Morning came without ceremony.

The Plastic Rabbit’s meat, as he’d half-expected, contributed less Activity than the ant specimens had. He’d prepared himself for that possibility and felt nothing particular about being right. He logged the result, ate breakfast, and moved on.

Morning exercises on the roof. Activity repair session on Vajra’s systems. Then he collected the ant legs he’d set aside from yesterday’s haul and got started on the queen.

The queen’s head had survived intact. The thorax and abdomen were pulped — the dozer blade had done thorough work — but intact enough to read the original structure through the damage.

The thorax was unusual. Ordinary ants had a thorax formed from three fused dorsal plates. The queen’s was assembled from individual bone-analog plates stacked against each other, each one distinct, the whole arrangement suggesting something more like articulated armor than a fused structure. One plate stood out immediately: roughly the diameter of a wash basin, radiating Activity at a concentration that exceeded anything he’d collected from other creatures, including the Tumour-Pig’s crescent tusks.

He pried it free.

Even damaged, the plate was impressive — dense, curved, the Activity in it alive and present in a way he could feel without extending his perception. As a standalone piece it would function as a small shield. Mounted on the Optimus 1.0’s chest section as a central plate, it would upgrade the armor’s defensive capability significantly.

He set it aside with the other priority items and kept working.

The antennae and three intact legs came off next — food storage. The abdomen was largely destroyed, but he found three undamaged eggs in the cavity beneath a section of intact shell. Translucent, egg-shaped, mottled surface, noticeably heavier than their size suggested. One end showed a dark spot — the fertilized point, he assumed.

No venom sacs in the queen. No stinger. The combat equipment apparently wasn’t part of the queen caste’s design.

He typed up the field guide entry:

Short-sting Queen Ant: mutated Brachyponera species, queen caste. Enormous body mass, very slow movement, essentially no offensive capability. Intelligence: unknown — demonstrated ability to identify Active frequency camouflage and direct colony behavior. Relationship to colony: atypical for known ant biology — appears to exercise genuine command authority rather than functioning as passive reproductive unit.

He flagged the last sentence in red and added a note: Ambiguous. Resembles termite colony structure more than ant colony structure. Requires more data.

Normal ant queens weren’t leaders in any meaningful sense — they were founders and egg-layers, occasionally needing to hunt for themselves, subject to replacement or culling by the colony depending on circumstances. What he’d encountered behaved differently. The queen had identified his camouflage, overridden the workers’ confusion, and redirected the assault. That was command function, not reproductive function.

Maybe the mutation changed the pheromone relationship. Maybe the workers produced by a mutated queen respond differently to her chemical signals. Maybe this is specific to this colony.

No conclusion worth committing to. He left the note, saved the file, and drove back.

The car graveyard looked smaller in the morning light than it had during the siege.

He pulled on the Optimus 1.0, checked his weapons, picked up a canvas carryall, and started the harvest.

Two hours of systematic work, moving from body to body, extracting the useful components from each specimen. Venom sacs first — he wanted those most — then Activity cores, then legs for the food supply.

Final count:

Short-sting Workers: 1,433 legs. 221 intact venom sacs. 206 pairs of mandible cores. 18 pairs of antenna cores. 9 node cores. 4 stinger cores.

Short-sting Soldiers: 357 legs. 53 intact venom sacs. 52 pairs of mandible cores. 6 pairs of antenna cores. 4 node cores. 3 stinger cores. One specimen had developed a pair of palm-sized bone-analog wings — an unusual mutation even within the already-unusual colony, and the wings showed Activity core properties.

Total body count across both days: approximately 320 individuals.

Most of the venom sacs were depleted — the siege had consumed the majority of what the colony had been carrying. The Activity core intensity in the ant specimens was also noticeably lower than the larger creatures he’d catalogued. Useful in quantity, but individually less significant than Fangwolf fangs or Tumour-Pig tusks.

He packed everything, drove away from the graveyard, and didn’t look back.

The metal concentration and the accumulated organic remains would draw more mutated creatures. He’d taken what he came for. Staying longer meant more encounters with things he didn’t need to deal with, and Vajra was still running below comfortable Activity levels. Recovery time was a resource he needed to protect.

The afternoon drive was frustrating.

No road surface. The terrain had shifted from the flat, flood-scoured landscape of the past few weeks into something more broken — rolling ground, elevation changes, the beginning of hill country. Without roads, a heavy truck with 1.5-meter tires and a dozer blade still managed, but slowly and at the cost of Activity reserves whenever the chassis needed support over difficult crossings.

He hadn’t covered as much distance as he’d planned.

When the sun started going down, a cluster of ruins appeared in the valley ahead — the familiar silhouette of a small town’s former main street, walls and building remnants visible above the debris line. One wall section had survived with most of its face intact. Rusted iron characters, still partially readable through the grime and damage.

Shijian Grand Hotel.

He recognized it immediately.

Shijian Township.

He pulled up the map files and found the location. Shijian sat approximately twenty kilometers from Wuwei county town, and roughly the same distance from the Chaohu city boundary. In nearly three weeks of travel — factoring in the days spent at the repair site, the days at the car graveyard, the time lost to the floods and the ant siege — he had covered twenty kilometers from his starting point.

He sat with that for a moment.

Twenty kilometers. Less than a quarter of the distance to Chaohu.

He wasn’t discouraged exactly. Every day had produced something — research, Activity accumulation, weapon development, resource collection. The travel had been slow because the obstacles had been real. But the gap between his mental map of progress and the actual map was worth acknowledging clearly.

The road north passes through hill terrain. I need Provincial Road 208.

Without a proper road surface, Vajra’s speed and fuel efficiency would remain poor. The 208 ran directly between Wuwei and Chaohu — if he could locate it, even a partially buried road surface would be better than open terrain.

He parked Vajra in front of what the hotel sign identified as the Shijian Grand Hotel’s former entrance, sealed the armor, and settled in for the night.

The evening’s work: Activity repair on Vajra’s systems, radio scan, weapons maintenance, and planning the route to the 208.

One day at a time. That was still the method.

(End of Chapter 27)