Shen Cong, in a moment of mild villainy, made Blackhead eat Iron Lichen.

Blackhead was visibly unenthusiastic about this. It ate anyway.

No toxic reaction. No distress beyond the initial reluctance. The Iron Lichen was safe.

Satisfied, Shen Cong stir-fried a portion for himself — light seasoning, quick heat — and tasted it carefully.

“Not bad at all. Fresh, crisp, clean flavor. Shame there are no eggs — Iron Lichen with eggs would be excellent.”

He ate a full meal of it without hesitation. Then took a bag outside and collected a large harvest from the carpet covering the mountainside. Ground lichen didn’t keep long, but two or three days was manageable.

The sun had returned and temperatures were climbing back above thirty degrees quickly. The mountain surface dried out fast. Shen Cong set up the wired drone for another test.

More problems. Manual structural modification at this scale was inherently imprecise — close enough in the broad strokes, wrong by a fraction in the details, and fractions compounded into failure. This was relatively simple large-scale work; he didn’t dare touch the high-precision electronics at all. His control over Amalgamation had the same limitation Blackhead had with gentle grip — the resolution wasn’t there yet. Intent and result didn’t match finely enough.

Keep adjusting.

He spent the entire day on it. Seventh attempt, late afternoon — the wired drone climbed steadily, leveled off, and held position at ninety-five meters. Cable limit reached.

Combined with Flag Mountain’s elevation, the effective altitude was over 260 meters above sea level.

The image feed came through clean and sharp on the laptop screen.

He suppressed the excitement and got to work — rotating the drone methodically, zooming into surface features, documenting everything. Four minutes before the battery gave out and the drone began its return.

He spent the next hour studying the footage frame by frame.

Flag Mountain as center point, roughly ten kilometers in every direction. Northwest: the ruins of the Chaohu Cement Factory school — Wang Gen had mentioned the fire brigade was based there. No visible activity in the footage, no sign of the iron person fire chief Liu Zheng or his fire truck. Either they’d moved or were keeping quiet. Southeast: Sanhe Village, still visible. North: the ruins of Chaohu University. East: Jian Mountain, Laohu Mountain, Fang Mountain.

He kept returning to the eastern footage.

Jian Mountain had color. Not the bare grey of everything else — a grey-green tint, similar to what Flag Mountain looked like now under its Iron Lichen carpet. He could make out scattered large trees among it. Species unclear at this resolution.

Worth investigating. If any of those are fruiting trees, this stop pays for itself.

He plotted the route mentally. County Road 016 to Lintou Town, branch onto County Road 022, approach from the south. Lintou Town ruins might yield useful salvage along the way.

Priority sequence: search the Juchao area for fruiting evolved trees, strengthen the body, then Hefei. Get to the military district at full capability, not at current capability.

Clang.

The next morning, Shen Cong quietly disconnected the Bull Demon King Totem.

Vajra had reached Lv0.777 / Activity Value 1.231H / Talent 1.584H. His own readings: Lv0.629 / Activity Value 0.996H / Talent 1.584H — nearly six-bull strength, the threshold almost within reach.

But Vajra had run out of amalgamation material. Everything on board that could be absorbed had been absorbed. Without fresh input, the Totem was generating Activity that had nowhere to go.

Totem dismantled, stowed. Time to move.

The road to Lintou Town was slow going — debris from the flooding, rocks that needed clearing before Vajra could pass. They arrived at two in the afternoon.

He suited up in the Super Baogai Armor and swept the town.

Lintou sat at the confluence of the Cao River and Yuxi River — low-lying ground that had caught the floodwater’s full force. The debris accumulation was extraordinary: furniture, metal frames, machinery components, all deposited by the receding water in tangled drifts throughout the town’s streets.

The metal frames were the prize. The heavily corroded ones went to Blackhead and the old-mature larva as feed. Anything structurally intact, Shen Cong cut into sections and loaded for Vajra’s future amalgamation.

Then, in what felt like genuine luck: several electric vehicle dealerships, side by side, ruins mostly intact. He dug through the collapsed storefronts and found a cache of rusted but workable bikes and trikes — two-wheelers and three-wheelers both.

He picked through carefully, identified four three-wheelers in reasonable structural condition, stripped their front sections, and welded the four cargo beds together. Steel pipe framing across the top, cross-braced for load. Result: a flat-bed trailer, crude but functional.

He worked until nightfall, Vajra’s rear lights illuminating the assembly area in a warm orange pool.

Once the trailer was hitched, he transferred everything non-essential from Vajra’s cargo bay — the Dog-Croc skeletal remains, the bulk scrap metal stock — out to the flat-bed. The vehicle’s interior opened up considerably.

He looked at the rear compartment where Blackhead and the old-mature larva lived.

Should I move them out to the trailer?

He thought about it and decided against it. He didn’t worry about the ants the way he worried about people — their intelligence was bounded, their bond with him was stable, and he didn’t seriously think they’d turn on him without warning. But without warning was the operative phrase. He kept them in the locked rear compartment and left it at that.

Next morning, Vajra rolled to the base of Jian Mountain and stopped at a small settlement called Taoyuan Village. He deployed the wired drone again — lower starting elevation this time, smaller survey radius, but enough to capture the full mountain surface.

The trees on the shaded north face weren’t poplars. Weren’t the metal-barked willows he’d seen elsewhere. The forms were different — rounder canopies, different branching structure, the specific silhouette of trees that bore fruit rather than just leaves.

Species unclear. But the shape was promising.

He suited up — Super Baogai Armor, rhino horn javelin in hand, Dog-Croc Warhammer at his side — and started climbing.

The mountain surface was thoroughly carpeted in Iron Lichen. Jian Mountain had been a mining site before the apocalypse; the ruins of the mining company’s facilities at the base were now buried completely under flood silt and debris.

Twenty minutes of climbing brought him to the first candidate site. Three trees, jujube type by the branching pattern. No fruit.

He photographed them and moved on.

Second site: more jujube-type trees.

Please don’t let this entire mountain be jujubes.

He crossed to the sun-facing slope, reached the third marked location. Also jujube. The bark showed metallic gradation, the leaves were small and dense and hard — not edible-looking. He cut a branch sample: high hardness, good for a walking staff, useless for anything else.

Check the shaded face before leaving.

He crossed the ridge.

The north-facing slope opened up in front of him, and he stopped.

Not jujubes. A whole stand of them — different species entirely.

Through the binoculars: fruit hanging from the branches. Dark yellow, oval, speckled across the surface with small black dots.

Sand pears. The kind grown in rural orchards, rough-skinned and dense-fleshed.

(End of Chapter 92)