After dinner, Shen Cong settled into the cab with his laptop. The vehicle radio had been running continuously, set to record.

No signal. Not since that fragmented Eastern Theater Command broadcast — a few broken sentences, then silence. The radio had returned to its familiar texture of meaningless static.

Tonight was the same. He read through several dozen pages of radiation-related research material. The radio gave him nothing. He washed up and went to sleep.

The next morning, he drove into Pukou District slowly.

He had reason to be careful. The camp's scouting team had attempted this route once before and nearly been wiped out — nuclear fallout dust and mutated toads, encountered before they even reached the district proper. The fallout might have dispersed by now — enough time had passed, and the rain a few weeks back would have helped — but evolved beasts didn't necessarily go anywhere.

He crawled forward at low speed, and when he reached the area around Longfu Mountain Tea Farm, he sent the drone up for a proper look. One hundred and fifty meters, stable transmission, several minutes of footage covering most of the district.

Pukou was completely abandoned. No signs of human activity. No survivor settlements, no evidence anyone had been living here. No large evolved beasts visible either. Just a profound stillness — quieter than Juchao District had been, quieter than almost anywhere he'd passed through. More like his hometown of Wuwei than anything else.

Rubble. More rubble. Nothing else.

Great Vajra moved into the district proper. The roads were nearly impassable — no human maintenance for months, the surface buried under debris and broken stone. The two-meter tires and sixty-centimeter width kept the vehicle from sinking in, but he was grinding through at an awkward lean, picking his way over obstacles. He'd switched from diesel to electric for this — quieter, and the lower power output was enough for this kind of crawling progress.

Occasional building remnants were still standing — a few meters of reinforced concrete, a load-bearing wall still upright, half a floor slab hanging at an angle.