Shen Cong climbed to the top of the tallest poplar and looked out over the land.

Cangzhou was not the oasis's center. Strictly speaking, this poplar wood at Cangzhou was a "false oasis," formed entirely on the radiative fluctuation leaking off the iron lion. The true center of the oasis had to be somewhere near Huanghua, east of here.

Judging by the radiation's reach, it was probably a medium or a large oasis.

In an oasis that size a Firestarter fragment is very hard to find.

Besides, Huanghua sits near the sea, and the coast belongs to the marine jin beasts. Shen Cong did not think anything in those waters could threaten him, but there was plainly no chance of a human settlement there either.

So he would rest a night at Cangzhou.

Tomorrow he would push north to Qing County in Cangzhou, and try to reach Beijing soon and find a survivor organization.

In the evening Shen Cong used the Super-Thunder Wave station to talk with the Eastern Theater Command, chiefly to ask the laboratory how the various lines of technology were coming along.

Then Liu Yiwu insisted on showing proper respect to the man who had been their number one, and had a super iron person relay what he wanted to say, by way of a work report.

Including some of the Eastern Theater Command's major decisions.

The spirit-monkeys, for one. After several days of argument the theater had settled on Shen Cong's proposal: support the spirit-monkey tribe as a vassal species. A set of policies had been drawn up to go with it.

By the theater's reckoning, extrapolating from the ratmen and the spirit-monkeys, animals evolving higher intelligence was already unavoidable. If humanity was to hold its position, some would have to be drawn in and others held down.

Those to be held down were the animals of harsher temperament. Those to be drawn in were the ones that could grow close to people. And even the ones drawn in were to be steadily talked down, these intelligent species cut down into vassals of humanity.

All technological…