Shi Huaiyang faded quickly after that. His speech became fragmented, looping back over the same grievances — unfairness, resentment, things done to him and things he’d done — until it stopped entirely, ten minutes later.

Shen Cong moved the body aside and organized what he’d learned.

His understanding of the death-eaters had sharpened considerably.

Zhao Zilong — the Holy Mother. He turned the name over, expression unreadable, then walked over to Yuan Changjiang and began the second interrogation.

Yuan Changjiang didn’t hold out long. Tears, pleading, and then everything he knew.

At the beginning, the Radiation Laboratory had been directed by a member of the Academy of Sciences. His assistant was Professor Zhao Yang — formerly of Nanjing University’s School of Life Sciences, mid-forties, vigorous, deeply committed to his research on metal radiation. C1 Mutagen had been developed under his sustained advocacy.

The development had met fierce opposition. Extracting lymph fluid and cerebrospinal fluid from human patients killed the patients immediately. The Command, concerned about civilian morale, had shut down the C1 project.

It continued anyway, quietly, under the authorization of several senior leaders who had other ideas. The support base was smaller than before, and Zhao Yang resented the constraint. His daughter Zhao Zilong had been born with leukemia. Zhao Yang had been hoping to develop a refined C1 that could cure her. When her condition worsened, he had administered the unfinished version to her out of desperation.

To secure more resources and support for perfecting C1, Zhao Yang had taken a calculated gamble: he covertly administered C1 Mutagen to several senior military leaders who came in for routine medical examinations.

These were the first death-eaters.

The gamble paid off. The enhanced leaders didn’t kill him. They accommodated him instead, giving him resources to develop a more complete version of C1.

Until the day an iron person who had lost his sister brought a nuclear warhead to Baguazhou and ended the Radiation Laboratory.

In the aftermath, the death-eaters split into two factions. Zhao Yang, unwilling to see his life’s work destroyed, began planning retaliation. The senior military leaders among the death-eaters didn’t support this — the power had corrupted them, but it hadn’t completely eliminated their judgment.

Zhao Yang outmaneuvered them. Using C1 allocation as leverage, he incited a revolt among the rank-and-file death-eaters, had the military leadership killed, and guided the Great Earth Dragon toward Jurong City.

The Eastern Theater Command moved north.

Without the moderating influence of the original military leadership, the death-eaters collapsed into factional warfare over C1 allocation and fractured into six organizations.

Zhao Yang’s daughter Zhao Zilong had watched all of this unfold. She didn’t understand what her father had become, and she couldn’t accept it. She gathered people who felt as she did and began disrupting operations — confronting rat-catching units wherever she found them, attacking them directly. Zhao Yang punished her for it. Father and daughter became enemies.

She kept going anyway. Sabotaging rat-catching operations, intervening wherever she could. The only reason the other death-eater factions hadn’t killed her was that she was the laboratory director’s daughter, and the laboratory controlled C1 production.

“Zhao Yang is the root of all of it.” Shi Huaiyang’s dying wish had been simple: that the Eastern Theater Command would work with Zhao Zilong to bring everything crashing down — ideally with the father-daughter confrontation as the centerpiece — and kill every last death-eater in the process.

Beyond C1, there were three other compounds the factions competed over, generating additional constant friction. Each organization wanted the others dead so they could absorb the resources. The alliance held only because they needed each other.

Half an hour later, the bodies of Shi Huaiyang and Yuan Changjiang were outside Great Vajra in a shallow grave.

He had what he needed. Everything verified against what the lymph-laggards had told him.

The sun was going down.

He didn’t stay in Taishan Town overnight. He took the night road north, turning onto the Changshen Expressway to put distance between himself and the death-eater zone. Individual death-eaters weren’t difficult for him — he’d handled seven of them without particular effort. But numbers mattered, and their chemical weapons were a genuine concern.

The standard core weapons — blades, spears, clubs, all made from approximately 0.5H jin cores — weren’t the issue.

The issue was the toxic material weapons. The death-eaters had inherited the Eastern Theater Command’s research infrastructure, and they’d held onto several categories of combat toxins.

The wooden water gun from the engagement was one of them. They called it a boiling-radiation gun. The name described the mechanism: the fluid inside, extracted from a venomous snake-type evolved beast, reacted rapidly with Activity in human tissue, producing a boiling, corrosive effect.

“Similar to the Venom Duke’s venom, back at the beginning.” He had a healthy respect for serpent-type toxins. The wooden delivery mechanism he found almost funny — without iron people, the death-eaters’ manufacturing had declined to this. But the weapon itself was effective.

Beyond the boiling-radiation gun: an asthma powder that burned the respiratory tract and caused lethal swelling; a numbing-boiling powder that sedated jin people and evolved beasts; and a thick centipede venom that could be formed into crude improvised bombs. Supposedly the higher-ranking death-eaters had access to still more refined toxic weapons.

“The death-eaters are genuinely problematic. Beyond the toxins — the hypervisor agent, the divine drug, and the stimulant are all things worth acquiring at some point, if the opportunity comes.” He noted the compounds without dwelling on how they were produced. Once something existed, its effectiveness was what mattered.

He wasn’t ready to engage with the death-eaters further. Not yet. The priority was getting clear safely.

He thought about what he’d done, and why he’d done it.

The lymph-laggards had given him a framework, and he’d adopted it. Their fear of the death-eaters had been genuine, their hatred absolute — and he’d walked into that first encounter with his judgment already colored. The rat-catchers had been wary partly because they assumed he was Eastern Theater Command personnel. That assumption had driven their behavior more than any generalized hostility.

“Even harmless, frightened lymph-laggards can mislead you without meaning to.” He wasn’t angry at Gao Jinyue and the others. They hadn’t manipulated him deliberately. They’d simply been traumatized people who had already made their judgments about the death-eaters — and those judgments had shaped how they told the story, without anyone intending it.

He should have been more independent.

“Being influenced by someone else’s emotions means I’m not cold enough. Not neutral enough. Not objective enough.” He felt something settle into resolution. “In this world, I have to be colder. Every person’s every word is suspect — good or evil, intentional or not, they can all lead me wrong. The only thing I can trust is my own judgment.”

“Schemes everywhere. Everyone, always, at maximum caution.”

His eyes held something fixed and certain.

The evening sky was going dark. The last color was draining from the western clouds. Great Vajra moved steadily northward, unhurried, resolute — nothing blocking its path, no one knowing when it might stop.

(End of Chapter 225)