He didn't have to wait long before the Super-Thunder Wave station finally connected. But he had barely said hello to the iron person on the new government's end when the link cut out again. It went on like that several times, and only after half an hour did it hold steady.

"Has the new government tallied up the losses from this great earthquake, and the changes to the surface?" Shen Cong asked first.

The man on the other end was the nuclear-grade Mechanist Hu Wei.

Hu Wei had been the Provisional Government's ultimate-grade iron person. He was the strongest it had, yet he never got the best treatment. All he got to be was a bodyguard for the top leaders, and that had probably left him quietly resentful of the bureaucrats.

From the moment he met Shen Cong, he made him his idol.

Once the Mechanist species began to take shape, Hu Wei planted his butt firmly on the Mechanists' side. He threw himself into Shen Cong's plan to use the Mechanists to keep the new government's bureaucrats in check.

Many of the Mechanist species' members, and its candidates, were iron people Hu Wei had won over himself.

Zhang Changde and Chen Xiuni were nuclear-grade Mechanists too, but their butts hadn't shifted that far. They still treated serving the new government as their first duty.

So Shen Cong deliberately backed Hu Wei.

Only Hu Wei would go along with his plan.

Of course, a man whose butt sat that crooked wasn't, at heart, of very good character. Shen Cong didn't care. For now, at least, Hu Wei worshipped him. Maybe someday ambition would take root in Hu Wei and he would turn traitor, but by then, Shen Cong figured, he should long since have broken out of Earth.

At this stage, his strength as a particle-grade Mechanist was enough to keep everything in line.

Hu Wei relayed the details. "The Great China Rift has widened sharply, with volcanoes erupting inside it and lava spilling everywhere. The Tanlu Fault Zone has formed a new rift, officially named the Great Tanlu Rift.…