Commander Ma Changsheng had taken a team out to do research. Political Commissar Zhou Zuohai had stayed behind to hold the Changsha Refuge Military Base, and most of the leadership had stayed at the base too.

That didn't get in the way of talks.

From Brother Dao, Zhou Zuohai and the others already knew that Shen Cong was very powerful, at least on Brother Dao's level. They were also eager for contact with the outside world, so they gave him a warm welcome.

Shen Cong stayed as cold as ever.

Nothing would change that.

"You're saying the survivors from Wuhan moved here?" Through all the polite official talk, Shen Cong quickly caught hold of a lead.

A senior official beside Zhou Zuohai smiled and picked up the thread. "Hello, Boss Huang. My name is Wei Xiangxian. I'm one of the survivors from the Wuhan area. Five months ago we migrated all the way here from Wuhan to escape a kind of mutant locust."

"How many of you came?"

Wei Xiangxian's voice dropped. "After a long time searching, rescuing and gathering people in Wuhan, we had about a hundred and twenty thousand survivors. More than half of them died in the locust plague, and a lot more left along the way. By the time we got to Changsha, only a little over forty thousand were left."

Zhou Zuohai added, "Our Changsha Refuge Military Base started out with only a little over fifty thousand people. Later some people moved in from the areas around us, and Brother Dao led a few search parties out into the surrounding areas, which brought us to about a hundred and seventy or eighty thousand. With the survivors from Wuhan, we have a little over two hundred and twenty thousand in all."

The disaster had been global. In the big cities, barely one in a hundred had survived. Downtown Changsha had once had more than seven million residents, and after the disaster only a little over fifty thousand were left.

The surrounding cities were much the same. Some people had survived the disaster itself, only to be…