Shen Cong watched the Dog-Crocs flee one by one, watched the Golden Python drag its swollen body away across the receding water, and kept watching until both had disappeared from camera range. Then he stayed inside Vajra.

The four carcasses were right there. He wanted them badly. He still didn’t move.

Setting aside the possibility that either creature might circle back, half a meter of murky floodwater remained between the mountains — and murky floodwater was exactly the kind of environment where something large and unknown could be waiting. He wasn’t going to find out the hard way.

He watched the evolved fish work through the carcasses instead.

Half an hour later, the water had dropped far enough that patches of ground were showing through. What remained of the four Dog-Crocs were mostly damaged hide stretched over bone, floating loose in the shallows. Only then did Shen Cong open the door, move down the slope at speed, and get to work.

The lingering evolved fish that hadn’t fled at his approach — he picked them off one by one. Strung them on a line. Then lashed the four skeletal Dog-Croc frames together and dragged them back up the mountain.

Ten meters of crocodilian skeleton, even stripped to bone, was substantial weight. For someone approaching six-bull strength, it was manageable. He had everything on the summit inside a few minutes, hung the fish on Vajra’s exterior armor spikes, and turned his attention to the carcasses.

First: skin what remained of the hide. Then: locate and separate the Activity cores.

Three of the four had their cores in the same place — the triangular drumstick growth at the tail tip, exactly what he’d been hoping for. The fourth was different: a massive plate of bone armor across the neck and upper back, with two sharp spine protrusions rising from its surface.

Same species, different core locations. Evolution wasn’t standardized even within a population.

He ran the numbers on one specimen carefully: Lv0.532 / Activity Value 0.726H / Talent 1.264H.

He sat with those numbers for a moment.

Level roughly matching the Melancholy Bird at Lv0.533. But Activity Value at 0.726H — well above anything else he’d catalogued outside of himself and Vajra. Wang Gen had been the previous high mark among anything he’d encountered in combat, at 0.541H, and that had been enough to make him a serious threat. The Dog-Croc at 0.726H was in a different category entirely.

And the Talent figure: 1.264H. Higher than Wang Gen’s Hummer at 1.193H. Second only to himself and Vajra among everything he’d measured.

He turned one of the triangular drumsticks over in his hands, extended a pulse of Activity into it, and brought it down on a granite boulder nearby.

The stone turned to powder.

Not cracked. Not split. Powder.

“Beautiful,” he said, and meant it. “One hit. Wang Gen, Zhang Tianshen, Zhu Haifeng — any of them takes this and they’re done.”

He paused, ran the math, and amended his enthusiasm slightly.

“Though it burns Activity fast. I’ve got maybe ten full swings worth of free Activity reserves before I’m running on empty.”

The distinction mattered. Vajra’s liquid-phase Activity could be drawn on freely — as long as the vehicle didn’t approach the critical threshold, usage was essentially unlimited. But Shen Cong himself was different. His personal Activity wasn’t liquid-phase — it was solid-phase, closer to mutant or evolved beast physiology than to Vajra’s. The reserves he could spend in combat came from Activity-rich food, stored throughout his body, and they depleted like muscle fatigue. Push too hard and he’d hit the wall.

Ten swings. Enough, if used correctly.

He ground one of the drumstick cores into a warhammer head — triangular, dense, grey-yellow and unimpressive to look at. Fitted a steel pipe handle at one and a half meters length.

“I’ll call you the Dog-Croc Warhammer.”

Basketball-sized, lighter than a solid metal equivalent, and capable of reducing granite to dust. He was satisfied in a way that went beyond the words for it.

The other two drumstick cores went into storage. Then he turned to the neck plate from the fourth carcass — larger than the queen ant’s chest plate, broader across every dimension.

Cut it into pieces? Wasteful. Better to do what I did with the queen ant plate — mount it directly.

The queen ant plate had become the Activity hub for the Baogai Armor’s chest. The Dog-Croc plate could go on the back — replacing the current steel plate backing, upgrading the rear defense significantly. Running from a fight meant taking hits from behind. A Dog-Croc plate back there would make that considerably safer.

He stripped the rear steel plate off the Baogai Armor, took the angle grinder to the croc plate, shaped it to fit the interior profile of the backing. The Activity core dust shaved off in the process went straight to the old-mature larva. Once the fit was right: edge-drilled, chain-linked to the queen ant chest plate at the front, protruding edges trimmed, exposed sections covered with panels of smoothed crocodile hide.

He put it on.

The fit was good. Better than good — noticeably lighter than the steel plate it replaced, and more flexible in the back. Movement had improved.

“New name required. Super Baogai Armor.”

Warhammer in hand, Super Baogai Armor fitted, Shen Cong felt his combat capability register another distinct step upward.

He genuinely wanted a Dog-Croc to appear right now so he could test it properly.

He let that feeling run for a moment, then put it away and returned to his normal operational caution. He could take a Dog-Croc in a solo fight — he was confident in that. But the Dog-Croc was no longer the most dangerous thing in the area.

The Golden Python was.

Thirty to forty meters long, he’d estimated from the final departure footage. Mid-body diameter comparable to a large barrel. Scales the size of fists, yellow-white, overlapping — defensive coverage that would shrug off most of what he could throw at it. Horned protrusions on the skull. If it had developed limbs at any point in its evolution, the word “dragon” would have been completely accurate rather than just approximately accurate.

He’d seen a wildlife documentary once — Man and Nature — that showed a ten-meter python strangling an adult African cape buffalo. This thing was three to four times that length and had just handled fifteen Dog-Crocs simultaneously.

Vajra versus the Golden Python: not good odds. The vehicle’s biggest liability against a creature like that was maneuverability — no animal on earth moved like a truck, and a forty-meter constrictor in close range could simply coil around Vajra and apply force until something gave. The dozer blade might land one clean strike. After that, if the Python got its coils around the chassis, Shen Cong would be hoping the armor held.

Bone-gold weapons wouldn’t cut through that scale coverage reliably. The demolition charges were a coin flip at best — and if the Python had developed any conscious Activity use, conventional explosives might be nearly useless.

Five-fifty odds against the charges working. That was the honest assessment.

All of this was extrapolated from video footage, nothing confirmed. He had no measured data on the Golden Python at all. Its full Activity profile was a blank.

At minimum, he thought, the Talent has to be above 2H.

He looked at the warhammer in his hand and decided he was content, for now, to have gotten this much out of the day.

(End of Chapter 89)