Night was Shen Cong’s domain. His hypersensitive vision made darkness irrelevant — the world was as clear to him under moonlight as it was at noon.

On the bouncing stilts, in the empty silence of Heliuqu District, he staged his own private exhibition of speed.

As familiarity with the stilts accumulated, the speed climbed. Turning, shifting direction, controlling the rebound — all of it smoothed out with repetition. He tried vertical jumps, building stored energy across several bounces, and launched himself forty meters into the air.

Fifteen stories. A genuinely alarming height.

At the apex, in the brief moment of weightlessness, he felt detached from gravity entirely — floating in open air. Better than when the Antgod had carried him aloft, back at the beginning. That flight had been high but uncontrolled, his body passive. This was his own power, his own trajectory. He could tumble, twist, try aerial techniques the way a trampoline athlete might work through a routine.

“I could go higher. But the alloy’s reached its stress limit. Push any more stored energy and the blade will fracture.”

The Half-Activated Armor had been progressively alloyed with titanium over time, seeking the balance between low weight and high hardness. Activity reinforcement helped substantially — without it, blade springs made of any conventional metal wouldn’t survive the loading. Shen Cong’s nineteen-bull stride force would snap ordinary metal like a post driven into soft ground. Only the Activity-metal integration made it viable.

“Let me try combat at speed.”

At the peak of one jump, descending, he twisted his body hard. The blade angle on landing changed, the rebound force redirected — and he rolled across the ground twice to bleed off the stored energy. The clumsy-looking landing was the price of too much stored force with nowhere to put it: either bleed it off slowly and controlled, or dump it fast and ungracefully.

He picked up a low-grade javelin and started a full sprint.

Wind screaming past. His dynamic vision was just barely keeping pace with his own movement — his physical coordination running at its edge to match. He was operating near his body’s ceiling in every dimension.

He threw.

The stone he’d targeted was missed — accuracy at this speed was still a problem — but the impact zone detonated in a spray of rock fragments. When he ran over to check, the javelin had buried itself past retrieval depth. Impact force approximately double what he could generate from a standing throw.

“Good.”

He filed the accuracy gap for practice. The power was there.

Then he saw them.

At the edge of his vision, shapes moving. Ghost-fast. Not one — many.

Small-cattle-calf-sized evolved beasts, resembling giant salamanders. The local name fit: they looked like enormous hellbender salamanders — 娃娃鱼 — but uglier, their skin covered in warty bumps like a toad’s.

He was already running before he’d consciously decided to.

The bouncing stilts closed the distance to Great Vajra in seconds. The creatures had already spotted him and were surging forward in a mass. They hit the vehicle without hesitation, swarming around it and launching themselves at the hull with their heads — enormous heads, almost industrial-fan-sized, with the forehead bone clearly serving as the Activity core.

BOOM.

Each impact transferred force that Shen Cong could feel through his bond with Great Vajra. Activity Value dropping with every hit. A hundred simultaneous strikes, the field-force storm from the Golden Jiao Totem pulling in ambient Activity as fast as it could — and still not keeping pace with the drain.

He stood at the window, watching, assessing.

Fast. Agile. Extraordinary jumping ability. Impact force capable of defeating most obstacles easily. An ordinary jin person couldn’t handle more than two or three of these simultaneously. Multiple surrounding an ordinary target would be a death sentence.

But that was before the bouncing stilts.

He counted. Roughly a thousand individuals.

Kill them?

He thought through it carefully. He’d fought the Water Tyrant pair head-on. Dangerous — but it had developed his close-combat capabilities faster than anything else. The bouncing stilts were new and untested in actual combat. These creatures had three advantages: iron-hard heads, jumping ability, and speed. His physical conditioning exceeded theirs in every category. The stilts added a movement dimension they couldn’t match.

Risk level: manageable.

He confirmed it with a quick test — opened the firing port, shot several with crossbow bolts and javelins. The forehead cores were nearly impenetrable, but the body was relatively fragile. Anything above 0.5H in bone-gold cut through easily.

Decision made.

A training partner this good, wasted? That would be a crime.

Clang.

He opened the roof hatch, stomped the bouncing stilts, and launched himself out. Landed on Great Vajra’s roof, rebounded, cleared distance. Within seconds, several dozen creatures had abandoned the vehicle and turned their attention to him.

He ran. Found the stilts’ rhythm. Synchronized his body’s motion to match. Then turned around, Tyrant Broadsword in hand, and came back.

It was a contest of speed.

In the opening minutes, he was in trouble. The creatures’ attack angles were unpredictable and his evasive movement was still linear — changing direction with the stilts took setup time he didn’t always have. They had the advantage.

He didn’t try to win. He was there to learn. Each attack he dodged taught him something about acceleration, deceleration, aerial body positioning, how to adjust the blade angle on landing to change direction. He was learning how to use his own body at this velocity.

Five minutes in: fluid movement through the mass of creatures, comfortable with the geometry.

Ten minutes in: beginning to strike back. Accuracy was poor — he kept missing the kill zones at this speed.

Fifteen minutes in: maintaining full movement speed while landing one-strike kills consistently.

Twenty minutes in: tired. He retreated to Great Vajra and rested for ten minutes.

Then back out. Full assault.

He repeated this cycle.

By the end, the bouncing stilts had become part of him — not equipment he was operating but an extension of his body that he simply moved with. Each landing: one or two creatures dropping, neck cut or belly opened.

When his reserves ran low, he retreated and recovered. When they were back, he went out again.

Two or three hours later, half the creatures were dead.

The survivors finally broke. One by one, then in a rush — all of them streaming back toward the Yangtze, disappearing into the dark as suddenly as they’d emerged from it.

He exhaled, long and slow.

Sustained combat over hours: technique and instinct had developed rapidly, but the cost in stamina, focus, and Activity reserves had been enormous.

He shed the Half-Activated Armor, ate, washed, and lay down.

The fight was still playing through his mind. Once he’d adapted to the speed — once his body had made the integration — it had felt like the engagement was running entirely in his favor.

(End of Chapter 228)