Leaving the magma fire river, Shen Cong wasted no time. He went straight across the big oasis and headed for Wuhan.

Since the nameless scientist had come from Wuhan, there must once have been an organized group of human survivors there, which had moved somewhere else to survive under the locusts' threat.

Shen Cong meant to find that group of survivors.

Wuhan was also one of the country's centers of science and education. Optics Valley by East Lake had been home to a mass of high-tech companies, along with a great many universities and research institutes. The survivors might well include plenty of scientists who had developed plenty of high technology. It was worth looking into.

Out of Macheng, he went west by a little south.

He soon reached where Wuhan ought to be, but to his great disappointment, there was no longer any sign of a place where humans lived.

"Going by the Super-Thunder Wave Navigator against the electronic map, this should be Jianghan District—Hankou, one of Wuhan's three towns. But..." Sitting in the driver's seat, Shen Cong saw nothing but a vast white lake as far as his eyes could reach.

From the moment he entered the spot on the map where downtown Wuhan should be, he had found it all under water. At first he thought the map and the navigator were off, and what he was seeing was the Yangtze. But when the Third Eye Radar swept it, he found it wasn't the Yangtze at all. It was a lake that went on and on.

The Yangtze at Wuhan was only two or three kilometers across at its widest. Here, even the Third Eye Radar's blurry vision, a dozen-odd kilometers deep, couldn't find the far side.

"Wuhan has been drowned and become part of the Yangtze? Or a barrier lake on the Yangtze?"

A thousand li of glittering water, wisps of blue mist.

Shen Cong drove the Four-Armed Vajra into the lake, and another sweep of the Third Eye Radar showed that the water wasn't deep, only three or four meters or so.

But the bottom…