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…