A name he hadn't used in a long time was back: the Vajra.

But the Vajra of today no longer bore the faintest resemblance to the Volvo heavy truck of three years ago.

"It's been almost three years in the new world, and a lot has changed. I'm not the weak man I used to be anymore... The world's the same, but I'm not. Has this world contaminated me?"

Never forget where you started.

That was easy to say and hard to do. Shen Cong had lost his way at times too, wondering what he had become.

But in the end he had held on to those first ideas: take control of his own fate, find a new self, be destroyed in the old world and reborn in the new.

He had only made that goal clearer.

Keep growing stronger, break away from Earth, roam the universe, and find the secret at the source of evolution.

A blink, another blink, and another. In mind and body alike, he had left behind the weak human named Shen Cong that he used to be and become a particle-grade Mechanist with a proto-Firestarter.

Sometimes, when night brought dreams, he lingered in the days just after the apocalypse.

Back then he drove a truck with a layer of steel plate slapped on it, rolling slowly down roads buried in yellow sand through days without a soul in them. Every living thing he met, he watched in fear. He trusted no human, kept his guard up as high as it would go, and stood utterly alone.

He changed names constantly, all just to stay alive.

He liked to lie on the truck's roof, sipping sodas, some expired and some not, and counting the stars in the sky. Back then the night sky didn't look dazzling blue-white to his eyes yet. It was still pitch-black, with only points of starlight.

His mind would wander along the river of stars.

And he would remember so many things from the past.

A father and son cooling off on a straw mat on the rooftop on a midsummer night.…