After dinner, Shen Cong settled into the cab with his laptop. The vehicle radio had been running continuously, set to record.

No signal. Not since that fragmented Eastern Theater Command broadcast — a few broken sentences, then silence. The radio had returned to its familiar texture of meaningless static.

Tonight was the same. He read through several dozen pages of radiation-related research material. The radio gave him nothing. He washed up and went to sleep.

The next morning, he drove into Pukou District slowly.

He had reason to be careful. The camp’s scouting team had attempted this route once before and nearly been wiped out — nuclear fallout dust and mutated toads, encountered before they even reached the district proper. The fallout might have dispersed by now — enough time had passed, and the rain a few weeks back would have helped — but evolved beasts didn’t necessarily go anywhere.

He crawled forward at low speed, and when he reached the area around Longfu Mountain Tea Farm, he sent the drone up for a proper look. One hundred and fifty meters, stable transmission, several minutes of footage covering most of the district.

Pukou was completely abandoned. No signs of human activity. No survivor settlements, no evidence anyone had been living here. No large evolved beasts visible either. Just a profound stillness — quieter than Juchao District had been, quieter than almost anywhere he’d passed through. More like his hometown of Wuwei than anything else.

Rubble. More rubble. Nothing else.

Great Vajra moved into the district proper. The roads were nearly impassable — no human maintenance for months, the surface buried under debris and broken stone. The two-meter tires and sixty-centimeter width kept the vehicle from sinking in, but he was grinding through at an awkward lean, picking his way over obstacles. He’d switched from diesel to electric for this — quieter, and the lower power output was enough for this kind of crawling progress.

Occasional building remnants were still standing — a few meters of reinforced concrete, a load-bearing wall still upright, half a floor slab hanging at an angle.

“Something’s off. Chuzhou looked like it had been systematically shelled. No sign of any fighting here at all.”

He was already thinking about pushing further — checking whether Nanjing’s Yangtze River Bridge was still intact — when the right-side camera caught something. A dark shape, there and gone.

He looked again. Nothing visible.

“No.”

His vision and situational awareness were at a level that didn’t produce false positives. He pulled the right camera feed to the main screen and ran the replay.

The dark shape was real.

“Zoom in.”

The image softened slightly with the magnification, but he could make it out. A person. Unclothed, shaved head, emerging from a gap in the rubble — catching sight of Great Vajra and ducking immediately back inside.

A survivor.

He processed the situation quickly. If a survivor organization existed here, it was small and almost certainly posed no threat to Great Vajra. The vehicle was effectively a mobile fortress at this point. Hard to imagine anything in Pukou District that could threaten it.

He turned around and drove toward the location.

The gap in the rubble turned out to be a tunnel entrance, angled downward into what had been a subway station. Cave-in debris and packed sand had half-buried the entrance. The station itself was intact behind the blockage — the platform visible in the drone feed, the tunnel mouths on both sides collapsed, only the central space preserved as a small refuge.

The entrance was narrow. One person at a time.

At 190cm, plus the Half-Activated Armor adding another twenty centimeters and considerable width, Shen Cong wasn’t fitting through that gap. And even if he could, he wouldn’t. This was their ground, not his.

He activated the external speakers.

“Anyone in there?”

Silence.

“Survivors, please respond.”

Still nothing.

“I’ve already seen you. Come out and talk.”

Nothing.

He reached for the remote-controlled toy car he kept for exactly these situations — equipped with a flashlight and a small camera on the front, real-time feed to his screen, a walkie-talkie strapped to the body. He guided it through the entrance and into the station.

The interior resolved on his screen: a subway platform, partially buried, only the central area clear. The tunnel mouths on both sides were completely collapsed. He steered the toy car in a slow arc, adjusting the camera.

Six people.

Huddled together in the far corner, staring directly at the camera. Some trembling. Some blank-faced, not registering.

He held the car still and adjusted the light.

All male. All unclothed. Shaved heads. Skin ulcerating in patches. Muscle visibly wasting. Bodies beginning to show signs of structural distortion.

Disease-changed.

The term surfaced immediately. Disease-changed was what New Hefei called humans whose mutation had failed. Normal mutation, even the painful kinds, produced Activity cores and generally strengthened the body — creating mutants, half-beasts, sometimes iron people. The Activity core served as the regulatory hub, channeling and stabilizing the body’s relationship with Activity.

When mutation occurred without producing an Activity core, the results were different. Activity infected the body with no regulating mechanism. The consequence was systemic dysfunction — cascading organ disruption, physical deterioration, pathological changes appearing throughout.

The camp’s field hospital had maintained a dedicated treatment center for the disease-changed. Research subjects, mostly — studying what went wrong when mutation failed.

Shen Cong had seen them before. He recognized the signs.

There was the occasional exception. Ran Tai — the evolved person he’d killed at the Fenghuang vineyard camp, who had no Activity core — whose dysfunction had taken the form of uncontrolled growth, eventually becoming a giant. Technically Ran Tai had been disease-changed rather than a true evolved person, though his particular pathology was relatively benign as these things went. A giant was still formidable. Still — if Shen Cong hadn’t killed him, he would eventually have grown until his organs couldn’t sustain the load and failed.

These six were not that. Their bodies were failing visibly.

He picked up the walkie-talkie and spoke through it.

“You can come out. I have some questions, and I’ll give you supplies in exchange. Whatever you need.”

The six exchanged glances, tense and uncertain. Then one of them — body covered in suppurating wounds — spoke.

His vocal cords had apparently been affected by the mutation. The sound that came out was harsh, grating, like a crow’s call.

“You’re not… with the rat-catching unit?”

(End of Chapter 218)