Vajra stopped at eleven PM, somewhere around the area of Xiaoxu Village. Yinping Township was close now.

He ran his evening inventory before settling in.

The Spine-cat was chained outside again. Variant 1 had eaten enough Activity pork to grow a full size category — about the size of a child’s fist now, its needle proboscis visibly thicker than when it had first mutated. The second-generation maggots had developed well: twelve of them, each one slightly larger than a USB drive. Vajra’s saturation had climbed back to 25.5%.

He ate twenty-odd fried ant legs, picked up one of the Honey Peaches, lay down on the bunk.

The encounter with the survivor woman was still moving through him. He was calm on the surface. Underneath, the thoughts kept circling.

He hadn’t helped her. He didn’t regret not helping her, exactly — the reasoning was sound. He was one person, resources finite, the post-apocalypse world was not the kind of environment where extending trust to unknown parties with unknown capabilities and a demonstrated willingness to take what they wanted was a sound strategy. He’d left food and water and clothing. He’d done what he could do at manageable risk.

The thoughts that wouldn’t settle were the harder ones.

She’d been human once, and was still human enough to say don’t kill me when she needed to. The mutation had come for her the way it had come for everyone, and it had been less kind to her than it had been to him. No Vajra, no guided development, no six years of preparation — just whatever the Activity decided to do to an unprotected person when the meteors fell. The fangs through her lip. The eye pushed out of its socket. The intelligence still in there somewhere, running behind the damage, trying to hold on.

He hadn’t saved her and he wasn’t going to go back. But he was going to sit with the discomfort of that rather than explain it away.

The next survivor encounter — because there would be one — might be that. Or it might be someone like him, functional and prepared. Or it might be an organized group, with all the complications that implied. Military, government remnant, civilian collective. Operating under old rules or operating under no rules at all.

He didn’t know. He wouldn’t know until he was in it.

At least I’m still alive. Still functioning like a person.

He said it out loud, to the empty cargo section, and found that it helped.

Then he ate the peach in a few large bites and let the heat take him under.

He woke to 26.9% saturation.

1.4 percentage points overnight, slightly less than the 1.8 from the previous peach, but still roughly equivalent to several days of normal ambient absorption in a single sleep cycle.

His own physical enhancement was showing signs of diminishing returns, though. The previous peach had taken him to two and a half bulls. This one had produced a more modest improvement — he estimated something like 2.7, the increment smaller than the previous jump. Either his body was developing a tolerance for the dose, or Vajra’s low saturation was acting as a ceiling on what the Exchange could return to him.

Try two peaches tonight. They won’t keep forever without refrigeration anyway.

The days were full enough that wasting half of one sleeping off a peach during daylight hours wasn’t acceptable. He’d developed a rhythm: eat at bedtime, sleep through the transformation, wake up upgraded. As long as the peaches held, it was the most efficient system he had.

He got moving.

July 31st. The last day of the month, and the first genuinely clear sky in several days. He extended the solar panels from the roof mounts — they’d been retracted for the overcast stretch — and let them start working on the battery deficit. Every hour of solar charging was fuel he didn’t have to burn.

By late afternoon, approaching Yinping Township, the landscape had shifted enough to notice.

The sand and gravel thinned. The road surface emerged more consistently from beneath the debris layer. He put the dozer blade up — the road could carry Vajra’s weight without needing to be cleared first — and felt the speed come up with it.

Trees appeared along the road margins. Mostly poplars, a few parasol trees, scattered and isolated but present. He stopped to examine one. The bark showed the same metallic-transformation quality as the Man-eater Peach Tree — hardened, conductive, faintly resonant when he pressed his palm against it — but no fruit, no Activity core, nothing structurally unusual beyond the bark. He dug one up and sectioned it systematically, looking for a core location.

Nothing.

He recorded the entry — mutated poplar, metallic bark transformation, no Activity core identified — and moved on. The survivor woman had sharpened his awareness of the gap between what he’d already accomplished and what was still unfinished. Research could wait when survival had open questions.

At 5:10 PM, Vajra rolled into Yinping Township’s main street.

The township sat in the approach zone to Chaohu’s urban district — Juchao District, now administratively part of Hefei following the restructuring that had merged Chaohu into the provincial capital’s jurisdiction. Due north of Yinping was Juchao’s southern residential zone. Cross the Yuxi River and you were in the main urban area. A little further north: Lake Chao itself, one of China’s five major freshwater lakes.

From the roof, telescope out, he scanned the surroundings.

Something was different here. The buildings hadn’t fallen the way buildings everywhere else had fallen. Most structures were still partially upright — a wall missing here, a roof section collapsed there, but the basic frames standing. He didn’t know the local geology well enough to explain it. Whatever the reason, the township had retained more of its physical structure than anywhere he’d passed through since leaving Wuwei.

He swung the telescope northeast.

A glint of reflected sunset off a water surface. A cluster of larger trees at the bank’s edge.

Water.

He thought about the Dog-Croc for approximately ten seconds, weighed it against the fact that Vajra’s water reserves were running critically low, and started the engine.

He positioned Vajra with the rear end facing the water and the engine running before he got out. Quick exit geometry. He didn’t like this and he wasn’t going to pretend he did. But the lake was small — an elongated oval shape he could see both ends of from the bank, shallow enough to show the rock bottom in the near sections — and nothing that size could hide in it.

He suited up, swept the perimeter, brought out the water pump, connected the hose, and dropped it in.

Then he sat in the driver’s seat with the periscope trained on the hose intake and his foot resting on the accelerator.

Nothing happened.

The pump ran. The water tanks filled. The spare containers filled. He collected the pump, checked the sky — fully dark now — and drove back to a clear section of the main street to camp.

Open ground. Good sight lines in every direction. Easy exit routes in three orientations.

The stars were out again when he cut the engine. More stars than the old world had ever shown him through the light pollution — the sky as it actually was, unfiltered, the Milky Way a genuine structural feature of the night rather than a rumor.

The ground below it was a different world than the one that had looked up at the same stars a few months ago. The people who had named those constellations, who had built the streetlights that had drowned them out, who had lived in the buildings he could see the broken frames of in every direction — they were mostly gone now, and the stars didn’t know the difference.

He sat with that for a while, then went inside.

Two peaches tonight. He had twenty-five left. There was work to do.

(End of Chapter 36)