One Gatling cannon in the window was enough to clear the area. Shen Cong didn't linger — he turned Great Vajra around and left Xuzhou City.

The Great Iron Bear: not found. An unprovoked ambush from an unknown party. On balance, the reconnaissance had produced more friction than he'd planned for, but the information gathered was real. Xuzhou City had survivors. At least one of them was in excellent condition — twenty-bull fighting strength, Third Eye capability, and an attitude problem.

For context: Bao Wenhui, the Command's strongest iron person, fully transitioned through bone-gold into the Lv1 era, would probably land around twenty-bull strength at peak. Barely.

This Li Xunhuan is a jin person, not an iron person. Twenty-bull strength for a jin person — that almost certainly means he's in the Lv1 — Pure Gold Era. A 2.715H Activity core weapon implies either he hunted the source animal himself, in which case his capabilities are considerably above my initial estimate, or there's an organization behind him with serious hunting capacity. Either way, the estimate needs revising upward.

He attacked me on sight with no provocation, then talked nonsense. Should have killed him. In the fog without a blood sample, I couldn't verify the color change — whether the blood-gold transition is actually occurring in survivors here.

One more thing: if the fog fungi are accelerating flesh-gold and blood-gold transitions, and he's been living inside this fog, his evolution may be further along than a single encounter can reveal.

He was still working through the implications when he reached Bayiji Town.

Liu Yiwu hadn't left. He came toward Great Vajra the moment it emerged from the fog. "Hu Ge — what's the situation in there? Did you find any 31st Group Army remnants?"

Shen Cong shook his head. "No."

A silence from Liu Yiwu. The 31st Group Army's missing units included several iron people and two standing committee members — the commander and political commissar both. The losses, if confirmed, were severe.

"Commissar Liu — they may not be dead." The words brought Liu Yiwu's attention back sharply. "I didn't…