He spent a few minutes after Zhu Haifeng left working through why the leadership offer had been made.

The obvious interpretation: respect for demonstrated capability. He’d dismantled the Dragon Slayers in a single night operation, including the mutant combatants. That was a credible basis for wanting him in charge.

The actual interpretation, assembled from first principles:

They want to borrow my threat value against Wang Gen. A leader who can kill mutants is a deterrent against Wang Gen’s faction moving on the newly-formed rescue team.

They want access to my hunting and combat capability. One evolved person who can systematically take down Level 0.2 evolved beasts changes the city south food equation significantly.

They want my material. A faction leader has obligations to his people. The flour and compressed rations and medicine in Vajra’s cargo section become legitimately requestable once I’m responsible for 216 people.

And some of them, eventually, will decide the vehicle and everything in it is more valuable in their hands than mine.

He’d run this calculation before the offer was made. Zhu Haifeng’s sincerity didn’t change the structural logic.

City south wasn’t where the important things were. The provincial military district had Activity research data. The path to Level 1 for himself, the path past the siphon problem, the path to understanding what the Activity system actually was — all of it pointed north and east, not here.

He’d get more fuel somehow, fix the antenna, and leave.

He couldn’t sleep.

The killing’s secondary effects had arrived on schedule — not guilt, not crisis, but a specific heaviness that settled in the chest and didn’t respond to argument. He knew the people he’d shot had been planning to kill him. He knew the Dragon Slayers’ history. He knew the women at Sanhe Village. He knew all of it, and his calculation hadn’t changed, and the heaviness was still there.

This is what killing people feels like. It doesn’t feel like killing evolved beasts.

He gave it the time it needed and kept his hands busy.

The antenna components Zhang Youhai had salvaged from the stairwell walls were a mixed set — three telecom base-station antenna elements in varying states of corrosion, two of which still had functional signal-transmission capability. He worked through the night assembling them into a directional configuration: a parabolic reflector ground from a car hood panel, the two functional antenna elements positioned at the focal point, the assembly mounted on a swiveling bracket he welded from rebar sections.

Extension handled the precision work that his hands couldn’t manage — adjusting component positions by fractions of a millimeter, ensuring the reflector curvature matched the theoretical optimum for the signal band he’d identified, reconfiguring the coupling between the antenna elements and the router’s transmission port.

By dawn: a hand-built directional antenna, mounted on Vajra’s roof, connected to the router with a shielded data cable, aimed at the sky.

He climbed to the roof as the light came up and took out the DJI Phantom 8.

The modified communication setup: router providing the base signal, directional antenna focusing it upward, drone’s 5.8GHz module configured to the specific band that had survived the radiation environment. Phone as flight controller, laptop as video feed receiver.

Pre-flight: warm-up, calibration, home point set to the roof.

The rotors spun up to operating speed and the Phantom lifted.

The video feed appeared on the laptop screen.

Ten meters.

Clear image. The surrounding ruins visible in detail, the roundabout below, the Liushui Bay complex to the north.

Fifteen meters.

Previously this had been the edge of reliable communication. The signal held. Some interference artifacts in the image — scattered pixel noise from the radiation environment — but the feed was stable and intelligible.

Twenty meters.

He could see the Yuxi River from here. One kilometer of visibility. The image quality was starting to degrade.

Keep going.

Twenty-five meters.

The signal warning indicator began blinking. He held position for a moment, confirmed the feed was still transmitting, and continued the ascent.

Thirty-one point two meters.

One final image arrived before the connection dropped: an aerial overview of city south, the Yuxi River visible, the road network, the cluster of structures that marked Wang Gen’s territory around the old vehicle repair shop, the bridge approaches in the distance.

The drone cut to autonomous return-to-home mode and descended.

Thirty-one meters.

He sat with that number for a moment. The previous effective range had been fifteen meters. He’d doubled it. He hadn’t reached the hundred-meter minimum for useful strategic observation, but the direction was correct and the headroom was real.

He ran four more test flights. The results were consistent: 28 to 32 meters, with the best signal quality in the 28-to-30 range before degradation became significant.

The footage was useful despite the limited altitude.

He ran it through the laptop’s video software, stabilized the aerial motion blur, and mapped what was visible against the Zhang Youhai briefing’s location data.

Wang Gen’s territory around the repair shop: active. People moving in organized patterns, the kind that suggested assigned tasks rather than individual scavenging. At the river’s edge, a fish-trap configuration using relocated stones — a maze trap, the traditional technique adapted to a post-apocalypse context by replacing bamboo with debris. Effective against normal fish. Probably insufficient against anything that had decided it was an apex predator.

If a Dog-Croc comes through that maze, the people at the river end of it are going to have a bad morning.

He noted the trap layout for future reference.

The bridge approaches were visible at the edge of the usable footage range — enough to confirm their existence and rough condition but not enough for detailed assessment. He’d need either better altitude or a closer ground approach to understand the bridge situation properly.

Wang Gen: probably a mechanic who’d been working on the Hummer when the Activity hit. The life-bond forming during physical contact with a vehicle under stress — that fit the pattern. Six months of development since then, without a resonance field, without systematic optimization, with the passive absorption that came from maintaining a bond with a vehicle that happened to be running.

Slower development than mine. But two months of field operation, with resources, and presumably without any of the near-death complications that my development has involved.

He was still thinking about the missing variable in the Level system. Wu Wenjun at 0.397 being weaker than Zhu Haifeng at 0.281 couldn’t be explained by body size alone — Zhu Haifeng wasn’t significantly larger. Something about the measurement was incomplete.

Zhu Haifeng knocked on the armor before he’d resolved it.

“What is it? The arrangement is concluded.”

“I thought we could have a drink. And I want to discuss some things.”

“No drinks. Come in.”

He opened the rear hatch and pointed at the meeting compartment. Zhu Haifeng settled onto the supply container with the practiced ease of someone who’d been doing operational debrief sessions in uncomfortable spaces for two months.

The chest wounds from Zhang Tianshen’s finger-claws had been bandaged. He moved carefully but without the compensating flinch that indicated something structural had been damaged.

Shen Cong waited for him to begin.

(End of Chapter 71)