Zhang Youhai had been a businessman.
On May 18th, 2022, he’d been hosting clients at a restaurant called Qimen Xiang in Juchao’s city-south district when the meteor shower started. He and the crowd of onlookers who spilled into the street had barely registered what they were seeing before the emergency broadcast system kicked in — stay indoors, shelter in place. Then the wind came, and the billboards and parked cars started moving horizontally, and everyone crammed themselves back into the restaurant.
They stayed four to five days before someone suggested the wall between the restaurant and the adjacent Youhui Supermarket might give way to determined digging. It did. The combined food stocks of both establishments kept roughly thirty people alive underground for a month while the storm ran its course.
People died in that tunnel. Starvation, illness, the particular violence that emerges when survival is uncertain and space is limited.
When the storm ended and Zhang Youhai crawled out into the open, he found a city that no longer existed in any recognizable form.
What came next he described matter-of-factly, in the tone of someone who had processed the worst of it and arrived at a functional equilibrium with the memory: finding food in the ruins, meeting other survivors, encountering the first mutants and half-beasts, learning that the disaster had produced both destruction and transformation simultaneously.
The iron person he’d met — the one who’d organized city south into something functional — had been a car mechanic before the apocalypse. He drove a Hummer. He drove it through the ruins looking for half-beasts and running them off, and the people he’d saved from half-beast attacks had gathered around him by the simple logic that staying near someone who could fight was better than not. His name was Wang Gen.
Zhang Youhai’s daily life under Wang Gen’s protection: scavenging the ruins, bringing back whatever he found, handing it over as tribute in exchange for security. Driving off half-beasts. Occasionally hunting what people were calling evolved beasts — mutated animals, the same category Shen Cong had been cataloguing since the first Burrower.
Then the flood came and disrupted everything — deaths, food crisis, Wang Gen’s protection turning into protection racket as resources thinned. Mandatory fishing in Lake Chao for mutated fish that weren’t safe to handle carelessly.
Then the Dragon Slayers arrived from across the Yuxi River. Three mutants, led by someone calling himself Zhang Tianshen — a name that translated roughly to Zhang the Divine — who’d been pushed out of Juchao’s main district by the fire brigade for conduct that Zhang Youhai described with the careful understatement of someone who knew there were things worse than being hungry. They’d tested Wang Gen’s position in city south, failed to take it, and retreated to set up a toll on scavengers working the township approaches.
Then the Shadows arrived. A second mutant faction, ostensibly pursuing some grudge against the Dragon Slayers. The leader gave himself a title rather than a name — Captain — and Zhang Youhai attributed the aesthetic choices to too much exposure to Japanese animation. However ridiculous the name, the Captain was apparently effective in a fight, operating alone as the sole mutant in his group and consistently generating problems for Zhang Tianshen’s people.
“City south is running low on everything,” Zhang Youhai said, settled against the cargo wall now with the resigned calm of someone who’d decided cooperation was his best available option. “Wang Gen keeps pushing for higher tribute. That’s why we’re out here — anything useful goes back to be traded. If you pay Zhang Tianshen the scavenging tax first, he leaves you alone.”
Shen Cong absorbed the information and kept moving. “The fire brigade running the main district — what’s their connection to Hefei?”
“I don’t know much about the main district. There’s someone on the bridge who doesn’t let city-south people cross. What I’ve heard is that before the flood, the provincial military district sent people to Juchao District — they took most of the mutants and iron people back with them and left the fire brigade behind to handle order. After the flood, contact stopped.”
“And before the flood — did the military make any radio contact? Any broadcasts?”
“That would be above my level. Wang Gen might know, Zhang Tianshen’s people claimed they heard something from the direction of Nanjing, but nobody trusted the source.”
Corroborated. Shen Cong filed it.
“What are you,” Zhang Youhai asked, with the careful phrasing of someone who wanted the answer but understood there were wrong ways to ask. “Iron person? Or—”
“What weapons does Wang Gen’s group have?”
Zhang Youhai recalibrated smoothly. “Two submachine guns. Some handguns. Crossbows. And bone-gold weapons.”
