The Bull Demon King Totem had run through the night without incident.

He checked the resonance field first thing in the morning. Stable. The horn surfaces still showing their iridescent flow, the closed field lines cycling between them, the field-force storm continuing its quiet work. No accumulation toward failure, no signs of decay.

Vajra: Level 0.618.

One night of continuous operation had added nearly 0.06 to the saturation — more than two full days of previous ambient absorption, achieved while he slept. The Exchange had pushed his own Level to 0.761, physical capability now solidly into the 3.4 bull range, approaching three and a half.

The catch: the local ambient Activity had thinned significantly overnight. The storm had been pulling from a fixed volume of air, and after sustained extraction, the nearby concentration had dropped enough that the absorption rate had declined. Ten minutes per 0.001 had stretched to fifteen.

The field works. The field depletes its local environment. Rotating positions will be necessary.

He gathered a supply of Veggie Willow leaves, loaded the harvested vehicle components he’d been accumulating for trap construction, and drove Vajra one kilometer north to the Yuxi River tributary.

The small river bend had several things going for it: high ambient Activity from the river water carrying dissolved particles, a narrow shallow channel that excluded any large evolved fish, clear sight lines in every direction, and enough open ground that approaching threats would be visible well before they arrived. Less comfortable than the lakeside camp. More defensible.

The resonance field reestablished its ten-minute rate immediately in the new location.

He set the fishing lines in the tributary, suited up in the Baogai Armor, and walked back to the township for the daily observation run.

The scavenging today was practical rather than investigative. He’d identified several vehicle frames in sections of the ruins he hadn’t fully processed, and the bumpers and frame rails could be worked into hunting traps. The field-force storm would draw evolved beasts toward the camp — he’d been expecting this since establishing the Totem. Daytime was manageable with his weapons. Nighttime required a passive defensive layer.

He tore a bumper free from a collapsed sedan with one hand, added it to the collection bag, and swept the horizon with the telescope.

Zhang Youhai’s group hadn’t appeared. Third day of absence now. He’d either given up on the repeat encounter or moved operations to a different scavenging zone.

He was lowering the telescope when the dust cloud appeared.

Four hundred meters east, in a section of open rubble field.

Two shapes, moving fast, circling and colliding in the pattern of animals fighting. He got the telescope steady on them.

One was a dog — a large one, clearly evolved, the oversized fangs visible even at this distance. Same morphology as the Fangwolves he’d catalogued outside Wuwei. One of the fangs was broken, the stub buried in the other combatant’s forearm.

The other combatant was human-shaped.

Male, probably, though the matted hair and shredded clothing made the assessment approximate. What identified him most clearly wasn’t his appearance but his capability: bare-handed combat with an evolved beast, holding his own, taking the fang through the arm without stopping. A normal person didn’t do that.

Half-beast.

The fight had been running for about a minute when Shen Cong located it. He settled in behind a section of remaining wall, braced the telescope, and observed.

This was data. The half-beast population represented the failed-mutation end of the evolved human spectrum — degraded cognition, retained physical enhancement, behavioral patterns closer to animal than human. He’d encountered one in the dark, briefly, outside Baimu Village. He hadn’t been able to assess capability from that encounter. This was a controlled observation with good sight lines and no immediate personal risk.

The combat continued for another minute and a half.

The half-beast had speed and striking power that exceeded what a normal human body was capable of, but it was fighting without tactical thinking — pure aggression, responding to the Fangwolf’s attacks rather than anticipating them, relying on its enhanced constitution to absorb punishment that would have ended a normal person. The Fangwolf had the same problem in reverse: its Activity-enhanced body and evolved instincts were formidable, but it was fighting a target that didn’t collapse on schedule.

At the two-and-a-half-minute mark, the half-beast got both hands on the Fangwolf’s throat, drove it to the ground, and applied weight and grip until the struggle stopped.

Shen Cong watched the aftermath.

