Blackhead’s appetite was considerably smaller than the old-mature larva’s.

Understandable, really — metamorphosis completed, body fully formed, growth stopped. Maintenance calories only. Adult insects didn’t eat the way larvae did.

What was interesting was how Blackhead ate. When Shen Cong tossed scrap metal into the container, Blackhead didn’t eat it where it landed. It picked the piece up in its mandibles, carried it across to the plastic box, and set it down beside the old-mature larva. Only after the larva showed no interest did Blackhead eat a few mouthfuls itself — and even then, briefly, before losing interest and leaving the rest.

Submission? No — ant colonies don’t have that kind of hierarchy. Members are peers. This looks more like feeding behavior. Blackhead might be expressing worker instinct — forage outside, bring food back to the nest, offer it to the larvae first.

He turned this over with some wistfulness.

Two ants. You can’t build a colony with two ants. Unless the old-mature larva turns out to be a queen — but a queen needs to mate before she can lay eggs. And there’s no one to mate with.

He remembered the chaos after the Short-sting queen’s death — several groups of ants each taking a few eggs and dispersing. It was possible some of those eggs had been destined to develop into males and females. If any had survived somewhere and grown to adulthood, new colony formation wasn’t impossible.

He shook his head. Too speculative, too far ahead.

Decision made: treat Blackhead like a dog. It was a blank slate right now — trainable, receptive, eager to please. The drizzly weather left him with time, and training the ant was considerably more interesting than staring at research documents.

“Blackhead — bring me the welding torch.”

“Lighter — don’t crush it.”

“Go outside and bring me that rock. That one, yes.”

“Good. Here’s your reward — scrap metal, eat up.”

“Blackhead — bite through this bone. Like that, exactly.”

“Bring me the rhino horn cup. Don’t spill it — if you spill it, no metal tonight.”

The training sessions revealed a consistent pattern. Blackhead’s command comprehension was genuinely solid for simple physical tasks — fetch, carry, break, bring here. Where it failed was precision. The rhino horn cup arrived with half the water gone and two mandible impressions pressed into the outer surface.

Force calibration was beyond it. Lifting a thirty-kilogram boulder required only maximum effort, which Blackhead understood perfectly. Holding a cup gently required graduated control, which it didn’t have the fine motor resolution to manage.

The other gap was Activity use. Blackhead’s mandibles were theoretically capable of cutting metal — from larvahood it had been shaving metal fragments off surfaces and swallowing them. But it was still doing exactly that: scraping and gnawing, consuming the resulting fragments. Not cutting — not focusing Activity through the mandibles to slice cleanly, the way the Sharp Eagle had worked with its beak.

Shen Cong had no mechanism to teach it that. Activity direction was too complex to convey through the bond.

He sat back and looked at the two of them — Blackhead moving around the container, the old-mature larva still in its third post-molt phase, both taking up increasing amounts of space inside Vajra’s already crowded cargo bay.

This is becoming a logistics problem.

The vehicle was packed. Amalgamation had consumed most of the loose material, leaving barely enough floor space for movement between the equipment racks. The kitchen and bedroom were not appropriate environments for a sixty-two-centimeter ant. And the old-mature larva — already the size of two stacked oil drums — wasn’t going to stop growing.

Should have kept the Hummer body. Could have converted it into a support vehicle. Separate habitat for Blackhead and whatever the larva becomes. Extra storage.

He filed that under lessons learned and thought forward instead.

What I actually need is another trailer section. Gives Vajra additional amalgamation material, solves the habitat problem, frees up cargo space. Main urban district might have abandoned truck bodies worth salvaging.

He added it to tomorrow’s scouting list.

The sky cleared around dusk. The rain that had hung over everything for two days finally broke, and the sunset came through in full color — a rainbow arcing across the eastern horizon over the flooded lowlands, vivid against the retreating grey.

It was genuinely beautiful.

He decided against driving Vajra down the mountain that evening. One more night on the summit, then down at first light. He’d spend the next day ranging through the urban district — looking for evolved trees with fruit, primarily. Getting his personal Activity Value level with Vajra’s was the only permanent solution to the siphon risk, and evolved fruit had proven the fastest route to physical enhancement he’d found.

Morning came clear and still.

He opened the cameras for the standard perimeter check — and stopped.

Flag Mountain had changed overnight.

Yesterday: bare rock, stripped slopes, not a trace of vegetation.

Today: dark green, edge to edge, covering the entire mountain surface. A dense carpet of something black-green had spread across every exposed rock face, including the ground around Vajra’s support legs.

What is this?

He suited up, collected a sample with a fork, pulled on plastic gloves, and examined it.

It looks like ground lichen. But something’s different about it. Can’t place what.

He pulled a piece apart. Soft, yielding — the texture of fresh wood-ear mushroom. Delicate.

He recognized the base organism. Ground lichen — 地皮菜 in Chinese — was a common and genuinely unusual life form: technically a symbiont, neither pure plant nor pure fungus. Algae performed photosynthesis and produced nutrients; fungi consumed those nutrients and simultaneously enclosed the algae completely, cutting them off from the outside world. The algae, dependent on the fungi for structural support and certain growth materials, couldn’t escape. A forced partnership that worked for both parties.

Has this mutated?

He extended his perception. The carpet of growth radiated Activity — faintly, barely detectable, but present. Only mutated organisms produced Activity radiation.

The classification question was genuinely difficult. Plant? Fungus? Symbiont? He decided it didn’t matter and filed it under mutated organism for practical purposes. He examined it carefully, took measurements, and wrote up a new entry.

Iron Lichen — a mutated lichen-type organism, classification indeterminate. Growth pattern broadly similar to standard ground lichen, but reproductive rate dramatically accelerated: covered an entire hillside in a single night. Level data: Lv0.083 / Activity Value 0.001H / Talent 0.012H. Weakest mutated organism catalogued to date.

He sat with the Iron Lichen for a while and found himself revising his assumptions about the barren zone.

Activity-driven mutation hadn’t simply destroyed the local ecology. Yes, most species had died, and the food chains that remained were fragmentary and broken. But mutation was also generating new niches, new organisms, new possibilities. The Iron Lichen was a perfect example — he wouldn’t have predicted that something this low-Level could survive in the barren zone, let alone expand across an entire mountain in one wet night. But here it was. Simpler organisms, it turned out, had survival advantages that apex predators didn’t.

And if Iron Lichen could establish itself this rapidly, then something might evolve to eat it. And something might evolve to eat that. A food chain could close around a foundation of mutated lichen just as well as around any other primary producer.

The barren zone might be dying. Or it might be rebuilding itself around entirely different principles.

He looked at the carpet of dark green covering everything in sight.

Can I eat this?

(End of Chapter 91)