The fog rolled on. Shen Cong found no human remains — only the occasional trace of what might have been a skirmish, white residue on the ground where fog fungi had consumed bloodstains and left their mark.

At some point he'd drifted onto Provincial Highway 323. This was the road the Great Iron Bear had taken west toward Xuzhou.

Should I follow it?

He stood on the hood and studied the road ahead.

Yesterday he'd looked down this same stretch and turned back.

Little Four isn't with me today. No complications.

Why not go a bit further?

Xuzhou City isn't an Oasis. There may be a large Oasis somewhere to its west, which would mean the city itself is less saturated with jin beasts than I'd assumed. The insects I've been encountering out here are uniformly around 0.5H — nothing threatening. And the fog, the one genuinely unpredictable element, has been identified as fog fungi. Manageable.

He decided to push forward.

He pulled out a map and sketched a rough circuit: west along Provincial Highway 323 to the Jingfu Expressway on the city's outskirts, then south along Jingfu to the Lian-Xu Expressway, and back along Lian-Xu to Bayiji Town. A loop around the urban perimeter — a look without committing to anything deeper.

He pressed the controller and got moving.

Along the route, the range of jin beasts capable of navigating the fog freely had expanded beyond insects. Larger creatures were active now. Most were still below Near-Heavyweight class, though — killing Lightweight jin beasts held little appeal when he had no shortage of Activity cores or jin beast meat.

A feline jin beast crept silently from the side and launched itself at Shen Cong on the hood. It hadn't realized he'd spotted it long before it jumped.

He let it come, stepped aside at the last moment, closed his hand around its throat, and snapped it with a single twist. Three meters of feline jin beast, dead.

"Not bad — 1.102H Talent, already in the Lv1 era. Worth studying later." He tossed the carcass onto the roof. "Blackhead, drag…