Volume 1: Rise of the Vajra Chapter 7: Survivor Remains

Three days. Three encounters with “survivors.”

A Burrower. A pack of Fangwolves. A Gnawrat.

Every living thing that had made it through seemed to have come out the other side changed. Shen Cong could only explain it the same way he explained everything else: the Activity the meteor shower had seeded into the world had touched more than just Vajra. It had touched all of it. Him included.

Is this still the apocalypse, or is it just the new world now?

Nobody answered. He kept adapting.

The fang-knife splitting the Gnawrat’s skull had opened up a line of thinking he hadn’t fully explored yet.

He’d originally mapped the Activity to three functions: Extension, Amalgamation, Exchange. But that clearly wasn’t the whole picture. When he deliberately channeled Activity into the fang-knife, the blade didn’t just get harder — it became something categorically different. He tested it against an ordinary knife and cut straight through the blade without resistance.

He named this the fourth property: Sharpening.

Digging further, he noticed something else. Of all the material on a Fangwolf’s body, only the fangs could hold the Activity when Sharpening was applied. The fangs were where the Activity was most concentrated — the densest point of the whole creature. Its core, in a sense.

Same pattern with the Burrower’s mandibles. Same with the Gnawrat’s incisors.

So what’s Vajra’s Activity core?

He spent a long time probing through the connection, pushing his focus through every part of the vehicle, looking for a concentration point. He found nothing. The Activity was distributed evenly throughout.

Maybe non-living things don’t have a core. Maybe the core is a biological feature.

He turned the question on himself. He’d been changed by the Activity too — that much was clear from the physical enhancements alone. If mutated creatures had cores, logically he should have one as well.

Ten minutes of careful internal focus. Nothing.

Either my theory is wrong, or I’m missing something.

Not enough data. He filed it away.

With his arm still healing, he stayed near the Carrefour site for a few more days rather than pushing on. One-handed, he welded together a rat trap, baited it with Burrower meat, and quietly lowered it into the supermarket basement.

The Activity content in the three mutated creatures he’d catalogued ran highest in Fangwolves, then Gnawrats, then Burrowers — and the taste followed the same ranking. He’d stopped eating Burrower meat. Burrower meat was bait now.

Day one: nothing. Day two: nothing. Day three: he cooked the Burrower meat first — warm smell travels further — reset the trap, and went back for another load of drinks and supplies from the basement. No Gnawrat encounter. Maybe there’d only ever been one.

Day four: the trap had been triggered.

The bait was gone. So was half the trap — the rebar frame, thumb-thick steel rod, had been bitten clean through. Teeth marks clearly visible on the broken ends.

Shen Cong stared at it for a long moment and felt a cold sweat starting at the back of his neck.

He’d built his entire sense of security around steel. Vajra’s armor was steel. His tools were steel. The idea that something out there could bite through steel construction rebar like it was a cracker — that was a different kind of threat than anything he’d encountered so far.

He put the broken trap down, walked back to Vajra, climbed in, sealed the armor, and drove toward the water treatment plant without further deliberation.

Safety first.

The water treatment plant was unrecognizable.

There had been a reservoir next to it before the apocalypse — nothing spectacular, but a real body of water. Now there was nothing but rubble and sand in every direction. No buildings, no reservoir, no sign that any of it had ever existed.

Should be around here. Start digging.

The mineral water he’d taken from Carrefour amounted to less than two full water-cooler jugs once he counted it up, and small bottles took up disproportionate space. He needed the real supply.

The dozer blade worked through the surface layer, scraping sand and broken stone aside. It burned through diesel at a rate that made him wince every time he thought about it. Fuel was irreplaceable right now — no refineries, no depots, nothing he’d found still intact. Worth more than anything except water itself.

Clear the water storage, then head toward the provincial capital and look for fuel depots. If there’s diesel left anywhere in the region, Hefei’s the best bet. If not — solar charging and slow travel.

An hour and a half of clearing work before the underground storage entrance appeared.

He did not walk straight in.

The Carrefour incident had left a mark. Instead, he went back to Vajra and retrieved a small RC car he’d modified with a camera mount — a cheap toy with decent range and a live video feed to his phone.

The car zipped down into the first compartment and sent back a clean picture. Empty space, some loose rubble, and several patches of dark staining on the floor and walls.

The car reached a closed door at the entrance to the second compartment and couldn’t get through.

Shen Cong called it back.

If he was going in person, he was going in properly.

The anti-stab vest had already proven it meant nothing to a motivated mutant. What he needed was actual armor.

