The first thing Zhu Haifeng had to do was win over the dozen-odd fire brigade members Shen Cong had been running as forced labour — they would be his first wave of supporters.

Nobody keeps their head high when they’re living under someone else’s roof. And this wasn’t the ancient world where loyalty was some sacred covenant. Once freedom was dangled in front of them, Liu Zheng’s former subordinates flipped without hesitation, pledging their support for Zhu Haifeng one by one with solemn, hand-over-heart sincerity.

Then they immediately got to work, brainstorming how to bring more people into the fold.

People are practical creatures. With Shen Cong — that terrifying force of nature — backing Zhu Haifeng from the shadows, the odds of him actually becoming captain had shot up dramatically. Jumping on board now was a far better investment than waiting until after he won. Back him early, and when he rose, they’d rise with him.

The alternative was clinging to loyalty to a dead man, getting squeezed out, and possibly ending up on Shen Cong’s bad side permanently.

The math wasn’t complicated.

Wang Yingying stood off to the side, listening to their scheming, her thoughts churning beneath a still surface.

Shen Cong had sent her as an observer — his terms framed it as a trade arrangement, but the message was clear: I’m watching. Everything runs through my interests. It was classic Shen Cong. He didn’t bother hiding the surveillance. He just told Zhu Haifeng and the fire brigade members to their faces: I have eyes here.

He’d chosen Wang Yingying specifically because he’d seen the hatred in her eyes when the fire brigade came up. That hatred had a source — what those men had done to her. The one with the scarred face. The one-eyed brute. The others.

The humiliation they’d inflicted had given her nightmares for weeks. By now the tears were long dried up, but the hatred hadn’t gone anywhere.

Shen Cong had told her plainly: those men were fire brigade too. The outfit was a mixed bag of the good, the bad, and the rotten.

That was all Wang Yingying needed to hear to be on permanent alert around them.

When Shen Cong announced his plan to put Zhu Haifeng in charge and rebuild Juchao district’s leadership structure, Wang Yingying had backed it with both hands and both feet. She’d also made one request — if those men were still in the fire brigade, she wanted them dealt with.

Shen Cong had given her a straight answer: “Once Zhu Haifeng is captain, I’ll have him run a thorough purge of the survivor population. Anyone with a history of senseless killing or rape gets a death sentence. No exceptions.”

It wasn’t moral righteousness driving that decision. It was pure pragmatism — a moral tribunal as cover for eliminating every potential threat before it could metastasize. Kill the rot, and what’s left might not all be good people, but at least they’d be manageable ones. The odds of anyone being in a position to threaten him would drop considerably.

That was the world now. Human nature needed a leash. Morality and order required force behind them — without it, they were just empty words.

Not that any of this was Shen Cong’s primary concern. He had no illusions about saving humanity. What he needed was to clean up Juchao district enough that it stopped being a liability — a stable base to stockpile resources and, more importantly, a fallback option.

Because he was going to Hefei eventually. He had to. Vajra needed a proper overhaul, and that required military-grade resources.

What waited for him on that road, he couldn’t know. But having the Fenghuang Mountain Vineyard Camp as a retreat — a real one, properly managed — was a card worth keeping. He needed hands he could trust to hold it.

Zhu Haifeng was the piece he’d placed on the board.

Wang Yingying was another.

She’d been hurt. That had scraped off the naivety and left something more practical underneath. She wouldn’t be guilt-tripped or manipulated by a sob story. Promise her justice, give her a purpose, and she’d be a reliable operator embedded in the camp while he was gone.

Wang Yingying understood what she was. She didn’t mind.

She listened as the group worked through their plans — how to build public momentum for Zhu Haifeng, how to leverage Li Weijun and Zhao Yalan’s activist streak to pull in more supporters, how to flip the neutral bloc: Chen Song, Xu Wanxian, Fu Jianguo. Even how they might get Ran Tai to switch sides.

All of it rested on a single guarantee: Shen Cong was dangerous enough to make it work.

The more she listened, the more these men struck her as calculating and small. And the more clearly she saw how far beyond them Shen Cong sat.

Strong. Ruthless. Careful. And consistent. That combination, Wang Yingying had decided, was the only kind of person who moved through the post-apocalypse with any real stability. Everyone else was just scraping by.

Boss Huang is more trustworthy than any of them, she thought.

He couldn’t make her feel warm. But she didn’t need warmth. What she needed was to know she wasn’t going to be stabbed in the back the moment it was convenient. After what had happened to her, principled coldness was infinitely more comforting than unprincipled warmth.

And underneath all of that, Wang Yingying was nursing a quiet ambition.

She wanted to earn enough of Shen Cong’s trust to go with him to Hefei. Hefei — with its provincial military garrison — was real safety. A place where someone might actually keep the monsters at bay.

Mom. Dad. My brother. They’re all in Hefei. They must be wondering about me.

She squeezed her fist. Her eyes went slightly red, though there was nothing left to cry.

