Not long after the Vajra Fortress drove clear of Mount Tai, an enormous four-legged serpent came bursting out of the mountain woods as well, some jin beast of indeterminate species still hanging from its jaws.

It crunched the thing down and charged the Vajra Fortress.

At the same moment, the Vajra Fortress's roof suddenly unfolded, spreading flat into a platform twenty meters square. And so the long four-legged serpent wound itself around that sky-propping pillar, coiled snake-fashion across the Vajra Fortress's roof.

An enormous body. Tens of tons of it, at the very least.

But the Vajra Fortress didn't register the weight in the slightest. Six tires, four and a half meters across and three meters wide, rolled over the ground and guaranteed it wouldn't sink in. Though where they had passed they left enormous tracks, like the work of a road roller — you could have driven a car down them.

The old world had been crosshatched with roads.

In the new world those roads were about ruined, and only traces of them remained. He still drove along them partly because the terrain the roads had been laid across was better, and partly because following a road meant not getting lost. The wilderness had changed too much; without navigation, finding the right route was hard.

Find a road's traces and everything got easier.

And where there was no road, the Vajra Fortress simply crushed one flat and made a broad open avenue of it.

He soon found the Tai-Xin Expressway and drove straight onto it. Under the Vajra Fortress's weight the expressway's surface shuddered as it passed, and the jin trees that had broken through and sprouted were pressed flat as paper by the metal tires. As the Vajra Fortress went, the twenty-odd-meter width of the Tai-Xin Expressway looked as though it were being resurfaced.

Crushing everything underfoot, with power to spare.

The Push-Pull Three-Core Totem Engine used four of White-Eye Bug's 4.744H jin-core canines and two of the great python's 4.713H jin-core fangs for its stator and rotor totems.

Maximum horsepower topped forty thousand.

Even now, with the…