He hadn’t expected much from the ant eggs. Three specimens extracted from a dead queen, incubated with improvised equipment, monitored with no particular confidence in the outcome. The fact that they’d been radiating Activity at all had been a minor surprise.

The fact that they were now losing it was a problem he found himself unwilling to simply accept.

Is it separation from the queen’s biological systems? Or something wrong with the incubation environment?

He turned one of the eggs in his hands. Roughly the size of a mineral water bottle, the surface texture he’d noted before — slightly pitted, heavier than it looked, the faint Activity signature present enough to feel but not strong enough to characterize clearly.

The research question beneath the practical one was the one he actually cared about: if he could understand why the eggs were failing, he’d learn something about how Activity transmitted through biological generations. That knowledge had implications reaching well beyond ant eggs. Why did some people emerge from the apocalypse as evolved people, and others as half-beasts, and others as unchanged? What determined which path the Activity took when it encountered a living system? These were questions he had no framework for yet, and the ant eggs were an unexpected window into the mechanism.

He made a decision that he categorized mentally as almost certainly futile, but worth the data.

He gathered a small amount of his own Activity and pushed it toward the nearest egg.

The response was immediate and unexpected.

The egg’s radiation signature shifted — fractionally, briefly, the kind of change that would have been invisible to him three months ago and was barely detectable now. But detectable was the operative word. The egg had changed something in response to the external input.

It’s trying to absorb what I’m offering.

The implication arrived with unusual clarity: changing your own Activity radiation frequency required willpower and intent. He knew this from the ant-swarm camouflage — adjusting Vajra’s frequency had required sustained mental effort and kept snapping back when his concentration broke. Frequency change didn’t happen passively.

If the egg had shifted its frequency in response to his Activity input, even slightly, something in it had chosen to do that. Something with enough self-organizing capability to recognize a potential energy source and move toward it.

The egg is trying to survive.

He worked with it.

The process required patience — inject a small amount, pause, let what had been absorbed settle, inject a little more. Too much at once and the egg’s ability to integrate it was overwhelmed. The right rhythm was slow and incremental, like feeding something that could only take small bites.

He worked through all three eggs in sequence.

Two of them shifted their frequency in response to his input. Slowly, imperfectly, but directionally. The third showed nothing — no frequency movement, no change in absorption rate, the Activity continuing to bleed outward at the same steady pace regardless of what he offered it.

He stopped working on the third egg and left it alone. Let it fail or not on its own terms. A control condition was worth more than a failed intervention, and the contrast between a frequency-responsive egg and a non-responsive one might teach him something about what the difference meant.

Three and a half hours of careful work, spread across all three eggs, the night deepening around him.

At some point in the process — he couldn’t have said exactly when — the two responsive eggs’ frequency signatures locked into alignment with his own.

The sensation that accompanied this was brief and strange. Something that wasn’t quite a feeling and wasn’t quite information — a quality of familiarity extending toward the eggs, as if they had crossed some threshold from being objects he was observing to being something adjacent to him. Not like his connection to Vajra, which was continuous and detailed and functional. More like the difference between hearing a voice in a crowd and recognizing it as someone you know.

He sat with that for a moment and decided not to examine it too closely. The frequency alignment had a mechanistic explanation. The sense of familiarity was a byproduct of the shared frequency, not evidence of anything more significant.

Probably.

With the Activity stabilized and no longer bleeding outward, both surviving eggs were holding their charge. The third was still declining. He’d check the differential in the morning.

He showered and ate three Honey Peaches before bed.

The math was becoming clearer. At three peaches per session, the overnight Activity gain came in at 4.4 percentage points — Vajra from 30.1% to 34.5% in a single night. The rate was improving as saturation climbed, which suggested the Exchange mechanism became more efficient as more of Vajra’s systems came online.

His own physical enhancement was producing diminishing returns above three bulls. The three-peach session had brought him to approximately 3.1 or 3.2, rather than the larger jumps he’d seen at lower baselines. He wasn’t discouraged. Every increment of improvement was real, the ceiling was still somewhere above him, and the direction of travel was right.

As long as there’s still progress, there’s still potential.

He filed that observation somewhere between philosophy and motivation and went to sleep.

Morning routine, compressed to essentials.

Wash, brush, laundry with water that was probably fine for cleaning even if drinking it unboiled wasn’t ideal. Activity injection for the two surviving eggs — both holding, the third still declining on its own schedule. Roof exercises, working through the combat forms he’d maintained since before the apocalypse. Beef ration from the preserved food stock. Tire pressure and seal checks on Vajra. Radio scan.

At 7:30 AM, he put on the Baogai Armor, full kit, and left Vajra.

Two objectives for the morning: fuel and weapons. Specifically, a diesel source and the Yinping Township police station’s armory. Both were low-probability finds — he knew scavengers had been through the area — but low probability wasn’t zero probability, and fuel was a genuine constraint on how far and how fast he could operate.

The sun was establishing its summer authority over the landscape, heat building in the still air above the bare rock and sand. His Activity-enhanced heat tolerance kept it from being a serious problem below about 50 degrees Celsius. The current temperature, roughly 35, was uncomfortable inside the armor but manageable.

The police station showed evidence of previous attention. The specific kind of systematic picking-over that came from organized scavenging rather than opportunistic looting — careful removal of portable items, the kind of thoroughness that suggested Old Li’s group had protocols. He moved the relevant debris and confirmed what he’d expected: the armory had been cleared. Whatever firearms had been stored there were somewhere in city south now.

He moved to the tire shop.

Three bulls cleared debris faster than seemed reasonable. The buried first floor contained the expected inventory — tires deformed from compression, repair supplies in better condition. He collected the useful repair materials: plug strips, mushroom plugs, cold patches, tire sealant compounds. All of it could extend the life of Vajra’s tires in the field, which was worth having regardless of his fuel situation.

No diesel.

Motorcycle repair shop, car wash facility, auto repair garage: all negative on fuel.

The only remaining option is the Sinopec station.

He pulled up the map coordinates from memory and started walking.

(End of Chapter 42)