“Youhai, you really did meet someone important. Tell us — who gave you all this?”

The man who’d called him lazy was now grinning with his whole face.

The two women were already clearing space to prepare the meat, but their eyes kept drifting back to Zhang Youhai.

He let them look for a moment, then tapped the medication packet with one finger. “I can’t give details. What I can say is we met under complicated circumstances. The person had questions about Juchao District, I answered them, and this is what they gave me in exchange.”

“Then why did they tie you up?” Old Li asked.

“They’re new to the area. Don’t want their presence known yet — didn’t want me seeing where they were operating from. Probably wants to avoid drawing attention from the evolved people here.”

“So they’re an evolved person too?”

“Definitely.” Zhang Youhai shook his head slowly, working the impression. “You didn’t see the armor. Bone-gold all over it. Wang Gen’s people don’t have that much bone-gold between them.”

The man who’d called him lazy slapped his knee. “Why didn’t you suggest we throw in with them? That kind of bone-gold means real capability. They just arrived — we get in early, it beats scavenging and starving.”

Zhang Youhai’s expression shifted slightly. “They said maybe later. It’s not going anywhere.”

Old Li had been quiet through this exchange. He spoke now with the particular authority of someone who had kept seven people alive for months through careful decisions. “Listen to me. All of you. This medication does not exist. The meat does not exist until it’s in our stomachs. Evolved people don’t care about medicine anymore — they don’t need it. We do, and so does everyone else in city south. Word gets out, Wang Gen takes it, Zhang Tianshen takes it. We keep our mouths shut.”

Nods around the circle.

“From now on, our seven stays together. This is how we survive.” He looked at Zhang Youhai. “Keep your eye on this new person. When the time is right, we move toward them as a group.”

“Done,” Zhang Youhai said.

In the corner, the youngest member of the group said quietly, “What if we just paid the bridge toll and went to the main district? If there’s still a government—”

Old Li cut him off. “The fire brigade isn’t a government. A government doesn’t let Zhang Tianshen’s people get pushed across the river to make trouble over here instead of handling them. A government doesn’t seal its own bridge. Don’t mistake something that holds territory for something that serves people.”

The young man said nothing.

Shen Cong knew none of this. He’d already left.

He also hadn’t said maybe later to Zhang Youhai — that detail had been invented on the spot, presumably to protect Zhang Youhai’s social standing within his group. In Shen Cong’s actual calculus, there was no maybe later. There was no intention of acquiring followers or building a faction. The persecution complex hadn’t changed its fundamental orientation: other people were liabilities, unpredictability was a threat, and the most reliable unit of survival was exactly one.

What he had done, deliberately, was engineer a specific information environment.

The medication was the key piece. For a non-evolved survivor in Juchao District, good antibiotics represented the difference between a treatable infection and a death sentence. For an evolved person, they were useful for trade but not personally necessary — Activity healing had made pharmaceutical intervention largely redundant. So the gift of medication served two functions simultaneously: it demonstrated that he was evolved (because only someone with better healing options would give away antibiotics), and it announced his presence to the local power structure without revealing his capabilities or location.

Show strength. Conceal depth.

The blindfold and the indirect return had handled the concealment side. Zhang Youhai knew there was an evolved person with substantial bone-gold equipment operating in the area. He didn’t know what kind of evolved person, didn’t know about Vajra, couldn’t describe the voice well enough to identify it, couldn’t triangulate a position.

The three factions would hear about it. They would assess an unknown evolved person as a potential asset or potential threat, and they would begin trying to locate and identify. While they did that, Shen Cong would have visibility into how they responded — aggressive, cautious, conciliatory — without being exposed to whatever that response was.

He’d played chess with himself in the warehouse for six years. The habit of thinking four moves ahead hadn’t left him.

What he hadn’t accounted for was that Zhang Youhai’s group was not thinking about the information the way he’d intended. They were thinking about recruitment, protection, and stability — not intelligence operations. The gap between his model of their reasoning and their actual reasoning would probably produce unexpected results.

That was fine. Unexpected results generated information too.

He drove Vajra back a kilometer to the small lake where he’d taken water, positioned against the bank with a clear exit lane, and began his assessment.

A sheet of blank paper on the fold-down desk surface.

City south: approximately seven hundred survivors. Evolved individuals: seven total. Mutants — six: Zhang Tianshen, Wu Wenjun, Wang Dong (Dragon Slayers), Tao Daqian and Dahaizi (Wang Gen’s people), the Captain (Shadows). Iron people — one: Wang Gen. Half-beasts — minimal presence, mostly killed or driven out.

The provincial military district had come through before the flood and taken the majority of the evolved people to Hefei. What remained were the ones who’d declined to go, or who’d been missed, or who’d arrived after the army left.

Zhang Youhai’s assessment of evolved-person capability: “A single one can take on several normal people. Everything exceeds what normal humans can do.”

His supporting evidence was thin. He’d seen Tao Daqian and Dahaizi sparring once, during which Dahaizi had punched through a brick with apparent ease. He’d seen Wang Gen’s firearm handling. He’d seen half-beasts in the early days before Wang Gen’s suppression campaigns cleared most of them from the urban area.

Shen Cong mapped this against what he knew.

Direct physical transformation — mutants — probably followed the same general curve as mutated animals: stronger, faster, more durable than the baseline. But without an Active metal partner providing Exchange feedback, without the guided development he’d been doing since the beginning, their enhancement was likely to be the kind that came from a single acute transformation event rather than sustained accumulation. Similar in nature to the difference between a Fangwolf and himself, scaled to human biology.

He estimated the mutants at somewhere around what he’d been at two months ago. Before the Honey Peaches. Before the motorcycle absorption. Before the systematic Activity development that had taken him from enhanced-normal to something that was moving toward a different category.

At three bulls, I can handle ten of them.

This wasn’t bravado. It was the same methodical arithmetic he applied to everything. He’d fought the Burrower, the Fangwolves, the Gnawrat, the ants, the Dog-Croc. Each encounter had calibrated his understanding of what his capability meant against various threat profiles. Against humans with one acute transformation event and improvised bone-gold weapons and no Vajra backing, the math was straightforward.

Which was why he’d let Zhang Youhai go without concern. Which was why he’d made the medication move. Which was why he could afford to sit at the lake and develop rather than scramble.

Twenty-three Honey Peaches remaining.

He did the math. At two peaches per night, roughly 2.5 to 3 percentage points of Vajra saturation gained per session, eleven nights to finish the supply. Eleven nights of transformation-sleep, each one pushing saturation toward the 80% range — possibly hitting 100% if the Exchange math held.

At 100% saturation, he had a strong intuition — the same kind of intuition he’d learned to take seriously — that something would change. What exactly, he couldn’t say. But the pattern of every previous saturation threshold suggested that crossing it would produce a qualitative shift rather than another incremental improvement.

Heads down. Develop. Let them come to him.

He set the paper aside, located the first two peaches of the evening, and started organizing the night’s repair work.

The radio hissed steadily on its designated frequency. He left it running.

(End of Chapter 40)