Like an oversized brick, Vajra rolled out onto Sili River Road.
The road had been wrecked during the battle with the Golden Jiao — craters and ruts everywhere, barely recognizable as pavement. The two-meter tires and 1.5-meter ground clearance handled it without complaint. Even pits a meter deep were crossed without slowing. It looked like one of those monster truck competitions Shen Cong had watched as a child — Vajra tilting and swaying across the broken surface, entirely unbothered.
Activity meant mechanical wear was hardly a concern.
What did concern him was the fuel readout on the center console. Less than five kilometers, and 4.5 liters already gone. Ninety liters per hundred kilometers. The engine was every bit the fuel hog Liu Yanbing had warned him about.
Part of that was the diesel itself. Pre-apocalypse reserves, properly stored, could last years — some discoloration, some incomplete combustion, but serviceable. The camp’s fuel supply was a patchwork of whatever could be scavenged from ruins, stored in varying conditions, mixed in quality. Poor combustion efficiency was the expected result.
Solar panels aren’t strong enough to offset this, and the diesel is finite. Shen Cong frowned. Energy is going to be a problem down the line.
Aside from the fuel consumption, he was satisfied. The test run confirmed what he wanted: large, stable, solid. A mobile fortress.
He drove back and resumed work with the Automotive Lab team on the interior.
Vajra 2.0’s internal layout was simpler than the original, not more complex.
The cab occupied 2.5 meters of the vehicle’s length — almost as wide as the body itself — and would be configured as an integrated combat operations, surveillance, and information management platform. The closed-circuit system would display everything happening around the vehicle, with control access to every electrical system in the rear. High-powered radio transmitter, multiple radar units, camera arrays, infrared thermal imaging. At minimum a one-kilometer monitoring radius in all directions.
The cargo body used a corridor-wrapping layout: an inner ring of walkway running the full perimeter inside the armor layer, with the actual living compartments inboard of that. A transverse corridor across the middle divided the body into two large sections — front and rear, each roughly equivalent to a thirty-square-meter apartment.
The front section — which Shen Cong designated the forward cabin — was divided into four rooms: a game room and study combined, a bedroom, a supply room, and a greenhouse.
The rear section — the aft cabin — held five: a kitchen and dining area, a washing room, a laboratory, a butchery area, and what he called the ant burrow.
The greenhouse had a full-width skylight installed at the top. Its current occupant: one Mechanical Vine cutting, growing at a rate that could charitably be described as mediocre.
The ant burrow was Blackhead’s quarters — and the Antgod’s, for whenever it returned.
Shen Cong looked at Blackhead moving alone through the space and felt an uncharacteristic twinge of something he couldn’t quite name. The Antgod had been gone for over a week now. Still no sign of it returning.
“Maybe it won’t come back. What do you think, Blackhead?”
Evening. The Lab team had gone back to camp for the night. Shen Cong had set out a pile of metal scrap for Blackhead and settled onto the floor himself with a plate of pan-fried Golden Jiao meat, eating in a squat.
Blackhead probably didn’t understand the question. She touched the metal scrap with her antennae, her movements sluggish, lacking their usual energy.
She’d been like this since the Antgod left. Low, quiet, diminished.
The Mechanical Vine was wilting. Blackhead was wilting. Only Shen Cong himself remained emotionally level — which was his default state. Somewhere after the age of fifteen, the warmth of other people’s company and the pain of their absence had stopped reaching him. He felt the occasional twinge of something — like now — but it was faint and passed quickly. The Antgod was something he’d pulled back from death and raised from an egg. Even if it was just an insect, there was a history there.
Blackhead crept over and touched his ankle with her antennae.
An attempt at comfort.
Shen Cong didn’t want to be comforted. He nudged her away with his foot.
He’d washed off the Half-Activated Armor and the Jiao-hide bodysuit for cleaning. Sitting here in just a pair of oversized shorts and flip-flops, he looked like any slender, fair-skinned young man — unassuming, almost delicate in appearance.
The explosive power compressed inside that appearance — ten-bull strength — told a different story.
The upgrade to 1.416H Activity Value over the past two days had pushed him into ten-bull territory. He felt it everywhere. The confidence that came with it made him half-wish another Violent Ape King would show up so he could find out what three hundred rounds with one felt like.
He finished the Jiao meat. The warmth of it spread through him, fiery and pleasant.
Then he gave the still-listless Blackhead a light swat. “Why aren’t you a dog?”
Blackhead didn’t know what a dog was. She raised her two antennae, then lifted her front two legs, holding the pose — apparently mimicking something.
Shen Cong read the emotional signal through the link. “You think you’re the Golden Jiao?”
Both antennae knocked together immediately — her gesture for yes.
He stared at her for a moment.
“Sure.”
The golden horn-cores were sitting in his bedroom in the forward cabin, and Blackhead still refused to set foot past the cabin threshold because of them. He’d confirmed by now that the pair could be configured into a Golden Jiao Totem — and that the resulting field-force storm would be extraordinarily dense, the ambient Activity practically condensing into droplets.
To avoid Vajra absorbing Activity faster than he could keep pace, he was still running the New Bull Demon King Totem only. Not even the Violent Ape Totem yet. No need. The gap between Vajra’s advancement and his own physical reinforcement was already a concern — push the absorption rate any higher and the Siphon risk returned.
“Go dream your Golden Jiao dreams.” He stood, walked out of the ant burrow, washed his plate in the kitchen, and went back to work — following the blueprints, continuing the interior build one section at a time.
Getting the forward and aft cabins fully finished, all appliances installed and operational, would take at least another two weeks.
In the small hours of the morning, something outside woke him.
A garrison messenger arrived shortly after, explaining what had happened: the scouting team was back.
Or rather, one member of the scouting team was back. Yu Daxian, driving Fu Ran’s battered off-road vehicle, had made it to the camp’s edge alone.
He’d brought bad news.
Zhao Weiliang called the camp leadership together immediately — middle of the night, in a field hospital ward, around the man’s bed.
“Daxian. Tell everyone what you told me. From the beginning.”
Zhao Weiliang stood at the window, his back to the room, staring at the darkness outside. His face looked tired in a way that went beyond sleeplessness.
Shen Cong stood in his full armor at the doorway.
Yu Daxian was wrapped in bandages from neck to hands, his face the color of old paper. The injuries were clearly serious. He coughed before speaking, and between sentences.
“We drove out and didn’t hit any serious trouble all the way to Quanjiao County. That’s when we knew something was wrong. Craters everywhere. Shell impacts across the whole area — like a full-scale war had been fought there.”
Another cough.
“We talked it over and decided to skip Chuzhou. Went straight toward Nanjing instead. We didn’t even make it to Pukou District before we ran into it — a strange black-yellow fog. The moment any exposed skin touched it, it started to… dissolve. Rot.”
Yu Daxian peeled back a section of bandaging from his hand. Beneath it, even through the medication that had been applied, the skin was covered in large suppurating sores — weeping steadily.
“We turned around immediately. But the fog spread and we got turned around in it, lost track of where we were. Then the evolved beasts came at us. They looked — they looked like the fog had gotten into them too. Rotting all over, like diseased toads. They came through the vehicle gaps somehow. Li Jun, Wei Siran, Luo Jintao, Song Pingning — the beasts killed them. Commander Fu Ran died getting me out.” He stopped. Then: “After a while the fog thinned and I could see again. I just drove. Kept driving. Eventually I made it back.”
(End of Chapter 164)