She’d been married once. Her husband was gone. Her child was gone. The faculty housing block at Chaohu University had come down in the chaos.

…

What Wang Yingying didn’t know — what she had no way of knowing — was that Shen Cong had no intention of taking her to Hefei. Not her, not anyone.

The stretch of wilderness between Juchao and Hefei was orders of magnitude more dangerous than the barren zone they were sitting in now. The density of evolved beasts out there made the local ecosystem look tame by comparison. Without military fire support to punch through, civilians simply couldn’t make that crossing.

That was why Liu Zheng had set up camp at Fenghuang Mountain Vineyard instead of pushing toward Hefei. The road was cut.

After transportation collapsed, human activity had been compressed into the urban perimeter — people surviving behind whatever fortifications they could build, holding back the pressure from outside. The wild had been ceded entirely to evolved beasts.

Even Shen Cong couldn’t guarantee he’d make it to Hefei in one piece. If that Golden Python crossed his path, survival would come down to luck.

And there was another nagging suspicion he couldn’t shake — the provincial military hadn’t sent anyone out this way in a long time.

Had they written off the Juchao district survivors? Or were they simply unable to get through? If it was the latter, was it because they were tied down containing the Oasis locust swarms, or because something had claimed the roads?

No way to know.

While Zhu Haifeng and his new allies were plotting, Shen Cong pulled Zhang Youhai aside for a quiet conversation. Zhang Youhai was another piece he was positioning.

“Boss Huang, I genuinely didn’t expect to end up working under you again.” Zhang Youhai’s default sycophantic grin was firmly in place, though his face had filled out a little — less grey than before. “It really is great, though.”

Shen Cong ignored the flattery. “How’s life been in the mutual aid group? Anything notable happen lately?”

“Passable, passable. That big rainstorm hit us before we could move to higher ground — lost a few people to the flooding. But afterward, Iron Lichen sprouted up all over the place, and that’s basically kept us fed for the past few days. We’ve consolidated all the southern district survivors into one group by now. Minor friction here and there, but mostly quiet.”

“What about the peach tree?”

Zhang Youhai had been there when Shen Cong first discovered that the Man-eater Peach Tree’s Activity peaches could drive evolution. He knew the significance.

“Zhu Haifeng took us over for a look. No fruit yet, but it’s blooming now. We haven’t checked it since the rain. We’ve kept it quiet — Zhu Haifeng’s thinking is that if the Activity peaches really work for ordinary people, the leadership cadre should get priority access. Makes managing things simpler.”

“Sound reasoning,” Shen Cong said with a nod.

Zhang Youhai leaned in slightly. “Boss Huang — the grapes at Fenghuang Mountain Vineyard. Could an ordinary person eat those and evolve too?” He couldn’t quite mask the longing in his eyes when he asked.

It was a very different feeling from Shen Cong’s own complicated relationship with mutation — that mixture of desire and wariness. For ordinary people, the evolved were simply objects of envy. Shen Cong remembered it from before: as a kid watching X-Men, imagining having powers of his own. Now that those powers were real and walking around, the pull was visceral. Of course everyone wanted it.

“Unknown,” Shen Cong said, then added, just enough to keep him thinking: “Once Zhu Haifeng’s installed as captain, I’ll have him overhaul the Evolution Grape distribution. If you want a shot, you’ll get one eventually. And there are always other paths to evolution — assuming you have the strength to go looking for them.”

Zhang Youhai caught the implication immediately. “I don’t have that kind of strength, Boss Huang. Everything I have, I owe to your generosity. You say the word, and I’m there — front, back, whatever you need. Ready to die for it if that’s what it takes.”

Before the apocalypse, Zhang Youhai had spent years grinding through small-time business — the kind of life that sharpened a man’s eye for where the real power sat.

Before: power and money. After: pure, uncut capability.

In a world where social order had collapsed, everything — every bit of authority, every claim to resources — ultimately came down to who could back it up. And the strongest person in Juchao district was, without question, Shen Cong. If Shen Cong decided to plant a flag, nobody could stop him.

In Zhang Youhai’s estimation, Zhu Haifeng was a puppet — pushed onto the stage by Shen Cong, nominally the leader of the mutual aid group and soon the fire brigade. But a title was only as good as the weight behind it. Zhu Haifeng didn’t have the reputation, the raw power, or frankly the strategic mind to actually sit in that seat on his own merits.

Better to stay close to the one who actually made decisions.

Besides, Zhang Youhai had been quietly chewing on that line — “there are always other paths to evolution, assuming you have the strength to go looking for them.” There was something under the surface there.

Late that night, it hit him.

The peach tree — Boss Huang found it. Evolution — Boss Huang cracked it. With his personality, there’s no way he doesn’t have more cards up his sleeve. Which means… maybe he’s already figured out how to give people the ability to evolve.

Sleep evaporated completely. He nearly bolted out of bed to go start complimenting Shen Cong immediately.

He was overthinking it.

(End of Chapter 101)