The snow kept building. Great Vajra stood over five meters tall and was now buried to nearly three meters depth.
Twenty meters away, the military jeep had completely disappeared under the snowline. Old Wei, Dahu, and Xiao Bei, with nothing useful to do, had started tunneling — carving out a snow cave large enough to drive the jeep inside. Their repeated shoveling had compressed the surrounding snow into something close to ice, and the cave walls were solid and stable. No risk of collapse. Surprisingly warm inside.
Shen Cong didn’t bother. Great Vajra’s exhaust vented from the roof, the entire hull was sealed waterproof, and being buried didn’t concern it.
He spent the night running the Siphon.
He’d switched to the Bull Demon King Totem — lower field-force storm output. At that absorption rate, Great Vajra pulled in roughly 0.024H per hour. The Siphon trigger point was 0.013H above his own current level. Every 32 minutes and 30 seconds, a Siphon event occurred, transferring the excess to him.
Recovery from each event took roughly ten minutes. Then eating to replace the energy expenditure — another ten minutes. Rest to absorb — another ten. Thirty minutes between each event, which aligned almost exactly with the transfer interval.
He stopped fearing it and started using it. Snowbound, no threats nearby, nothing pulling at his attention. Perfect conditions.
7:15 PM — first Siphon.
7:45 PM — second Siphon.
BOOM.
He watched it carefully this time, full attention on the process. The Activity arrived the same way Exchange always did — not from outside, but as if it had welled up from inside his own body, spreading through him. The violence of it was real but bounded.
8:20 PM — third Siphon.
BOOM.
Activity Value: 2.437H. No organ damage beyond tolerance.
8:50 PM — fourth.
Activity Value: 2.45H. His stomach moved. Hunger, right on schedule. He ate — Activity fruit, a small vial of Bee Treasure, several cuts of evolved beast meat.
He felt it. The physical condition that had been sitting at the nineteen-bull ceiling, pressed to its limit, beginning to tip over into something higher.
Twenty-bull.
The improvement wasn’t tissue reinforcement — his organic structure had already reached what flesh and blood could achieve. No amount of enhancement would give him a fourth type of cone cell in his eyes; certain limits were architectural, built into the fundamental construction of a human body. The only way forward was more Activity, using Activity’s amplification to compensate for what the underlying biology couldn’t exceed on its own.
“Again.”
9:20 PM. 9:50 PM. 10:25 PM. 10:55 PM. 11:30 PM.
Five more events. A large quantity of Activity fruit consumed between them.
Activity Value: 2.526H.
The strength was genuinely different. He could feel the new level throughout his body. Twenty-bull strength was real.
He stopped there. Nine Siphon events across the evening had produced rapid advancement and real capability growth — but he could feel the accumulated wear on his internal organs. Each event left a minor residual injury that didn’t fully clear before the next one arrived. Keep going and the damage would compound into something serious. A full night of recovery was necessary before continuing.
“Stop the Siphon. Let the body settle.”
He removed the Bull Demon King Totem, rested briefly, then moved to the corridor and constructed a makeshift punching target — a hanging bag wrapped in multiple layers of captured sharkskin. He hung it from the ceiling mount.
Bare hands. He started working.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
The bag was dense and solid. Under his strikes, the sharkskin flexed and compressed to its limit but held. He worked through combinations — straight punches, then a pivot and a kick that rocked the whole suspension.
Half an hour. He’d internalized twenty-bull strength — not just possessed it, but understood it, felt where it lived in his body and how to direct it.
Another qualitative shift in combat capability. He was certain of it.
The next morning he was up early — four hours of sleep left him fully rested now, a consistent pattern for the past several months.
The snow had slowed considerably overnight, but what was already on the ground had accumulated to over four meters depth. The landscape was a uniform white plane with no visible surface features. Occasional humps in the distance — trees over four meters tall that hadn’t been buried entirely.
“Morning, Colonel Chen.” Old Wei was already shoveling, cutting steps into the snow around the jeep for easier access.
Shen Cong acknowledged him with a nod and turned to his own tasks. The roof needed clearing before he could deploy the drone.
He was about to start when his vision caught something.
Five hundred meters out, the snow surface was erupting in waves — plumes of white flying up as something massive moved beneath and through it. A creature, enormous, white-bodied, rolling and thrashing in the deep snow.
Something like a snake’s body, but with legs. Something like a lizard’s silhouette, but longer and more sinuous.
Taken together: a giant four-legged snake. The body hadn’t been moving at that scale for long — it was at minimum comparable to the Golden Jiao in overall size.
The creature was playing in the snow. It hadn’t noticed Great Vajra. It wasn’t approaching — just moving in the far distance, apparently enjoying itself.
The pressure of its Activity presence reached Shen Cong immediately, pulling everything taut.
He stopped sweeping, closed the roof hatch, and moved back inside without any drama.
He picked up the walkie-talkie. “Stay hidden. Five hundred meters out, large evolved beast. Moves freely in the snow. If it finds you, I can’t guarantee I can reach you in time.”
Warning delivered, he positioned himself at the roof camera feed and watched.
If the creature came for Great Vajra and attacked, he’d respond — Pepper Water in sufficient quantity might manage a Heavyweight-tier opponent, and he had to try regardless. If it didn’t come, he wouldn’t initiate anything pointless. This creature was larger than the Golden Jiao — minimum Heavyweight classification. He was confident his current combat capability could reach the Heavyweight tier as well, but combat was never just numbers stacked against numbers. One mistake could end everything.
Several minutes passed.
The camera feed resolved the creature’s full outline. It still hadn’t noticed Great Vajra — still moving through the snow in its own absorbed activity, its white body indistinguishable at distance from the snow itself. Whether the white was natural coloration or accumulated snowfall wasn’t clear.
It drifted closer. One hundred and fifty meters. Then a hundred.
Full combat readiness. If it crossed inside fifty meters, he’d strike first — losing the ambush advantage was worse than the risk of initiating.
The creature turned.
It moved away slowly, unhurried, and disappeared back into the white.
He didn’t relax immediately. He kept watching the radar. A creature that large, even with snowfall degrading the signal, should still register — and it did, moving away steadily until it dropped off the screen entirely.
False alarm.
(End of Chapter 240)