The drone survey had shown no significant threats in the area. Shen Cong confirmed it with his own binoculars, found nothing of concern, and started toward Xinghuo Forest Farm ahead of Fuxing Township.

North of the farm is Huanglishu Reservoir. The thought drifted through his mind as he approached the tree line. Worth checking out afterward.

Huanglishu was one of Anhui Province’s ten largest reservoirs.

Then the fruit grove was in front of him, and he stopped thinking about water.

Up close, he could identify the trees: jujube. Unripe fruits were still green; the yellow and red ones had matured.

No evolved beasts settled here, apparently.

The thought had barely formed when the jujube grove moved. Leaves rustling. But there was no wind.

His scalp prickled.

From the undersides of leaves, they emerged. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Plump caterpillars in every color imaginable — red, yellow, green, black, purple, mottled. Each one covered in dense protrusions, bristling with needle-like spines.

Stinging caterpillars?

He stopped walking. The surge of revulsion was immediate and visceral. These fist-sized mutated creatures were unmistakably descended from the larval form of limacodid moths — the bane of every child who’d ever crawled through undergrowth. In ordinary form, contact with their spines produced instant burning pain, raised welts, hours of misery.

He’d suffered that exact experience more than once as a reckless child.

The grove had become a sea of them in seconds. What made it worse was that every caterpillar had a pair of black false eyespots — wide, round, all of them seemingly fixed directly on him.

Thousands of false eyes staring simultaneously.

Even Shen Cong found this deeply unsettling.

But the Activity fruit was still on those trees. He controlled the revulsion and kept moving, edging carefully toward the nearest jujube.

One caterpillar arched its body into an Omega shape.

He brought his dagger up.

Snap.

It launched — fast. He was faster. The dagger bisected it mid-flight. The caterpillar split apart, and its fluids spattered onto his Half-Activated Armor.

Where they landed, the armor surface immediately began smoking. A small section of Activity coating dissolved. The corrosion was immediate and aggressive.

That’s not a minor effect.

He barely had time to register it before the entire grove responded. Every caterpillar in view arched into an Omega. Then they launched — not one at a time, but in waves, a simultaneous volley, a living rain of corrosive projectiles pelting down on the spot where he’d been standing.

Shen Cong had already run.

He turned from a safe distance to look. The caterpillars were still impacting the ground — and one, the most aggressive of the lot, had covered twenty meters and landed right at his feet.

He crouched, drove his dagger through it, and lifted it up for examination. Green fluid dripped from the wound. The body continued writhing.

The data reading: Talent 0.051H, Activity Value 0.024H, Lv0.471. Numbers that implied something trivially weak.

But the body.

Every spine was an Activity core in miniature. He probed one with his senses — it read like a concentrated node of Activity-corrosive potential, identical in principle to the fluid. He pulled a spine free with his gloved hand and made the lightest possible contact.

The Jiao-hide glove charred. A shallow burn mark appeared on material that shrugged off most weapons.

It corrodes through Golden Jiao hide. This caterpillar is more dangerous than it has any right to be. The entire body is a corrosion weapon.

He set the impaled caterpillar down and looked at the grove — the caterpillars had retreated into the foliage again, visible only as vague shapes among the leaves.

Low Activity Value, high corrosive effect, vast numbers. The combat threat is real despite the individual weakness.

The jujube fruits are valuable. So are the caterpillars themselves — their fluid and spines, collected in quantity, might rival or exceed the Activity-Killer venom. The Super-2 Ant Acid doesn’t compare.

How to get both?

He looked around. The grove ran along the mid-slope. Above it, the ridgeline. Between two peaks — a valley, and in that valley, Huanglishu Reservoir.

If I breach the valley at the low point, release the reservoir water, let it run down through the grove — the trees are only two or three meters tall. The slope gradient would push the water right through the caterpillar territory.

One lake’s worth of water. Ten minutes of flow, minimum. Stinging caterpillars, however capable, cannot hold their breath for ten minutes. Probably can’t hold it for one.

He scanned his surroundings once more, then turned and climbed toward the summit of Xinghuo Farm’s hill.

From the top, looking north, Huanglishu Reservoir was visible — or what remained of it. The disaster had sent rubble and debris cascading into the valley, filling most of the original reservoir bed and dividing what was left into seventeen separate small lakes.

He went down to the southern end, the closest lake to the valley and the grove below. One good look at the terrain confirmed it: a three-meter section of rock at the valley throat was all that was holding the water back. Break through that, and the lake would drain south into the grove.

Detonators. Grenades. The Condor Spade. Come back and open a proper channel.

He turned to go.

The surface of the lake moved.

He was airborne before the motion fully registered, landing well clear of the waterline.

A head. Fish-headed, massive — one square meter of face at the surface, regarding him. Whatever the body looked like under the water, the head alone was already enormous. It watched him back away. Watched him stop retreating. Then, apparently satisfied, it sank slowly below.

What kind of fish is that? Something enormous.

Doesn’t matter right now. Once the lake empties, a fish that size has nowhere to go.

He stopped thinking about it and ran back toward Great Vajra.

(End of Chapter 197)