Taishan Town — technically Taishan Subdistrict, the "town" designation having been officially retired long ago, though the old name persisted.

The Geiger counter showed elevated radiation outside the vehicle. Inside, with the lead-composite shielding, the readings were manageable.

He sent the DJI drone up for a quick sweep. No sign of additional rat-catching units in the area. Then he held it over Baguazhou.

At the island's center: a wide, shallow circular depression. The detonation crater.

The warhead had been surface-detonated, which reduced the effective kill radius compared to an airburst, but the ground-level impact had been correspondingly brutal. Every surface of Baguazhou was scorched black rubble. Not a trace of green anywhere.

Beyond that, the scene was less dramatic than he'd imagined. Nuclear weapons killed primarily through blast wave and thermal radiation — the radioactive contamination was secondary. Blast and thermal effects were devastating on the surface and nearly irrelevant underground. And this had been a 25,000-ton warhead, not a city-buster, followed by months of weathering and several rainfall events.

He recorded the drone footage, then climbed out onto Great Vajra's roof with binoculars.

The nuclear ruins came into sharp focus. He studied them until his curiosity was satisfied.

Then the Yangtze caught his attention, and he forgot about the ruins entirely.

The river — China's mother river, one of the longest and highest-flow waterways on Earth — was running brown and turbid. The northern channel encircling Baguazhou showed visible signs of diminishing water level. Parts of it looked close to dry.

"The Yangtze is running dry?"

He found this genuinely difficult to believe. The Yellow River going dry he could accept — it had happened before historically, and its elevated channel made it vulnerable to levee failure or course changes in an extreme event. The Yellow River had changed course multiple times throughout Chinese history.

But the Yangtze was the third-longest river in the world by both length and discharge volume.

He recalled vague news from before the apocalypse — Dongting Lake, Poyang Lake, annual reports of shrinking surface area — but the main Yangtze channel had never approached…