Conventional missiles couldn’t kill them. Only nuclear weapons could.

Shen Cong tried to picture what Xuanwu and the Great Earth Dragon must have been — what tier of creature required that answer. But regardless of scale, even the most powerful evolved beast had been completely vaporized in under three seconds of nuclear thermal radiation.

With the industrial base crumbling, conventional weapons losing effectiveness, and stockpiles shrinking by the day, the remaining nuclear warheads had become humanity’s only decisive card against the most dangerous evolved beasts.

“How many usable warheads does the Eastern Theater Command still have? And they can’t be launched by rocket anymore — metal corrosion, communication failures, no targeting capability. They have to be detonated in place. Which means an iron person has to carry it in. One iron person per detonation.”

Gao Jinyue and the others didn’t know much about the warhead unit specifically.

What they knew: due to metal corrosion and the breakdown of targeting systems, rocket-launched delivery was no longer possible. Each warhead now required an iron person to transport and detonate it manually. Every detonation consumed one iron person.

The survivors had a name for these individuals: Ghost Operatives.

The reference was to the Starcraft II Terran faction — the Ghost unit, a specialist capable of calling in tactical nuclear strikes. A widely played game before the apocalypse, and the parallel was obvious enough that the name had stuck.

Ghost Operatives demanded the scarcest resource available: iron people. The warheads themselves required extensive maintenance from additional iron people and technical staff. The Command’s operational nuclear arsenal was therefore limited — the exact number was classified, and Gao Jinyue’s group were patients, not personnel; they had no access to that kind of information.

Shen Cong could estimate.

The Eastern Theater Command had started with a population of roughly 230,000. Among those: approximately 2,700 jin people, approximately 240 iron people. A ratio close to 1000:10:1 — for every thousand survivors, ten jin people and one iron person.

Those 240 iron people, by Shen Cong’s extrapolation from how New Hefei’s iron people were utilized, would need roughly 220 of their number just to handle tool maintenance, equipment repair, and basic materials processing for a population of 230,000. That left perhaps twenty iron people available for dedicated warhead maintenance.

Giving the Command generous credit for capability beyond his baseline assumptions, his estimate was a maximum of forty usable warheads.

Nowhere near a one-to-one ratio of iron person to warhead. Nuclear weapons weren’t hand grenades.

“But what about very small warheads — something like an atomic cannon?”

The thought surfaced from his reading. Cold War artifact — both the Soviet Union and the United States had developed artillery-fired nuclear rounds for tactical battlefield use, with yields potentially in the single-digit kiloton range. The Americans had deployed atomic cannons to South Korea after the Korean War as a deterrent against China. The program had been abandoned later — the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the risk profile of artillery-grade nuclear weapons, and eventually the development of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles had all contributed to phasing them out.

Whether China had ever pursued similar programs, or whether the Command had small-yield warheads that could be artillery-delivered — he didn’t know. But he couldn’t rule out that the Command maintained a stock of sub-kiloton tactical warheads for large-scale situations.

“If the Eastern Theater Command has actually relocated to Huai’an, they might genuinely be capable of taking the Hongze Lake Oasis. Finding the meteorite fragments there. Studying them.”

“The Radiation Laboratory’s scientific personnel — the researchers who weren’t part of the death-eater network — were evacuated by the opposition faction before the first detonation. The Command retained substantial research capability.”

“The death-eaters still have their own research strength too. The Radiation Laboratory was effectively working for them, and they survived in the underground shelter.”

He processed the information and made his decision quickly.

Death-eater territory was no place to operate. These were people who had discarded every constraint on what they were willing to do to other human beings. The danger was too unpredictable, too asymmetric.

His approach: establish a position near Huai’an without entering the city. Find proxies from among the Eastern Theater Command’s external personnel. Obtain research data through indirect means. Stay invisible to the Command itself.

Keep developing.

As for joining the Eastern Theater Command — he rejected that immediately. The Command was militarized command structure. He didn’t have crushing dominance at that scale. And if they classified him as an iron person and assigned him as a Ghost Operative…

He would never agree to that.

He didn’t have the nobility for self-sacrifice on behalf of humanity. His goal was his own growth. Living well. He had become a predator near the top of the food chain — he could survive in the wilderness indefinitely. Settlements were fueling stations. They couldn’t protect him; under a fair exchange principle, he had no obligation to die for them.

There was another consideration.

His rate and magnitude of physical development far exceeded what any ordinary iron person or jin person could achieve. Great Vajra’s ambient Activity absorption rate was the fastest of any known vehicle — and as Talent increased, that rate accelerated further.

In just the past few days, with the Golden Jiao Totem running a continuous field-force storm, Great Vajra had climbed from around 2.4H to approximately 2.9H. Nearly at the ceiling.

Tonight, or early tomorrow morning.

That was when the Siphon upgrade method would get its test.

If it worked — and he believed it would — his own level would climb rapidly in parallel. The Lv1 era wouldn’t be distant. They’d cross the threshold together, as planned.

Humanity’s evolution, with him at the front.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

He carried a week’s worth of food down from Great Vajra and set it beside the six disease-changed survivors. Transaction complete. Time to leave.

He was already turning back toward the vehicle when he stopped, shook his head slightly, and went back inside. He found a hand grenade, came back out, and put it in Gao Jinyue’s hands.

“Take care of yourselves.”

(End of Chapter 221)