“What are bone-gold weapons?”
“Made from the evolved beasts’ bone material — the parts that turned metallic. Someone figured out you could work it like metal but it cuts through things regular metal doesn’t.” He paused. “Your helmet has bone-gold on it.”
Shen Cong touched the side of the helmet without thinking about it.
Bone-gold. The same material. Different name, same discovery path — someone else had noticed that the Activity cores in mutated creatures had exceptional properties when shaped into weapons. The survivors had been working with the same materials he had, arriving at the same applications independently.
They’re ahead of where I was at this point. That’s worth knowing.
“Dragon Slayers?”
“Three mutants — Zhang Tianshen, Wu Wenjun, Wang Dong. Ten or so regular people. Some guns, some bone-gold weapons.”
“The Shadows?”
“Just the Captain as a mutant. Small group. Effective enough to keep the Dragon Slayers occupied.”
Shen Cong worked through the structure in his head.
The Yuxi River dividing Juchao District into main district and city south. The fire brigade — military-designated, Hefei-backed — controlling the main district. Wang Gen holding city south through a combination of capability and tribute extraction. The Dragon Slayers and Shadows operating in the approaches, fighting each other and taxing the scavengers who moved between areas.
Most of the population — people like Zhang Youhai — living inside this structure, working within its terms because there was no realistic alternative.
An ecosystem. Crude, recent, functional.
“Zhang Tianshen,” Shen Cong said. “Theatrical name.”
“It’s a nickname. Nobody knows his real one.”
In the stories he’d watched and read, characters with names like that tended to resolve quickly and badly. Whether that observation had any relevance to the actual world was unclear. The Captain of the Shadows was probably equally ridiculous on paper and apparently quite dangerous in practice.
The Activity changed what people are capable of. It also apparently removed some filters on what they’re willing to call themselves.
He thought about his own months of solitary, careful, paranoid preparation and decided he wasn’t going to examine that contrast too closely.
“I’ve told you everything I know,” Zhang Youhai said. The tone was polite but the meaning was clear.
“You have.” Shen Cong stood. “I’ll return you to walking distance from your team. Blindfold stays on until you hear them. You don’t know what direction we came from, what you were inside, or what I look like beyond the armor.”
“I understand completely.”
He found a cut of Tumour-Pig and a packet of medications from the medical supply — amoxicillin, cephalosporin, dexamethasone, berberine. He set them in Zhang Youhai’s bag. Fair exchange for useful intelligence.
The scavenging team had been searching for Zhang Youhai for an hour when they heard his voice.
Old Li — the leader, the gray-haired man Shen Cong had identified as the coordinator — moved fast despite his age, the group converging on the sound within a minute. They cut the bindings, pulled the blindfold, and Old Li fixed Zhang Youhai with the particular expression of someone managing worry by expressing it as irritation.
“What happened? Did another scavenging team get you? We’ve been looking—” He stopped, looking at the bag now hanging from Zhang Youhai’s back. “Is that — is that evolved beast meat?”
“Keep your voices down. Back to camp. Now.” Zhang Youhai put a hand on Old Li’s arm and moved him.
Old Li read the urgency and nodded once. The team went quiet, instinctively positioning the bag out of sight as they moved, navigating through the township’s ruins back toward their camp in the northern section of the settlement — a collection of patched tents and salvaged materials that constituted their operational base.
When they were inside and settled, the questions came from every direction at once.
Zhang Youhai waited until the noise peaked and subsided, then straightened his jacket with the particular gesture of someone about to deliver a piece of information they’d been saving.
“I met someone important today.”
He opened the bag on the ground in front of them.
A large cut of unspotted, unspoiled meat — real meat, more than they’d seen in one place since before the flood. Beside it, a sealed packet.
One of the women read the labels out loud without thinking, her voice going up at the end: “Amoxicillin, cephalosporin, dexamethasone—”
She caught herself and covered her mouth.
Old Li hadn’t looked at the meat at all. His eyes were fixed on the medications.
“These drugs.” His voice had dropped to something close to a whisper. “These are lifesaving drugs.”
(End of Chapter 39)