cutting and fusing during the overhaul generated significant Activity through the Exchange process, raising my own level as well — I’m now at Lv0.562, Activity Value 1.416H, Talent 2.518H.
The Half-Activated Armor has climbed from its previous 0.9H to approximately 1H. Excellent.
He reached out and felt the armor plating — 25 millimeters of layered protection, solid and present in his perception.
The Lv1 era. I’m coming.
(End of Chapter 163)