The inspiration came from the same place as everything else lately: the fang-knife. If Activity could be channeled into a piece of bone and make it cut through steel, then by the same logic, any material infused with Activity would become something beyond its base properties. The question was how to make that work as wearable protection.

Vajra was entirely infused with Activity. Every plate of its armor carried the same energy.

The problem was Amalgamation working in reverse — cut a piece away from Vajra, and it would start losing its Activity. Based on his observations, that process took about half an hour to complete.

Half an hour of Activity-infused armor per use. Manageable.

After each use, he could hand the detached plates back to Vajra, let Amalgamation reintegrate them, re-infuse them with Activity, and repeat the cycle whenever needed. Consumable armor that refreshed itself.

He was fairly pleased with this idea.

Then a follow-up thought: if he embedded Activity cores — Fangwolf fangs, Burrower mandibles — directly into the armor plating, and used his own Activity as an anchor, could he slow the decay rate further?

He had fourteen Fangwolf fangs, one pair of Burrower mandibles, and one pair of Gnawrat incisors. More than enough to test the theory.

Two days of work. One arm in a sling for most of it.

The result was rough. Plates of steel bolted and welded together into a wearable suit, two Fangwolf fangs mounted into the chest section — functional, ugly, primitive.

He named it the Optimus 1.0 Active Armor.

It looked considerably worse than the earliest Iron Man prototype. He put it on anyway, and immediately felt better about the world.

The interesting thing happened when he checked the Activity decay rate. The fangs had done something — not just sat there, but integrated with the surrounding plate, creating a reaction that dramatically slowed the energy bleed. His estimated thirty minutes of Active time had stretched to three hours, at minimum.

He hadn’t predicted that. He wrote it down.

Clank. Clank.

Shen Cong descended into the storage facility in full kit: Optimus 1.0 Active Armor, Activity-Amalgamated Type 64 replica in hand, two fang-knives on his belt, hand crossbow across his back.

The first compartment was empty. The infrared showed no heat sources. He crouched by the dark staining on the floor and walls and examined it more carefully.

Blood. Old blood, dried to a nearly black crust.

He stood up slowly. Couldn’t tell from the appearance whether this was pre-apocalypse or post. He moved carefully to the second compartment door and pushed it open.

The smell hit him first.

Rot and decay, thick and immediate, flooding out from the dark space beyond. In the compartment that should have held rows of sealed water jugs, there were bodies. At least a dozen human bodies in various states of decomposition, along with the rotting remains of several creatures he couldn’t immediately identify.

Shen Cong stepped back and spent a moment fighting down his gag reflex.

When it passed, he looked again. Properly this time.

This was a fight. Survivors versus mutants. Given the decomposition — a month, maybe more. Before the storm ended?

He covered his nose and moved through to the third compartment.

Signs of habitation. Food scraps. Bedding. A waste bucket. The basic infrastructure of people who’d been living underground — because down here, with access to water, you could survive the storm. These people had. For a while.

Big cities have basements everywhere. Metro systems. Bomb shelters. Carrefour wasn’t a fluke — there are survivors out there.

Large urban centers, military installations — anywhere with substantial underground infrastructure and enough stored supplies to last through the month-long storm. Shen Cong had made it through inside Vajra. People with access to deep basements and stocked shelves could have done the same.

The thought sat with him as he moved to the fourth compartment, which was exactly what he’d come for: rows of sealed water jugs, untouched.

He loaded ten jugs for drinking and grabbed two more for a bath. The first real wash in nearly two months.

He soaked in the makeshift tub he’d rigged in the cargo section and stared at the ceiling and tried to sort through what he was feeling.

Survivors meant people. People meant interaction. He’d known intellectually that he probably wasn’t the last person alive — but the bodies in that compartment had made it real. Other people had been out here, living underground, fighting things in the dark, dying in a storage room. And others were probably still out there, in the cities, in the military bases, trying to figure out the same things he was trying to figure out.

He couldn’t wander alone forever. He knew that.

But he also didn’t know how to be around people. Hadn’t, really, since his parents died. The persecution complex had never gone away — it had just been redirected into Vajra and apocalypse prep. Other people were unpredictable in a way that mutated monsters weren’t. Monsters attacked or they didn’t. People could smile at you and want something entirely different.

The post-apocalypse novels and films were full of it. The moment civilization cracked, human beings became the most dangerous thing in the environment. He’d read enough of those stories to know the shape of what came next.

Survivors and mutant monsters. In terms of threat level, honestly — not that different. At least monsters don’t negotiate in bad faith.

He trusted himself. That was it. That was the full list.

He stayed in the water until it went cold.

(End of Chapter 7)