The ratman sweep continued.

As a rodent species that had developed genuine higher cognition, the ratmen were alarming on two levels simultaneously: individual capability and reproductive rate. A battalion-sized force would be stationed in the area going forward, working alongside a research team to study the ratman population's ecological dynamics and document the cognitive evolution process in jin beasts.

Chuzhou City's local ecology almost certainly couldn't support a ratman population of this scale on its own. There had to be a broader food source somewhere. And the ratmen's internal caste differentiation almost certainly tracked back to that food source in some direct way. Understanding that relationship was the key to suppressing ratman evolution at the root — cutting off the conditions that allowed a new intelligent species to develop. The planet had one high-intelligence species and that was already one more than the situation called for. It absolutely could not accommodate a second.

The scenario from Rise of the Planet of the Apes — a primate species developing enough to displace human civilization — needed to be prevented rather than documented after the fact.

None of this research work involved Shen Cong, who drove out of Chuzhou City without delay.

He was heading back to the Fuchuan Mountain area, at the boundary between Juchao District and Feidong County. He wanted to study the Mechanical Vine's parent plant.

Great Vajra Totem's speed ate the distance. If he hadn't been towing the Four-Legged Dragon's trailer, he'd have pushed past two hundred kilometers per hour rather than holding at a hundred and change.

Under an hour to Miao'gang Township.

He didn't stop — drove straight across the low hills. Forty-five-degree inclines gave the tires trouble with grip, but anything below forty-five degrees was nothing. On the genuinely impassable sections, the Four-Legged Dragon served as a draft animal.

Between two peaks, a shallow valley with sparse vegetation and a lake at its center.

Near the lake, the Mechanical Vine had grown into something that bore little resemblance to what Shen Cong remembered. Using a broken electrical tower as its structural base, the vine had…