It was eleven at night by the time he reached Xinyi City.

The Eastern Theater Command's Military Commission had already approved the tactics for the Changxing County extermination. To take the ratmen in a single net, the staff department's recommendation ran like this: first map out every one of their underground burrows, then cut a ring of trenches around the outskirts of Changxing County and seal off every possible bolt-hole.

A sizeable engineering job. But the Eastern Theater Command had by now domesticated a great many burrowing evolved beasts, and trenching a line around Changxing County was no great difficulty.

Slow work and heavy work. The ratmen still had to die.

"I'll go to Changxing County myself and get their tunnels mapped." Shen Cong signed off on the plan, and meant to lead the Vajra-Ants in person and have a look at these ratmen.

The Vajra-Ants were fine diggers in their own right. For checking burrows and bolt-holes there was nothing better.

And he wanted to see the ratmen with his own eyes. Seeing is believing. He wanted to know how they had come this far this fast. Breeding was one thing; what mattered was that they had built a social order, and that was not the work of a single morning and evening. A beast's mind does not run the way a human's does.

Yellow Great-Immortal had the intelligence of a ten-year-old child and had never once entertained a thought about founding a social order. Its whole mind was on eating, drinking, sleeping, and spice.

That was animal instinct.

Before Changxing County, though, he still had to hand the basics of long-distance communication technology over to the research staff.

The next day Nan Guohua brought him something over a hundred researchers — several iron people and better than twenty jin people among them — to be taught.

Shen Cong handed out the materials he had put in order.

On the projector behind him ran the teaching files he had prepared. On the communications technology of the old era his knowledge was thin. On the new world's Activity-wave communication he…