July 27th, 7:28 PM. Second blowfly death. Three remaining. Eggs: no change.
He swapped in fresher meat for the flies — higher Activity content, better substrate for what he was testing — and took a close look at the egg cluster. Still there, still attached to the rotting tissue, still unhatched. Needle-point scale, a faintly fuzzy mass clinging to the surface.
He was genuinely curious about those eggs.
The ant colony’s size had been suggesting something for a while. A normal Brachyponera colony ran to a few hundred individuals at most — the conditions in the post-apocalypse landscape weren’t exactly optimal for population growth. The only explanation for the numbers he’d encountered was that the mutated queen had been producing mutated offspring at scale. Which implied that the Activity — the mutation itself — could be transmitted reproductively. Inherited, not just acquired.
If that was true, and the blowfly eggs hatched into mutated larvae, it would be the first direct evidence of Activity inheritance across a generation. That was a significant data point.
He was even more interested in the three queen eggs he’d extracted from the gaster cavity.
If those hatch — raised in controlled conditions, fed on Activity-rich material from the beginning — what comes out?
He checked the reference files. Standard ant egg incubation: fourteen days. He set up a small incubation box with appropriate humidity, positioned the eggs carefully, and noted the start date.
Failure case: the eggs were immature, or the queen’s death had interrupted development. In that case, he’d hard-boil them. Waste nothing.
The venom sac processing was methodical work that he did while eating leftover Tumour-Pig.
Acid required glass or metal containers — plastic would degrade. He went through the preserved fruit stock, ate the contents, cleaned the jars, and started transferring fluid.
221 worker sacs produced approximately 2.5 liters of Strong Ant Acid.
53 soldier sacs produced approximately 1 liter of Super Ant Acid.
Three and a half liters total, sorted by concentration, sealed and stored in a section of the supply rack he’d cleared specifically for chemical storage. He had no immediate use for any of it. That was fine. The things he’d collected just in case had saved his life more than once already.
The ant legs took the rest of the evening.
Each leg had five segments. He’d eaten enough of them now to know which parts were worth the effort: the femur and tibia only — equivalent to thigh and shin, the only sections with real muscle mass. The coxa, trochanter, and tarsus were bone and claw, not worth eating. He stripped each leg to the edible sections and fried them in batches.
The smell was better than it had any right to be.
Six shoebox-sized containers of fried ant leg segments. He took one out immediately, sat down, and ate several while humming to himself. If he could find tomato sauce somewhere, the combination would be genuinely excellent.
I’m eating fried ant legs in the ruins of Shijian Township. What is my life.
The queen’s legs and antennae were a different category entirely — cooking ingredients rather than snacks, substantially more Activity-dense, the antenna segments in particular radiating strongly enough that he could feel them without reaching for his extended perception. He set those aside for proper meals.
The food surplus problem was real and annoying. Tumour-Pig scraps, Teddy Tyrant meat, fried ant legs, queen meat — all of it accumulating, none of it lasting longer than a few days in summer heat without refrigeration. The onboard fridge had been damaged in the flood and never repaired. He’d never prioritized cold storage in the original build, and now the oversight was costing him in wasted food.
When I reach a survivor base — assuming a stable situation — Vajra needs a redesign. Cold storage. Better water handling. Possibly a proper underwater seal.
The gap between the apocalypse he’d prepared for and the one he was living in kept manifesting in these small practical ways.
He pushed through until nearly 1 AM working on the spare tire.
The Activity-enhanced tires were a specific engineering challenge — the Extension property could restore material integrity, but the process required careful guidance to avoid misshaping the internal structure. He got it right eventually, confirmed the repair through the connection, and fitted the tire back to the reserve mount.
Then he slept.
He woke to an overcast sky.
His first reaction, conditioned by the previous storm, was to check the horizon for incoming weather systems. But this wasn’t the pressure-drop gray of an approaching storm front. The cloud cover was diffuse, haze-like, the air quality reminiscent of heavy smog rather than incoming weather.
He checked the Geiger counter.
Nine times the clear-sky baseline.
Which meant nine times the ambient Activity concentration.
He’d stopped flinching at high radiation readings weeks ago, after he’d worked out the Activity-radiation correlation. What the counter was showing him wasn’t a hazard; it was a resource. He stood in the open hatch and let the dense air move through the Exchange link for a few minutes, feeling Vajra absorb it, feeling the saturation numbers tick upward at a pace considerably faster than normal clear-sky conditions.
Vajra’s mood, if he was going to describe it that way — and the feedback through the connection sometimes felt specific enough to warrant the word — was something close to contentment.
He spent the rest of the morning in armor, running his standard patrol patterns around the vehicle, maintaining the discipline of treating every location as potentially dangerous until proven otherwise. High ambient Activity meant other creatures might be drawn to the area. Enjoyable conditions for him were likely enjoyable conditions for things that would try to eat him.
He found the 208 within an hour.
Shijian Township’s road network was mostly legible once he knew what he was looking at. Most of the structures were gone, but their foundations were often visible under the debris layer, and road surfaces — even buried — retained enough geometry to identify.
Three options at the main intersection. Left branch: the county road toward Qingtai Forest Farm. Right branch: toward Taiping Township. Center: Provincial Road 208, heading northeast toward Chaohu.
He took the center route.
The mountain terrain flanking the 208 corridor was unrecognizable. What had been forested slopes was now bare limestone and kaolin clay — white and gray, the surfaces scoured down to bedrock by a month of storm-force wind and then a day and a half of catastrophic rainfall. From a distance, the hillsides looked like dirty snowfields.
The valley floor was choked with rock debris. He worked the dozer blade steadily, opening passage, burning fuel at a rate that made him wince each time he checked the gauge. Occasional stretches of exposed road surface appeared where the flooding had scoured the debris away — the apocalypse had been thorough about many things, but it hadn’t produced earthquakes, so the road structure itself was intact where he could reach it. The pavement was pitted and cracked but not broken or displaced.
Five kilometers in forty minutes.
Then the rockslide.
A full hillside section had come down across the road, burying it under meters of limestone rubble. Not passable. He reversed back to the intersection and took the Taiping Township branch — a village road, narrow by design, barely wide enough for Vajra’s full width. He’d have to drive it carefully.
The radio hissed steadily on the dashboard frequency. He’d been running it continuously since the Eastern Theater signal, scanning every few minutes for a repeat. Nothing had come through.
He was chewing his way through a container of fried ant legs, fatigue from the sustained concentration of manual driving on difficult terrain starting to accumulate at the edges of his attention, when his peripheral vision caught something in the monotonous white-gray landscape flanking the road.
Green.
Vivid, saturated, unmistakable green.
(End of Chapter 28)