The faint reaction reached him, and Shen Cong caught it immediately. He closed his eyes and traced the source — somewhere at least twenty meters below his feet.

Direction confirmed. He pushed his excitement aside, swept the surrounding area for threats, found none, and started digging.

Twenty meters was difficult excavation, especially in a barrier lake bed. The sand and gravel layers were saturated — the moment he broke through, groundwater seeped in and pooled at the bottom. He hauled over a water pump and kept it running continuously.

Two hours of effort produced a hole one meter square and twenty meters deep, pump working the whole time to keep the bottom from flooding. As he neared the location his perception had identified, he noticed the temperature rising.

Not the stuffy heat of enclosed underground air. This was heat from inside out — the unmistakable warmth of radiation.

Inside the Half-Activated Armor, he was drenched in sweat and still sweating. He pulled out the Geiger counter. The reading: 320 millisieverts. High enough to damage the human body — killing white blood cells, disrupting fluid balance.

Whether his mutated and strengthened physiology could handle radiation exposure was an open question he didn’t intend to test by lingering. He needed to get the fragment into the lead container and out of this hole.

The lead bucket had been prepared specifically for this — crafted to shield radiation on the working assumption that the meteorite fragment was the source of it. Lead was the slowest-corroding metal in the post-apocalyptic environment, and its shielding properties against X-rays and gamma radiation were well established. Theoretically the best available material for the job.

One minute later, the Condor Spade struck something hard. Not rock — rock wouldn’t have stopped it.

He probed carefully. Whatever it was, it wasn’t large. About the size of a rice bowl.

“Dig it out first, figure it out after.”

One lift of the spade.

Water poured in around it.

A bowl-sized lump of metal, coated in wet silt, came up with the blade.

He didn’t need to touch it. He could already feel the dense, concentrated Activity radiation pouring off the thing. Without pausing, he dropped it directly into the lead bucket and closed the lid.

The air around him seemed to cool immediately. The lead shielding cut the radiant heat source off entirely.

He grabbed the bucket and ran.

Back inside Great Vajra, Shen Cong exhaled slowly and let the satisfaction wash through him.

Heaven rewards persistence. Thirteen days. He had found it.

Now came the research.

He showered, ate, and changed into the radiation protection suit he’d obtained through camp trade. Then he opened the lead bucket, lifted the meteorite fragment out, and rinsed the silt away under running water.

What it revealed: an irregular, roughly oval lump of metal. Pitted and uneven across the surface, its composition unclear from appearance alone. Black exterior, with a faint metallic sheen.

He touched it through the gloves. Cold as ice.

But with the fragment sitting out on the lab table, the room temperature had already begun to rise. It was radiating energy outward, heating the enclosed space.

He decided to cut a small sample for study and return the rest to the lead bucket — otherwise the laboratory was going to become uninhabitable.

The cutting tools accomplished nothing. Not a mark, not a scratch. He tried Activity core material as a cutting edge. Same result.

He escalated. Super-2 Ant Acid. Activity-Killer Venom. Pepper Water. Applied each in sequence directly to the surface.

Nothing. No reaction of any kind.

The meteorite fragment was, in every meaningful sense, indestructible. Chemically inert. Physically impervious. A thoroughly unboilable, unsteamable, uncuttable, indestructible iron lump — the old saying fit perfectly.

He tried perception next. He could detect that the fragment had its own Activity radiation frequency. But he couldn’t sense any Activity Value within it — it registered as though it contained none at all. And the radiation it emitted was strange: where every Activity-bearing organism and object he’d ever encountered emitted radiation in a discontinuous, pulsing pattern, the meteorite fragment’s emission was a flat, continuous line. Unbroken. Unwavering.

Then he noticed the ambient Activity concentration in the laboratory rising. Fast. The air felt like a trembling field-force storm was building inside the room.

“Where is this Activity coming from?”

His first hypothesis: the fragment was radiating Activity outward. But that contradicted what his perception was telling him — no Activity Value leaving the fragment, only radiation frequency, no outward flow.

His second hypothesis: ambient Activity from outside was converging on the room. Great Vajra’s sensors ruled that out — the external Activity concentration was unchanged.

“Not coming from the fragment. Not coming from outside. Then where—”

He stopped. A third possibility surfaced.

“Is it being produced here?”

The laboratory contained substantial metal equipment and stored materials. Inside Great Vajra’s Activity field, metals didn’t corrode or rust even without being alloyed. But with the meteorite fragment radiating at full intensity in an enclosed space—

He checked every piece of equipment. No visible corrosion yet.

As a precaution, he decided to stop the research session entirely. He would prepare a proper experimental plan first, then return to this impenetrable lump with a systematic approach.

He lowered the fragment back into the lead bucket, had a sudden thought, and dropped in a small metal wire-drawing die along with it.

Closed the lid. Reconsidered. Unwrapped his radiation protection suit and wrapped it around the outside of the bucket instead — the suit used tantalum shielding material, comparable to lead in effectiveness against X-rays, gamma rays, beta particles, and alpha particles.

He locked the laboratory door behind him.

The laboratory walls were already built with lead-plate sandwich construction — radiation had been an assumed threat from the beginning, and Great Vajra’s design reflected that. Key structural sections of the vehicle body also incorporated lead in the metal composite. After lead, the material selection priorities had been hardness and low weight; high-quality tungsten and titanium were too scarce for bulk alloying.

He went to the game room — study room — and settled at the desk.

He designed experimental approaches until midnight. By the end he had over ten distinct research plans laid out. He reviewed them, found them satisfactory, ate a late supper, showered, and went to bed.

In the dream, he had fallen into a pit of fire.

He ran. He clawed at the walls. He could not get out. The flames were closing in—

He jolted awake.

A long breath out.

Just a dream.

He lay there for a moment, and then awareness returned.

Something was wrong. He was soaked — clothes, bedding, everything saturated with sweat. His mouth was bone dry, his body felt like it had been wrung out. He drank two long gulps of cold tea and waited for his thoughts to clear.

Once they did, the conclusion was immediate: what had happened to him tonight was connected to the meteorite fragment.

And then, a moment later, his pupils widened.

“My Talent — it’s reached 2.521H.”

(End of Chapter 213)