Food, water, and fuel were all in good supply. The upgrade situation had stabilized. Shen Cong felt no urgency about the road ahead.

He decided to finish the wired drone conversion first — proper high-altitude reconnaissance before pushing toward Hefei.

The moment his own safety was something he could control, his entire calculus changed.

His original plan had been to move toward the military district, fold himself into their organizational structure, and trade his usefulness for access to Activity research data. The siphon phenomenon had been driving that urgency — that sword of Damocles hanging over every amalgamation session, every decision about how much Activity to let Vajra absorb. One misstep, one miscalculation, and the overflow would hit him.

But he’d solved that. The Activity Source concept gave him the framework to track Vajra’s exact capacity, manage the absorption precisely, and amalgamate without fear. The siphon was no longer the emergency it had been.

Which meant Hefei could wait.

Internally, Shen Cong wanted to trust the government — the state had taken care of him after his parents died, and he hadn’t forgotten that. But the military wasn’t the government, and there was no government left. Wang Gen had told him as much: the provincial military district’s General Zhao Weiliang and the Hefei Garrison’s Commander Zhu Li were on a collision course. That conflict was coming sooner or later.

Arriving too early meant picking a side.

Picking sides in military politics was a different kind of survival problem — the kind where being wrong got you killed, and where the most dangerous person in the room wasn’t always the one with the most firepower. The Hefei Garrison was inside the abundant zone. Activity-rich environment, larger population, research infrastructure that made his self-taught theorizing look primitive. For all he knew, they had evolved people who’d already crossed Lv1.

Walking into that blind would be a serious mistake.

The deeper issue was the one he knew best: he didn’t know how many people in the military might want to use him, control him, or eliminate him. The world had never been short of people who wanted to hurt him. Zhang Tianshen and Wang Gen had both confirmed that the apocalypse hadn’t changed that fundamental fact.

With safety secured for now, he had no reason to rush into danger.

Go when I’m ready. Not before. Hefei is necessary — the overhaul is beyond what I can do alone — but there’s a difference between necessary and urgent.

He turned the thought over with a private kind of satisfaction.

I’m an evolved person. An iron person. Life-integrated with Vajra. I can do industrial-scale metalwork — shaping, cutting, precision fabrication — things that would normally require a full production line. That kind of capability has value even to a military force. Arrive stronger, and I might walk in as a guest of honor rather than a resource to be harvested.

Then my safety is actually guaranteed.

There’d been a period after the siphon incident where he’d genuinely wondered if mutant evolution was the better path — more direct, less dangerous. But the days spent dissecting the Hummer, deriving the Activity Source framework, building out the full quantification system had shifted something in how he understood all of it.

At the fundamental level, every evolved organism was doing the same thing: pushing Activity Value toward its Talent ceiling. The mechanism varied. Mutants, evolved beasts, half-beasts, evolved birds — they all fed on Activity-rich meat to climb. Iron people and iron beasts added the ability to directly absorb ambient Activity, along with the liquid-to-solid conversion process. Evolved trees operated by rules he still didn’t fully understand.

Every path had tradeoffs. None was clearly optimal. Not yet.

All of us are feeling our way across the river. No one can guarantee they’ve found the right stones.

He stood looking at the sunrise.

No fear of the future. Only appetite for it. Since his parents died in that car crash, he’d wanted to become something capable of controlling his own fate — not at the mercy of circumstance, not dependent on anyone. What he’d seen as a child’s desperate fantasy was becoming real, tangibly, measurably, one H at a time.

Everything he’d done to survive had been in service of that.

Anyone who tried to take it from him — human or beast — would become dust.

Hiss. Hiss. Hiss.

The wired drone modification consumed the morning. Half-leaning out of the cab door, welding torch in hand, Shen Cong worked through the detailed assembly — every component stripped, repositioned, reattached. Once the physical structure was ready, he’d guide Vajra through an Amalgamation pass to finish it, then fine-tune from there.

Without formal training in aerodynamics, his approach to the redesign was essentially: bigger. Larger rotors, wider axis spacing, more motor output. The original drone had sophisticated stabilization systems for directional flight. He stripped most of that out. He didn’t need it to fly forward — only straight up and straight down.

Progress was fast.

By one-thirty in the afternoon, he was ready for the first test flight.

Whirr. Whirr. Whirr.

The modified rotors were substantially louder than stock, and the flight path immediately made clear that “stable” was an optimistic description. But it left the ground, and it climbed.

At ten meters altitude, something changed. The ethernet cable’s weight began pulling — not catastrophically at first, then all at once. The drone tilted, corrected badly, tilted further, and began drifting sideways in an accelerating spiral.

He hit the controls. The drone didn’t care. Whatever balance calibration had existed in the original design was gone now, and the replacement was not doing its job. The machine wandered across the sky like something with a head injury.

He cut the throttle gradually and let it come down in a controlled fall, landing in a heap on rubble twenty meters away.

First test flight: failure.

Useful failure, though. Balance wasn’t optional. Version 2.0 would need a complete rethink of the stabilization approach.

Version 1.0 had barely been declared dead before the outside world intervened.

The laptop radar screen showed several blips moving fast toward Juchao’s main urban area. Direction: from the north.

The fire brigade.

Decision, immediate: Leave.

He hadn’t observed the fire brigade’s situation carefully enough to know how they’d respond to him. Better to pull back to the eastern district, reconnoiter the surrounding terrain, and let them pass without a meeting neither side was prepared for.

He packed up, Vajra growled to life, and they moved.

The radar tracked the incoming blips as he drove. The fire brigade seemed to have detected Vajra’s presence — their course adjusted, heading directly toward the Shangzhidu mall.

He turned onto Jiankang East Road and pushed east, cutting across to Changjiang East Road, and kept moving until a thousand meters of separation showed on the screen. The blips fell off the radar edge.

They didn’t follow. No pursuit along the trail Vajra had left.

He slowed.

East of the city, in the area around Chengjia Mountain Pass, two peaks flanked the road — Drum Mountain on one side, Flag Mountain on the other. He’d been thinking about them since the bird encounter. Somewhere in those hills there might be evolved trees — something like the Man-eater Peach Tree that had given him twenty-eight peaches of condensed Activity-enhancement.

He still thought about those peaches. A fruit that could accelerate physical evolution in a matter of hours — he’d eaten all twenty-eight, and he still wanted more. The twenty-eight pits were sitting in storage, preserved carefully. If he ever found a place to stay long enough, he’d thought seriously about planting them.

A second-generation Man-eater Peach Tree, grown from seeds that had passed through an evolved system — what would its fruit produce?

He was curious enough that the thought kept returning.

The mountains were worth a look.

(End of Chapter 85)