The meeting ran until deep in the night.
Casualties, battle damage, arrangements for the dead, reconstruction assignments — all of it was covered. But the most significant agenda item was the iron person.
Through Li Aiping’s account, the garrison’s senior leadership had already reached their conclusion: this man would not comply with the wartime regulations. He also had sufficient capability to make non-compliance stick.
“He showed off his speed deliberately before he left,” Commander Zhu told the assembled officers. “I watched closely. It was genuine — short of a missile strike, I don’t think we have anything that could reliably stop him. And his armor is clearly Activity-enhanced throughout; bone-gold rounds wouldn’t do significant damage even if we could land them.”
He let that settle, then continued. “You all saw the wounds on the Violent Ape King. Several penetrating injuries that didn’t come from our bolt-throwers — those were single-handed javelin throws from Hu Ge. One of them tore through the Ape King’s throat at a hundred meters. That’s better accuracy than our bolt-throwers produce.”
He looked around the room. “Little Li mentioned he twisted a forearm-thickness solid steel pipe into a spiral. We have evolved people in this room — Xu Zhong, you’re the strongest mutant we have. Fu Ran, you’re the strongest iron person. Could either of you do that?”
Xu Zhong shook his head.
Fu Ran smiled. “Commander, is it possible Little Li exaggerated? I’d believe bending it. But twisting it into a spiral — that’s not dough, it doesn’t work that way.”
Li Aiping pushed back immediately. “Deputy Commander Fu, I’m not exaggerating by a single word. He did it right in front of me — just casually, like it was nothing, that thick of a solid pipe. And you didn’t see him kill the Violent Ape King. If you had, you wouldn’t have any doubts. Honestly? My impression was that he functions at Heavyweight evolved beast level.”
“That’s an extreme claim,” said one of the uniformed mutants. “And even if it’s accurate — even if he’s a walking Heavyweight threat — he’s still a human being, and the wartime regulations apply to human beings.”
“He has the capability to refuse and the personality to match,” someone else said. “What exactly do you propose we do about that?”
“Capture him. I don’t believe one person can hold out against the entire provincial garrison.”
“These are our own people — save that energy for the evolved beasts. Anyone who can kill a Violent Ape King bare-handed is someone I respect. We need people like that.”
The debate circled without resolution.
Finally Commander Zhu cut through it. “Commander Zhao, everyone — my recommendation is this: whatever approach it takes, we get him to the camp first. Whether he goes into the Motor Battalion or operates under some independent arrangement can be worked out internally once he’s here. Right now, bringing him into the coalition means one more asset on our side. That’s the priority.”
General Zhao Weiliang, seated at the head of the table, had been quiet for most of the discussion. He turned it over for a long moment.
“The wartime regulations… the united front…” He came to a decision. “Tomorrow morning. After the dawn exercise. I’ll go to Feidong County myself and have a proper conversation with this iron person Hu Ge.”
“Sir, leaving the camp carries significant risk—”
“That will do. Is anywhere truly safe right now? The camp had a Heavyweight assault tonight. Hefei is too close to the Huoshan Oasis for anywhere here to be called safe.” He pushed back from the table. “It’s three in the morning. This meeting has gone long enough. Everyone get some rest — there’s a full day of problems waiting when the sun comes up.”
Commander Zhu walked back to his quarters with his aide — a mutant — at his shoulder.
“Sir,” the aide said quietly, “Commander Zhao not only volunteering to go himself but rushing to do it first thing tomorrow — it looks like he’s very eager to bring this iron person in. That conversation probably should have been yours to lead.”
Commander Zhu gave him a sharp look. “Don’t talk about people behind their backs.”
“I’m just observing.”
“Observe the evolved beasts instead. Keep your attention where it belongs and stay out of the camp’s internal politics. And I mean this — if I find out you’ve been building factions on the side, there will be consequences.” His voice carried the weight of someone who meant it.
“Absolutely not, sir. You have my word.”
Back in his stone room — one of the camp’s sturdier constructions, simple to the point of austerity — Commander Zhu splashed water on his face. Water resources were one of the camp’s few genuine advantages; the site had been chosen partly for that reason, with the Dongpu Reservoir to the west and the Dafangyong Reservoir to the north. Chaohu Lake to the south would have been an obvious additional source, but the evolved aquatic creatures in it made the water inaccessible. That was its own problem.
He sat at the small desk. The oil lamp cast its usual dim yellow circle. The camp’s diesel and petrol reserves had been running down for months — the industrial infrastructure that had produced those supplies no longer existed, and there was no path to resupply. They generated power sparingly now.
He glanced at the family photograph in the album on the corner of the desk. The look lasted only a moment before he closed it off and opened his notebook. Writing the day’s events — concisely, accurately — was a habit he’d maintained since before the apocalypse.
When the entry was done, he lay in the dark and thought.
The provincial garrison and the Hefei Garrison were nominally distinct structures running on substantially overlapping personnel. Most of the surviving military units were his direct subordinates. Zhao Weiliang held the title of Provincial Garrison Commander, but titles and actual authority were, in the current situation, two different things. Friction between them was inevitable — it had been present since the beginning and showed no sign of resolving.
The sharpest fault line was the relocation question.
Zhu Li’s position: stay in Hefei, consolidate, expand the survivor search across Anhui Province, rebuild from a fixed base and wait for conditions to improve. Relocating meant moving thirty thousand people through unknown territory toward an uncertain destination — the risks were incalculable.
Zhao Weiliang’s position: move northeast to Chuzhou, then link up with the Eastern Theater Command in Nanjing. A plausible strategy on its face, but Zhu Li had his own read on the underlying motivation. Zhao Weiliang was a non-evolved ordinary person, commanding a garrison where the evolved population was growing in capability and influence, in a city where his nominal subordinate commanded genuine loyalty. In Nanjing, surrounded by conventional military hierarchy, his title meant something real again. The institutional framework would reinforce his authority rather than quietly undermining it.
Today’s nuclear detonation from Nanjing’s direction would have hit him hard. It demonstrated, rather plainly, that the destination he wanted to reach was not the sanctuary he’d been treating it as. The pressure to relocate would ease, and with it some of the friction between them.
Let him go to Feidong, Zhu Li thought. Let him make his pitch to the iron person. For the sake of the thirty thousand people in this camp, we can both afford to give a little ground.
Zhao Weiliang moved fast.
Morning exercise completed, he assembled a party without delay — two iron persons, a full company of soldiers — and set out for Feidong County.
The logic was straightforward. Zhu Li was a mutant. The camp’s mutant population naturally aligned with him, looked to him, deferred to him. Iron persons, by contrast, looked outwardly unchanged — physically indistinguishable from ordinary humans, closer in appearance and manner to the non-evolved population. That proximity was the opening.
Cultivating the iron persons was not a choice for Zhao Weiliang — it was a necessity. As Provincial Garrison Commander, he commanded the title and very little else inside the Mingfa Camp. The Iron Person relationship was one of the few genuine levers available to him, and he intended to use it before Zhu Li thought to close it off.
Whatever it took.
(End of Chapter 143)