The Gentle Sand Pears tasted good going down and felt better once they settled. A steady, whole-body warmth, and the sense of enhancement — subtle but real, not imagined — working through his system pear by pear.

One after another, through the evening, he ate ten before his body signaled it had reached capacity. The familiar edge of saturation — the point where the next piece would start spilling over into Vajra rather than absorbing cleanly into him.

He stopped and slept.

He woke and checked himself immediately.

Stronger.

That was the first and clearest sensation. By his own internal calibration — the bull-strength scale he’d built and refined over months — he’d been fractionally short of six-bull the night before, close but not across. Now he was across. The threshold had passed while he slept, the accumulated pear-Activity finishing the work quietly overnight.

He ran the numbers: Lv0.633 / Activity Value 1.002H / Talent 1.584H.

Activity Value up by 0.006H from the previous evening. Weaker per unit than the Activity Peaches had been — but far fewer side effects, and he had eight hundred of these versus the twenty-eight peaches he’d exhausted months ago. The overall arithmetic strongly favored the pears.

Activity Value past 1.0H. Six-bull strength.

He climbed to Vajra’s roof with a handful of pears for breakfast, sat facing east, and watched the sky lighten over the horizon.

A cool wind moved across his face. Something in him that had been held tense for a long time released slightly.

He’d been careful — frightened, if he was honest — for almost the entire duration of the apocalypse. Even when his raw capability had surpassed everyone he’d encountered in the southern district by a wide margin, the carefulness hadn’t eased. There was always the next threat. Always the thing he hadn’t accounted for.

Dog-Crocs, until they stopped being the ceiling. Then the Golden Python appeared.

And that was just the barren zone. The abundant zone would have its own hierarchy. The Oasis, which had repelled a military assault through locust swarms alone, would have something above that. Whatever the abundant zone produced, when the barren zone’s ecology recovered enough to make migration worthwhile, would eventually arrive here.

The Sharp Eagle and Melancholy Bird had already demonstrated that animals moved.

And animals that didn’t migrate could still mass. Fifteen Dog-Crocs in a single location — he hadn’t anticipated that. Individual apex predators forming coordinated groups. The Short-sting ant colony had nearly killed Vajra through sheer numbers. The military’s assault on the Oasis had lost half its force to locusts.

Every calculus kept arriving at the same conclusion: individual strength had limits. Groups had different limits.

He wasn’t going to become someone who trusted easily. That wasn’t changing. But the question of whether to engage with the military structure in Hefei wasn’t really optional anymore — it was just a matter of timing and positioning. He needed their manufacturing capacity for Vajra’s overhaul. He might need their organizational umbrella for the threats that were coming. And they would need whatever he represented: an iron person with a high-Activity vehicle, fabrication capability, and a functional understanding of the Activity system that no one else seemed to have developed yet.

Arrive strong enough that the relationship is negotiation, not dependency.

Activity Value 1.002H. That was the foundation. Many evolved people, even those who reached the Lv1 era, would never see numbers like that. If Vajra went into a modification bay tomorrow and sat inoperable for weeks, he could still handle most threats with his body alone.

Whoever comes for me takes on the risk of dying for it.

He picked up a steel pipe from the roof rack, closed his hand around it, and applied pressure steadily.

His fingers left indentations in the steel.

He could actually punch a Bull Demon King to death now. Barehanded. He was fairly sure of that.

Morning drill done, body cleared — Vajra’s compact bathroom handled the basics, the toilet draining to a sealed exterior port via a removable bag that he’d largely stopped bothering with, since the drainage just became organic matter returned to soil. Not fastidious about it, but he kept the interior immaculate. An organized space was a functional space, and a functional space was a survivable space. He’d believed that since before the apocalypse and nothing since had changed his mind.

Vajra’s interior layout had been designed with six years of forethought:

Eleven compartments, divided by a central corridor running the vehicle’s length. Left and right sections across four zones.

Forward zone: Compartment 1 (left) — high-value items. Compartment 2 (right) — sealed and packaged goods.

Second zone: Compartment 5 (right) — food storage. Compartment 3 (left, upper) — documentation and research files. Compartment 4 (left, lower) — bedroom.

Third zone: Compartment 6 (left) — mechanical equipment and tools. Compartment 7 (right, upper) — bathroom and washroom. Compartment 8 (right, mid) — kitchen. Compartment 9 (right, lower) — short-term food access.

Rear zone: Compartment 10 — general storage and reception area. Compartment 11 — a partitioned side room serving as habitat and, when necessary, processing space for harvested creatures.

None of the compartments ran at full capacity — ventilation ports, window positions, firing ports, and periscope housings all required clearance. His actual living space was four locations: the corridor, the bedroom, the rear compartment for research work, and the cab for driving. The corridor also held the treadmill.

Narrow. Dense. Complete.

Six years of solitary design work, and it worked.

Half a day’s driving along the Hechaohu Expressway brought him to Bantang Town — northeast of the main urban district, adjacent to Chaohu University. In terms of local geography, Juchao’s urban area had grown in a shape something like a boxing glove, the surrounding mountains and rivers defining its boundaries. Bantang Town was the wrist — the narrow connector extending from the main mass.

He established camp, ran the standard perimeter sweep, and deployed the wired drone.

From this position he could just make out Drum Mountain and roughly half the main urban district. The post-flood city showed standing water in the lower areas. No evolved beasts visible. No survivors in the urban ruins.

But at Chaohu University, directly adjacent to Bantang Town and close enough for clear footage — people.

A group of ten or so survivors had made camp on the university’s athletic field. Further from them, a second group of seven or eight was working a pond nearby, fishing. The composition read as a single community split by task: the camp group included several women, the fishing group was all men.

He watched the footage carefully and decided not to approach yet. More observation first. Then contact, if the situation warranted it.

He noted the shift in his own thinking as he watched.

At some point — he couldn’t identify exactly when — ordinary survivors had stopped registering as threats in his mental hierarchy and started registering as potential resources. Not with contempt, not with the superiority complex he’d always been wary of developing. Just as a matter of practical reality: an unaugmented person without Activity enhancement was weaker than most evolved beasts at this point, and Shen Cong’s relationship to that fact had quietly changed.

He didn’t think of himself as a new species above them.

He just knew what the gap looked like now, and planned accordingly.

(End of Chapter 94)