A productive morning. The flood plan had worked. By midday, Shen Cong had hauled his spoils back to Great Vajra and was cooking.

Steamed sleeper goby sections. Stir-fried giant shrimp. Steamed hairy crab. A genuinely excellent lunch. He could have made it even more elaborate — the water had brought down evolved fish of many varieties, plus river mussels, softshell turtles, river snails, all of them edible.

While he ate, he thought.

In terms of distance from the Huoshan Oasis, Quanjiao County should be in the outer barren zone. But the ambient Activity here is roughly comparable to the Hefei area. Could there be another Oasis nearby, radiating outward and creating a second abundant zone?

The extinction-level meteor storm had obviously brought more than one fragment down. If Oasis zones were created by meteorite impact sites, there was no reason to assume Huoshan was the only one.

What’s unusual isn’t just the Activity density. It’s the evolved beast diversity. The Huanglishu Reservoir lake system had far more variety and density than Dongpu or Dafangyong back at New Hefei — and those two supply the camp’s water. A single small lake here produced something the size of the dopey fish. That implies a significantly richer evolutionary environment.

He turned it over without reaching a conclusion.

Dessert: fresh jujubes directly off the carry pack.

Sweet, crisp, the familiar surge of physical enhancement spreading through him after the first bite.

Activity classification: normal ‘vital’ Activity — not the high-vitality grade. Can’t be cultivated. Enhancement effect is moderate and gentle, similar to the Gentle Sand Pear. I’ll call them Gentle Jujubes.

The naming satisfied him. He ate through twenty-plus and felt the enhancement working.

The decision to leave New Hefei had been correct. Staying would have been stagnation. Day one on the road and he’d already found a new Activity fruit source.

At sixteen-bull strength now. This batch of Gentle Jujubes, combined with Great Vajra’s Exchange contributions, should push me to 2.2H — seventeen-bull territory.

A short rest. Then back to work.

The hillside’s Activity cores needed harvesting. The stinging caterpillars needed collecting — all of them. Some chrysanthemums to take back and dry for tea. The lake bed needed a thorough pass.

I’ll probably camp here tonight.

The evolved fish diversity was overwhelming in its variety, and identifying mutation origins for most of them wasn’t feasible. Shen Cong made a practical decision: starting now, minor evolved beasts would get category-level naming rather than individual names.

“Mutated [species]” as the standard format. The purple-black lobster he was currently extracting Activity cores from: mutated lobster. Log the photograph, record the data, move on.

Only significant specimens warranted individual names. The dopey fish that had come out of the mud charging like a predatory cat — that one had earned something. He designated it the Fierce Sleeper.

Sometimes he thought naming was pointless anyway. Individual evolved beast mutations varied enormously even within a species — the Violent Ape King and ordinary Violent Great Apes occupied the same species but differed in scale by a tremendous margin. And most things that made it into his journal were already dead. The odds of ever finding a second identical specimen were low.

He shook the thought off. Keep naming. Give them some record of having existed.

The stinging caterpillars — he needed a name for them too.

Spicy Eyes. For the false eyespots that were deeply unpleasant to look at. The name also carried a vague reference to Tangseng, the caterpillar character from the old drama The Journey of Flower he’d watched years ago. The show was well past its prime but the association had lodged somewhere.

Spicy Eyes were corrosive specifically to Activity-bearing materials. Plain plastic held them without issue.

The harvestable components: body fluid, and the spines which were themselves miniature Activity cores.

Spine removal was straightforward — grip the Spicy Eye with chopsticks, roll it across a wooden board, all spines detach, shake them into a container. Clean and fast.

Body fluid extraction: puncture the striped skin along the mid-body and find the internal channel running through it. The green corrosive liquid — he called it Pepper Water, acknowledging immediately that this was an undignified name — drained directly into a collection vessel.

Thousands of Spicy Eyes across the ground below the grove.

He worked through the afternoon and processed fewer than a thousand — yielding 30 liters of Pepper Water and a full bag of spines. Two thousand-plus remained.

Tomorrow. The light is going and working outdoors after dark isn’t worth the risk.

His night vision was essentially equivalent to daylight. That wasn’t the point. His best judgment and fastest reaction times were in daylight conditions, and field work on an unfamiliar landscape in the dark invited mistakes that daytime didn’t.

Nights were for vehicle work or sleep.

Evening.

The fourteen Treasure Bees returned to the greenhouse from their day in the chrysanthemum sea and the jujube grove remnants, abdomens packed. Their haul was impressive — over thirty cells filled with collected pollen.

He watched them work and began to understand the production chain.

Three products from Treasure Bees: Royal Treasure Jelly, rarest and most valuable. Bee Treasure, the primary product. Bee Pollen, the most abundant.

The bees carried both pollen and nectar. Pollen came back on body hairs, packed into pollen cells and mixed with nectar and saliva to produce bee pollen. Nectar was stored in the honey stomach and regurgitated into honey cells — smaller volume than pollen, seven cells filled. Each honey cell, fermented and concentrated, would eventually yield one small vial of Bee Treasure.

This small colony, minus their own consumption, could now produce a few vials of Bee Treasure and a few packets of bee pollen per day.

Still no Royal Treasure Jelly production. The queen requires it but the workers aren’t secreting it spontaneously. Try a controlled hunger experiment — reduce queen feeding, see if it stimulates gland activation in the workers.

Gentle Jujubes and Bee Treasure for the evening. He looked out at the night sky — brilliant stars in the absence of light pollution, the Milky Way visible in a way it hadn’t been in his previous life. He identified the constellations he recognized and let the rest wash over him.

Before sleep, he opened the laptop and updated his Apocalypse Journal. Today’s findings, today’s questions.

Why was the Huanglishu Reservoir area richer in evolved beasts than New Hefei’s abundant zone?

Maybe I’ve arrived at the edge of a new Oasis.

(End of Chapter 199)