From a pure food chain perspective, Shen Cong and the four-legged snake were operating at roughly the same level.
Without the remnant scaffolding of pre-apocalypse civilization, humanity had already slipped from apex predator to prey. Which was why, watching what appeared to be a negotiation between Shen Cong and a forty-five-meter lizard, Xiao Bei had called it communication between higher lifeforms — because right now, humanity genuinely hadn’t reclaimed the top of the food chain.
The four people in the military jeep sat in silence and waited.
Shen Cong walked to the regurgitated carcass without incident. Then he stopped. He met the four-legged snake’s eyes directly, reached down, and took hold of the mucus-covered mass of dead animal with his hand.
The four-legged snake tilted its head. A low gurgling sound came from its throat.
He didn’t know what the sound meant. He wasn’t trying to decode it. He was executing his own judgment: he pulled the carcass toward Great Vajra.
The snake didn’t intervene. Didn’t threaten. The opposite — as Shen Cong dragged the offering toward the vehicle, the creature’s behavior shifted visibly into something that looked like pleasure. It raised its head and called out twice, and the calls had a lighter, quicker quality than before.
He dragged the carcass to Great Vajra’s front bumper, suppressing the physical discomfort of handling it.
The four-legged snake cried out again — enthusiastic, rapid calls — then turned sharply and began moving away toward an open slope. After several meters, it stopped and looked back at Shen Cong, calling once more.
Like it was asking him to follow.
He looked back at Great Vajra. At the military jeep behind it. He sat with the hesitation for a moment, then made his decision.
He activated the bouncing stilts and followed the creature.
The conclusion he’d reached was almost comical, but it fit: the four-legged snake wasn’t offering food as courtship or submission. It was proposing a transaction.
Calling it a transaction with a lizard was absurd on its face. But the four-legged snake wasn’t really “a lizard” in the sense that word implied anymore. Its eyes said otherwise. It had been watching him with the kind of attention that suggested actual evaluation, actual thought.
A powerful evolved beast, clearly intelligent, arriving with food and not attacking. That looked like an opening bid.
Shen Cong operated on a principle of fair exchange. He understood, from the inside, what that impulse felt like. This creature had run into something it couldn’t handle. It had encountered Great Vajra, perceived something formidably powerful — Beyond Three-Star Talent, Lv1 era, pressure aura active — and it had decided to seek help rather than contest.
The cross-species communication barrier had made the negotiation difficult to read. But when he’d dragged the carcass toward his own vehicle, he was accepting the offered terms. The creature’s joyful response confirmed it.
He had his gear. If things went wrong, he could disengage. Great Vajra in the Lv1 era wasn’t something Zhao Zilong’s group could threaten or damage. And a genuine, functional interaction with a Heavyweight evolved beast — the chance to understand what it needed help with — was worth the risk.
So: a forty-five-meter lizard running ahead, and a two-meter armored figure bouncing after it, heading toward Jishan Forest Farm.
Two sets of tracks in the slush, proportions wildly mismatched.
In the military jeep, Old Wei scratched his jaw and stared. “Zilong — am I seeing things? Did Colonel Chen just go with the lizard?”
Dahu confirmed: “He did. Do Colonel Chen and the lizard know each other?”
Xiao Bei exhaled. “Higher lifeforms. They can understand each other.”
Behind the silver mask, Zhao Zilong’s eyes were thoughtful. “I think Colonel Chen and the four-legged snake may have reached some kind of exchange arrangement. He dragged the snake’s food over to his vehicle — that was probably the agreement signal. The intelligence of evolved beasts has been climbing steadily. Perhaps genuine trade between humans and evolved creatures is actually possible.”
Old Wei grumbled: “Terrific. Animals getting smart. What does that leave us humans?”
“Evolve.” Zhao Zilong’s tone was serious. “Natural selection has already started. Human technology has been too heavily damaged — we don’t have nearly the advantage we once did over the animal kingdom. The only path forward is evolution. Like Colonel Chen. Become strong enough to maintain the human edge.”
On the bouncing stilts, Shen Cong kept pace with the four-legged snake without much difficulty.
The snake led him northeast. After roughly three minutes, it brought him to the edge of a U-shaped lake and began calling toward a peninsula at the center. Shen Cong followed its attention and found a massive tree on the peninsula — something like a banyan, with countless aerial roots hanging down like a small forest, filling the entire half-island.
From a significant distance, the smell hit him. Something rotten, spreading outward from the banyan grove.
The four-legged snake called out twice more and began moving toward the peninsula. It looked back occasionally, as if checking that Shen Cong was still following.
He stayed behind it, moving carefully toward the peninsula.
The moment he reached the bank, the banyan grove erupted into motion.
Enormous black-and-yellow spheres began rolling out from between the roots. He stopped and studied them from a distance.
Nearly circular. Approximately two to three meters in diameter each. Composed, on close examination, of compacted animal remains — bone and flesh in varying states of decomposition. And behind each sphere: a fat, heavily-built beetle, using its rear legs to push.
He looked at the spheres of rotting animal material, looked at the beetles doing the pushing, and the identification came immediately.
“Dung beetles.”
Scarabaeidae — over 2,300 species worldwide, present on every continent except Antarctica, primarily known as consumers of animal dung. Ecological engineers. Nature’s cleanup crew, accelerating the conversion of waste into nutrients that other organisms could use.
The ones in front of him were not pushing dung.
They were pushing carcasses.
The meteor shower had rearranged too many biological habits to count. Beetles that had spent their entire evolutionary history eating excrement had apparently decided to upgrade to meat.
He looked at the four-legged snake. It had offered food in exchange for help — and this was what it needed help with. Dung beetles that had discovered carrion, colonized its territory, and proved to be more than it could handle alone.
The four-legged snake seemed to understand the question in his expression. It charged directly at the beetles.
The counterattack was far more capable than it looked.
The beetles climbed to the tops of their carcass-balls, aimed their abdomens at the approaching lizard, and began rapidly kicking apart the compacted material with their rear legs. Something metallic was packed inside — something Shen Cong couldn’t immediately identify. The beetles launched the metallic fragments outward like a controlled spray.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
The fragments scattered in a wide arc toward the four-legged snake. Where they contacted its skin, the effect was immediate and severe — something like concentrated acid on skin, corrosive tissue damage spreading rapidly on contact.
The four-legged snake retreated, bellowing, and came back to Shen Cong’s side. It made low, insistent sounds from its throat — the urgent register, not the happy one.
The meaning wasn’t hard to read: I genuinely cannot handle these things. You’re up.
(End of Chapter 248)