With every last piece of cargo squared away and the information he wanted in hand, Shen Cong set off without hesitation, driving straight north.

His thoughts on the road were, truth be told, a little tangled. He'd lived in the Eastern Theater Command's territory for a long time and taken part in the course of many major events.

To claim he felt nothing at all would be a lie.

When he'd left New Hefei back then, he had dropped off a USB drive — wasn't that itself a ripple of emotion? Whether that ripple was about leaving behind some faint mark of his passage, or just some inexplicable feeling, was hard to untangle.

"Hah. I still can't shake off humanity's weak, soft sentiments…"

Listening to some English song he couldn't name, Shen Cong rolled every window down and let the wind, laced with fine rain, blow into the cab.

The temperature inside dropped fast, and it kept his head ruthlessly clear.

Clear enough to comb carefully through everything that had happened.

Come to think of it, Shen Cong had changed a great deal. In the old days he almost never opened the windows and let the wind in. Now he did it all the time, and an open window no longer made him feel unsafe.

Strength had given him a great deal of confidence.

He still felt like everyone was out to harm him — but the tension in his chest wasn't what it used to be. He could even hunt a saltwater croc alongside the Liaoning's iron people: on guard, yes, but no longer with a fishbone lodged in his throat. Much of the time, his mindset had shifted into something else entirely.

You want to harm me. But you can't.

Of course, confidence was one thing; caution had never changed. Even if they couldn't hurt him, having people constantly scheming to was tiresome all the same. Better to simply walk away.

"So many things don't turn out the way you'd like…"

The tangled melancholy of parting only lingered on the highway for a short while. The moment he…