He set out a cup of water, a choice cut of Tumour-Pig meat, and a bowl of pig blood for the Plastic Rabbit.

Not out of guilt. He wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. In this world, sentiment was a resource he allocated exclusively to himself. The reason the rabbit was getting premium care was simple: Activity. Vajra’s ambient absorption was too slow, his own meat consumption was limited by storage and spoilage, and a living Activity source he could cycle on a regular basis was more valuable than almost anything else he’d found. The rabbit and the motorcycle could serve as a managed supply.

He hung the motorcycle frame from Vajra’s rear tow point and let it begin its slow self-recovery. Then he spent ten minutes taking stock of what the absorption session had actually produced.

Before the session, Vajra’s Activity saturation had been sitting at a recovered 42% — still well below the pre-crocodile peak of 85%, with most of the electronic components and smaller parts yet to be re-Amalgamated. After six cycles of absorption from the motorcycle, the reading had jumped to 48.5%.

Six and a half percentage points in one session. That was four or five days of normal accumulation, compressed into a few minutes.

His own body had received a proportionate boost through Exchange. The rough internal metric he’d been using — bull’s worth of strength as a unit, imprecise but consistent — had moved up. One and a half to two. The Activity density throughout his system felt qualitatively different, more settled, less like something he was managing and more like something that was simply part of him now.

Two bulls, for whatever that was worth. He didn’t have calibrated instruments. He didn’t know precisely how strong one bull actually was. The unit was his own invention and he used it anyway because something was better than nothing.

The benefits were real. So was the near-combustion.

And there was one other thing worth noting.

When he focused his attention on Vajra’s Activity distribution, he could feel a subtle dissonance between the energy that had always been there and the energy absorbed from the motorcycle. Different frequencies, very slightly — not enough to impair function, but enough to be detectable. His willpower ran slightly less smoothly through the new sections than through the established ones.

The dissonance was already fading, though. The motorcycle’s Activity was slowly shifting toward Vajra’s frequency — like a tuning process, or digestion. Interestingly, this didn’t happen with Activity absorbed from ambient sources or from eating mutated meat. Those integrated cleanly from the start. Only the direct absorption from another Active object produced this temporary friction.

He filed the observation and moved on. Net assessment: absorption was significantly more efficient than any other method, the digestion friction was temporary, and the intake ceiling was a hard limit he absolutely could not exceed. Managed properly, cycling the motorcycle every two weeks while the Plastic Rabbit slowly recharged it was a viable system.

He went to bed satisfied and slept better than he had in weeks.

He was up before dawn.

Roof of Vajra, early exercises — striking combinations, staff forms, footwork patterns — until the horizon went from black to gray to the first thin line of red. By the time the sun cleared the horizon properly, he was done and cooling down.

Breakfast: two pan-fried Tumour-Pig rib cuts from the belly section, where the fat marbling was best.

Then the research checks.

The Plastic Rabbit had eaten everything in its cage overnight and was moving around with something approaching its normal energy. A few more days of good feeding and it would be back to baseline. The motorcycle frame, hanging from the rear tow point — slower. He estimated two weeks before it returned to pre-absorption levels. Without the rabbit consciously guiding its Activity intake, the recovery would be entirely passive, relying on ambient absorption alone.

Two-week cycle. Six and a half percent of Vajra’s capacity per absorption session. Equivalent to four or five days of normal accumulation. Sustainable.

The blowfly check was less encouraging.

One of the five green bottle flies had died — natural lifespan, probably around fifteen days. The remaining four showed no signs of mutation despite over a week of Activity-rich feeding. The energy seemed to dissipate as soon as the flies processed the meat, leaving no residue in their biology.

Disappointing.

But in one corner of the meat supply, he found a cluster of small white dots.

Eggs.

The flies themselves might be too short-lived and too metabolically simple for the Activity to take hold. Their offspring, raised from the beginning on Activity-saturated food, starting the process from the larval stage — that was a different question. Potentially a much more interesting one.

He logged the observation with a timestamp and closed that research thread for the morning.

July 26th, 6:45 AM. One blowfly deceased, natural causes. Eggs observed. Monitoring continues.

He moved to the driver’s seat, opened the roof hatch to let the morning light in, and propped a spare laptop on the dash as a substitute navigation display. The original screens were still on the repair list.

He pulled up the map files and oriented himself.

Based on his estimated position relative to Wuwei and the distances he’d traveled, Vajra was currently somewhere between the old Wuwei county boundary and the outskirts of Chaohu City. Chaohu was his planned waypoint — originally an independent prefecture-level city, later incorporated under Hefei’s administration, situated on the shore of Lake Chao, one of China’s five major freshwater lakes. From Chaohu it was another seventy-odd kilometers to Hefei proper.

Before the apocalypse, he’d mapped three possible routes out of Wuwei. East to Wuhu City, south to Tongling City, or north toward Hefei. He’d eliminated the first two immediately after the storm ended — both required crossing the Yangtze River, and he’d assessed the probability of the river bridges surviving an apocalypse-level storm at essentially zero. The northern route was the only viable option.

The immediate challenge was navigation. Provincial Road 208 ran directly between Wuwei and Chaohu — if he could locate it, pathfinding would be straightforward and the road surface would be significantly better than open terrain.

Assuming 208 isn’t buried under a meter of rockfall.

He let that thought settle and moved on to the fuel situation.

The crocodile incident had cracked both side fuel tanks. The losses had been substantial. Current diesel reserve: roughly 200 liters. At low-speed operation with active dozer work, he was burning at least 60 liters per hundred kilometers. That gave him approximately 300 kilometers of range under current conditions — enough to reach Hefei, barely, if nothing went wrong.

If he couldn’t find diesel in Chaohu, he’d continue on reserve and switch to solar charging when the tank ran dry. It would slow him down considerably — battery power alone limited Vajra to just above walking pace, requiring a solar recharge cycle every two hours of travel. But the distance was short enough that it remained viable.

Forty kilometers to Chaohu. Seventy to Hefei. Even on solar, I can make that.

He checked the watch. 7:27 AM.

The vehicle radio had been repaired two days ago alongside the propulsion system. He hadn’t held much hope for it then, and he didn’t now — no satellites, ground relay stations almost certainly destroyed, radiation interference blanketing most frequencies. But he’d made a habit of checking, and habits were worth maintaining.

He powered it up and started scanning.

Szzzt — szzzt — szzzt.

Full sweep, every band. Nothing but static on all of them. He hadn’t expected otherwise. He reached for the power switch —

And stopped.

Buried in the static, almost below the threshold of recognition, for just a moment:

“— szzzt — Eastern Thea— szzzt — Nanjing — szzzt — please respond — szzzt —”

(End of Chapter 20)