The Terror Rat — a Featherweight-tier evolved beast in individual form, presumably mutated from field mice. Colony creatures. Once a group exceeded a hundred individuals, the collective crossed into Lightweight territory.

Not far from Yingshan Forest Farm in Feixi County, Tanchong Reservoir sat amid the terrain, and a Terror Rat colony had established itself along its banks. Any large evolved beast that passed through their range got swarmed.

Shen Cong had come to hunt them.

Unlike the White Bone Beetles, which were mostly shell with almost no usable meat, Terror Rats were substantial — bodies the size of domestic pigs, several grades larger than the Great-Fang Rats he’d encountered earlier. Their teeth could gnaw through metal, though they’d lost the burrowing ability their ancestors had — they operated entirely on the surface.

He didn’t need to go looking for them.

The moment Great Vajra rolled into Terror Rat territory, over a thousand of them came flooding in from every direction, treating the vehicle as prey.

Thud.

Great Vajra stopped. The exterior armor extended immediately — a net-like mesh skirting that dropped around the vehicle’s undercarriage and wheels, enclosing both within a protective barrier. The roof-mounted radar and other external equipment retracted into their housings. From the outside, Great Vajra now looked like an oversized iron knuckle.

The rear cargo door opened. Shen Cong stepped out in his Half-Activated Armor, pushing a custom-built iron frame ahead of him.

The frame was purpose-designed — braced against both sides of the door frame, leaving a controlled opening only at the front. He locked it into position.

This gave him a choke point. One controlled angle of engagement, with Blackhead behind him to handle logistics — picking up the kills and carrying them into the cargo hold. Blackhead’s tremendous strength proportional to size had diminished as she’d grown, but she could still lift ten times her own body weight without effort.

Solo hunting required the right tools. Shen Cong had designed the right tools.

The Terror Rat tide couldn’t breach Great Vajra’s defenses. At best they chewed at its Activity coating — but Shen Cong had activated the Golden Jiao Totem, and the resulting field-force storm flooded the vehicle with ambient Activity so dense it was nearly visible. The Terror Rats couldn’t drain the coating faster than it replenished.

They had only one angle of attack: the opening Shen Cong controlled.

He stood at the choke point with the Ape King Long Blade and worked.

One Terror Rat at a time. A single downward stroke each — Featherweight-tier, no resistance worth measuring. They came and he cut and they fell, and Blackhead moved in and out behind him collecting the results.

Twenty minutes later, his arm was tired. A hundred-plus pig-sized Terror Rats were loaded in the cargo hold, filling it to capacity.

“Pull back.”

He retracted the iron frame, sealed the cargo door, raised the mesh skirting, and drove Great Vajra out through the remaining swarm.

Full load returned to camp.

260 points.

A cargo hold of Terror Rat meat could feed the camp for a day or two. The math was favorable.

One run by Great Vajra outperforming dozens of ordinary collection sorties. Two missions complete, sky darkening. Shen Cong called it a day and returned to working on Great Vajra’s interior.

His points, after expenditures and earnings, stood at 759. Silver tier maintained.

Shen Cong’s results — and Great Vajra’s presence — had begun to shift how the camp’s leadership thought about iron people.

Before, iron people had been treated as industrial assets: maintaining equipment, fabricating supplies, providing manufacturing capacity. The Independent Motor Battalion lived comfortably and rarely saw combat. Iron people were scarce, and scarcity implied fragility.

But watching Shen Cong kill the Violent Ape King, kill the Golden Jiao, and then run load after load of resources back to camp had stretched the leadership’s sense of what iron people could do.

The meetings happened without him.

“We should be building combat teams centered on iron people. Small units for field operations.”

“Bone-gold ammunition doesn’t need to be a priority. It’s difficult to produce, burns through quickly, and can’t be recovered. That model isn’t sustainable.”

“Right. We should be developing recoverable ranged weapons — bows, crossbows, javelins, throwing blades, slings. Evolved people’s strength makes them competitive with firearms on these systems, and bone-gold recoverable weapons are where we should focus development.”

“And when we modify iron people’s vehicles, we need to design for team combat — a vehicle as an armed mobile fortress, supporting multiple mutants operating together.”

“Yes — stop thinking about them as personnel carriers. Think combat vehicle and transport.”

Shen Cong wasn’t in these meetings. For a Colonel technically ranked third-highest in the garrison — a position that made him nominally part of the leadership — he operated almost entirely outside the camp’s organizational structure. He didn’t contribute to camp policy discussions. The camp had no real command authority over him. The relationship was collaborative rather than hierarchical.

Great Vajra made the independence visible. A fully self-sufficient mobile base — living quarters, recreational space, combat systems, surveillance — one person’s complete fortress.

Some people had strong opinions about his self-isolation and refusal to integrate. Nobody voiced those opinions to his face. His wariness was transparent, unmasked, making itself felt the moment he was in the room. His whole bearing said: I am not with you.

The camp psychologist had flagged it again: persecution complex, probably acute. The camp leadership had quietly given up on expecting him to fall neatly into organizational patterns.

And even if the condition could be treated — who would volunteer to try? Telling a man with near-Heavyweight combat capability that he had a mental illness wasn’t a career-advancing move. Moreover, the condition that supposedly debilitated him had pushed him further and faster than every healthy, well-adjusted evolved person in the camp. Who exactly was the one with the problem was becoming genuinely unclear.

Functional cooperation was enough. That was what they settled on.

Shen Cong, for his part, didn’t think he had a problem.

If anyone told him he did, he would immediately suspect the diagnosis was a cover for some hostile intent — and might deal with the situation accordingly.

There are always scheming people trying to harm me.

One night’s work. Great Vajra’s kitchen was finished.

Cooktop, large refrigerator, large freezer, induction burners, exhaust hood, automatic dishwasher, microwave, lockable cabinets, a sink connected to a 1,500-liter roof-mounted water tank with a filtration system and water heater.

Everything fixed and integrated — designed to stay functional even if Great Vajra was bouncing across open terrain. Nothing loose, nothing that could shift in transit.

Once the full interior is finished, I’ll go back and refine the details. Some of it is still rough.

Kitchen complete. He made himself a proper late meal as reward.

The next morning.

His destination: the Binhu Wetland Forest Park along the Chaohu shoreline. Two missions from the People’s Defense Department list were located there.

The first: “Money-String Mulberry” fruit — a mutated mulberry variety the garrison had listed as an Activity fruit source. The second: a population of Giant Salamander Monitors that had taken over part of the park — Lightweight-tier evolved beasts, few in number but formidable individually.

Great Vajra had just entered the Binhu New District when something stopped Shen Cong cold.

A perceptual signal. Coming from a distance.

An emotional signal, transmitted through the link.

Help. Help me.

From the Antgod.

The Antgod — the perceptual link only functions within a kilometer. It’s somewhere within a kilometer of me right now.

He slowed Great Vajra to a crawl and reached out through the link, orienting on the signal’s direction. Northeast. One kilometer toward Dayu Town.

He launched the DJI Generation 8 immediately.

Three minutes. The drone feed found the Antgod.

And found what had surrounded it.

Enormous flying wasps, bodies massive — Dragon Hornets.

Super-Heavyweight colony type.

(End of Chapter 167)