The Activity cores — the claws, he realized, when the half-beast moved into better light. Each fingernail had extended and hardened into something closer to a blade, driven deep into the Fangwolf’s throat in the final moments. The Activity core manifestation in the hands rather than the mouth distinguished this individual from the female survivor he’d encountered. Every half-beast he’d seen had shown different specific mutation sites.

The blood drinking. The crunching of the extracted fang — swallowed whole, apparently. The dragging of the carcass away.

He watched it all without moving.

The half-beast wasn’t his problem. It wasn’t targeting him. The female survivor near Baimu had shown residual human cognition — don’t kill me, I’m hungry — and this one had shown the same implicit social awareness by walking away from a potential confrontation with an unknown armored figure rather than attacking. They weren’t gone entirely, whatever the surviving human communities called them.

He’d shoot one if it came for him. Until then, no.

Walking back, bag of vehicle components over one shoulder, he worked through what the observation had told him.

Half-beast physical capability: substantially above pre-apocalypse human maximum. Special operations level or beyond — faster, stronger, more durable, with a pain tolerance that suggested either degraded pain sensation or extremely high tolerance. An individual of that capability, fighting an evolved Fangwolf barehanded, taking a through-and-through fang wound to the forearm, and winning in under three minutes.

His own assessment: he could have handled the same Fangwolf in under three strikes, unarmed, in his current state.

That put him measurably above half-beast level — which he’d already expected from the Level measurements, but it was useful to see it demonstrated in live combat rather than just derive it from numbers.

The mutants in the city south factions were presumably at similar physical enhancement levels. Better cognition, worse morphological transformation, comparable or slightly lower raw capability. His three-bulls-plus against their one-to-two-bulls, multiplied by the Baogai Armor and Vajra as tactical infrastructure.

The arithmetic was favorable. He didn’t let himself become comfortable about it.

He thought about what he’d told himself during the Baimu campfire — Vajra is the most capable thing I’ve encountered, and I’m the most capable person. That had been true then, in his limited reference frame. The reference frame was about to expand considerably when he entered Juchao District.

What other iron people existed, and at what level of development?

Wang Gen had been a car mechanic who’d bonded with a Hummer. A Hummer was a capable vehicle but not an evolved one — no Activity saturation, no Amalgamation capability, no Exchange feedback loop. The bond would have enhanced Wang Gen physically, but without a developed Active system to draw from, the enhancement ceiling would be substantially lower than his own.

But the Hummer example was the minimum case he’d identified. He needed to think about the maximums.

Tank drivers. The provincial military district had sent people to Juchao before the flood and collected evolved individuals. Those people were in Hefei now. If any of them had bonded with military vehicles — actual military vehicles, armored, powerful, potentially with their own mechanical sophistication that might interface interestingly with Activity saturation —

Submarine crew. Operating vessels that could remain submerged for months, structurally robust, entirely enclosed and protected through the storm. If a submarine crew had survived in their vessel, and the vessel had developed Activity properties —

Aircraft carrier officers. The Liaoning’s final transmission had come through in the Chapter 2 radio collage. He didn’t know if the ship had survived or sunk. Either way, the thought experiment was valid: a naval vessel at sufficient Activity saturation would be genuinely terrifying.

Wang Gen’s Hummer on one end of the scale. An Activity-saturated aircraft carrier on the other. The iron people he’d encounter in Juchao, in Hefei, in Nanjing would fall somewhere in that range. He had no idea where most of them landed.

And that was just iron people. The Plastic Rabbit had been an iron animal — an evolved creature in a bond with an Active metal object rather than an evolved human. The world was full of metal objects that had been in proximity to living things when the meteors fell.

The screwdriver in someone’s hand. The bicycle frame someone was riding. The car someone was driving. The iron post someone was leaning against.

How many iron people are there? How many iron beasts?

He didn’t know. He wouldn’t know until he traveled further and gathered more information.

So travel further. Gather more information.

The Level counter ticked upward in the background of his awareness.

Evolve. Grow strong.

(End of Chapter 51)