The old woman showed some signs of senile dementia. Her talk rambled and tangled, and she kept circling back to her old man, hoping Shen Cong would help her find him.

All Shen Cong could do was deflect. From her account, he had essentially confirmed it: the elderly jin person in the Painted Fairy Butterfly nest was her husband. And though he was no great hand at conversation, even he knew this much — for now, that news was better left untold.

On the events since the apocalypse, the old woman was muddled in many places, but a general picture could still be assembled.

The Yimeng Mountains were old revolutionary country, and it happened that right there in Yiyuan County a preserved tunnel network from those days survived. When the apocalypse storm devastated Yiyuan, the old couple hid in the tunnels and lived through it. The old man evolved into a jin person, went out hunting, and provided for the old woman — and for a number of nearby survivors besides.

Later, a group of people with vehicles came to Yiyuan County and carried all its survivors off to Culai Town.

Culai Town was a township under Tai'an City, backed against Culai Mountain. After the apocalypse, under the leadership of Mayor Chen Jiuxian, it had launched a rapid self-rescue, rallied every survivor it could find, and established the Culai Town settlement — then formed a brand-new government, the Tai'an City Self-Rescue Committee, and set about reconstruction.

The land there was rich. There were giant Fire Cloud Pines that produced amber stone — and amber stone made excellent fuel.

There were giant mushrooms too: good eating, and once you hollowed out the stalk, good housing. They smelled wonderfully fragrant.

And in the pine and mushroom forests lived a kind of gardener squirrel, whose eaten-and-buried pine nuts would actually sprout. With the gardener squirrels' help, the Fire Cloud Pines grew ever larger, sheltering the human survivors.

Their leader, Chen Jiuxian, was a middle-aged man of real boldness and drive — before the apocalypse a deputy mayor in charge of investment recruitment, after…