Camouflage color came on, and the Hell Plant Armor over Shen Cong faded at once toward transparent. Patchy, gray in one place and white in another — but sunk into the treeline it took a careful eye to find him.

On the strength of a camouflage color he had still not finished developing, Shen Cong walked straight up to within a short distance of the ratman city's moat. His Third Eye ran to six hundred meters of clear sight now, which let him observe well beyond visual range.

A ratman's limbs are built for digging, and the moat was going forward at a rate the eye could follow.

The ratman city stood roughly where Mount Fulong and Mount Zhang rose out of the ruins of Changxing county town — four kilometers of high wall running around them, ten meters tall and ten meters thick. It took both low hills neatly inside the city, and there were tall buildings up on them, and watchtowers.

Shen Cong's Third Eye carried as far as twelve hundred meters at blurred resolution. A little closer to the moat, and he could make out the layout within the walls.

Rat-beasts, rat generals, rat soldiers and rat slaves, thronging back and forth — for all the world an Orc settlement. Shen Cong had played Warcraft. He had liked playing Undead, and he had liked tormenting the Orcs. It had never occurred to him that a Warcraft story would happen in earnest, and the further the ratmen came, the more of the Orc there was in them.

The rat officers most of all: few in number, mounted on evolved beasts of every strange description, whips in hand, and any rat slave or rat soldier caught slacking got several strokes of it. Absolute authority.

"The ratmen have all but become a higher intelligence," Shen Cong said, watching the city, his mind turning it over. "Rats aren't the cleverest animals going, and their intelligence has come this far. So what about the animals that are cleverer than rats? Do they develop high intelligence too?"

The science had it that orcas…