"Activity Pearls, the pearls inside pearl mussels, possess special properties. They can stimulate a third round of human development, and can stimulate animal development too. They live in the crescent-shaped barrier lakes of the Huanglishu Reservoir. Recommendation: harvest, then cultivate artificially."

"Banyan yogurt trees…"

"White Silver Fruit…"

Shen Cong organized the projects that needed someone to follow up on into a single document.

Then he left the Huanglishu Reservoir. He planned to roam around a bit and, in passing, think carefully over whether there was any possibility of using White Silver Fruit to hunt an ultimate-grade jin beast.

Don't make decisions in the heat of impulse — this too was one of Shen Cong's styles of doing things. He always considered every consequence in advance, made sure a thing was worth doing, and only then did it.

The Core-Totem Great Vajra galloped along a highway growing ever more broken.

The apocalyptic storms' onslaught had, at the very first, buried countless highways beneath dust and dirt, so they'd been preserved fairly intact. Once the torrential floods washed the sand and gravel away, the highways were exposed again; push aside the rubble, and they could be driven.

But in the apocalypse, with no humans to manage and maintain them, the highways inevitably decayed. Many roads were even damaged at the roots by jin trees that had cropped up. Passing along a county road last time, Shen Cong had even seen a jin tree growing right out of the center of the highway, wrecking the road surface completely.

Luckily the Great Vajra had a two-meter-high chassis, its enormous tires loaded with a shock-absorption system — bumpy or not, it didn't matter.

Even the trailers had a simple shock-absorption system of spring-loaded telescoping rods.

No need to slow the speed in the slightest.

When he was drowsy, a round of "Victory" and he was instantly in high spirits; when he wasn't, he'd play some other songs too. The music library was vast — hear something good, listen to it; something not good, switch it at once.

"Plant the pond of happiness, and dreams will…