It was already the small hours of March 14, and the nighttime Oasis still held a temperature above twenty degrees — thoroughly warm.

Shen Cong now understood the situation in the Ji-Mou-Dai region. A great upheaval had erupted here; the Bug Warriors' rise had brought too many destabilizing factors. Add in the dwindling numbers of evolved people — iron people especially — and civilization had utterly collapsed, reverting to a way of life resembling primitive society.

Without the tools of civilized society, humans relying on physique alone might not even measure up to monkeys. Life was hard.

He thought for a moment, weighed the value of the information, and made his exchange. "In the two provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui, the Eastern Theater Command has already opened up most of the territory, making it a new homeland for humanity. Head south along the Beijing–Shanghai Expressway, cross the desolate barren zone, pass through the Linyi City Oasis…"

"Oasis?"

"An Oasis is what you call a source of spiritual essence. It's actually a place where a fragment of some meteor from the time of the apocalypse — a Firestarter fragment — remains, releasing a special energy that catalyzes metal to produce Activity. That's your so-called spiritual essence." This kind of surface-level knowledge, Shen Cong wasn't stingy with.

He went on. "A Firestarter fragment's radiation range is limited, distributed in a decreasing gradient — Oasis, abundant zone, barren zone. The Linyi City Oasis was once presided over by the ultimate-grade iron beast, the Great Iron Bear; now it probably holds only some super-grade jin beasts… Continue south from Linyi, and Xinyi City is the Eastern Theater Command's headquarters."

"The Eastern Theater Command is very strong. Iron people like you number in the hundreds — and iron people stronger than you, there are maybe twenty or thirty."

Evolved people, evolved beasts, evolved trees, jin fungi — every category, Shen Cong ran through once.

These things weren't important information, just human-summarized content, the equivalent of academic terminology; no real value, only convenient for communication.

Yet to this band of the Pest-Killer Squad, it made for…