He'd read a news story once, years before the apocalypse.

Australia had originally had no cattle or sheep — those came with the convicts and colonists, who brought livestock and let them multiply across the grasslands. As cattle and sheep populations grew, so did their dung. The problem was that Australia's native dung beetles had evolved alongside marsupials and had no interest in imported bovine waste — they were specialists for kangaroo dung. The result was enormous quantities of cattle manure accumulating and destroying vast stretches of pasture.

The Australian government's solution: import dung beetles from around the world. It worked.

But then the pastures were sprayed with pesticides. The cattle ate the treated grass, produced pesticide-contaminated dung, the dung beetles ate the contaminated dung, and began experiencing paralysis, reproductive failure, and population collapse. Facing extinction.

A genuine illustration of a genuine principle: there was poison in the excrement.

Unable to eat dung safely, facing extinction — and then the meteor shower came.

The dung beetles in front of him were not that story anymore. They were enormous, they had switched from dung to carcasses, and whatever metallic material they packed into their balls was corrosive enough to drive off a Heavyweight lizard.

Shen Cong was reasonably certain his Half-Activated Armor couldn't survive a sustained barrage of those metallic fragments either.

"But the four-legged snake has been persistent enough to recruit help using food as a trade offer. There must be something worth having in that banyan grove."

He thought it through.

Should I help?

If I don't — how does the four-legged snake respond? Attacks me? Tries to take the food back?

If I do — what's the actual danger level? How do we split whatever's in there after the beetles are gone?

And what method do I even use?

He worked through the questions and found himself leaning toward helping. Not for any strategic reason particularly — because this was the first cross-species trade negotiation he'd ever witnessed, possibly the first one in the post-apocalyptic world. A Heavyweight evolved beast with enough intelligence to seek help from a…