Having classified Zhou Ningning as unhinged, Shen Cong added her to his active monitoring list and returned to Great Vajra.

The queen cell larva was next on his schedule. Another round of careful Activity infusion, another round of the larva straining toward a frequency alignment it couldn't quite achieve. He pushed until it was clearly near collapse, then stopped. Royal Treasure Jelly administered. Recovery maintained.

Eat. Recover. We try again later.

The Antgod had laid one egg and was now moving around the cabin with her distended abdomen, apparently unconcerned about the egg's welfare. Blackhead, by contrast, had appointed herself the egg's full-time guardian — picking it up periodically for inspection, settling it back in the corner of the ant burrow, hovering over it with obvious protective investment.

Shen Cong noted the Antgod's physical development carefully. The abdomen had grown substantially since the wing-shedding — now twice the combined volume of her head and thorax, with the original yellow-brown pattern replaced by pale yellow-white stripes where the abdominal plates had separated under the expansion. But she retained mobility. She hadn't become the grotesque distended shape of a driver ant queen or a termite queen. She was something between — capable of movement, visibly changed, distinctly her own evolutionary form.

"You need a proper species name," he decided. "You live on Great Vajra, so: Vajra Ant. You're the Vajra Ant Queen."

The name wasn't particularly elegant. Nothing better came to mind immediately, so it would do.

The Antgod transmitted no emotional response to the naming. Ants didn't need names. They needed to know they were ants, and that was sufficient.

Current daily observation log: Treasure Bee queen cell larva, Vajra Ant Queen, Mechanical Vine, Activity Peach seedling, Life-Saving Yellow Soybeans. Shen Cong tracked all of them, not because he had scientific training but because he recognized patterns in how Activity-infused organisms developed, and pattern recognition didn't require a laboratory.

The professional analysis could stay with the Research Institute. He was content to be a dedicated amateur.

What he couldn't do — what the Research Institute couldn't do either, currently — was…