"After the world fell,"

"everyone was broken in some way."

"It's hard to tell anymore who's the one who's lost it—"

Shen Cong stood in the moonlight on the Nanjing Ring Expressway, head bowed, reciting to himself in a low voice. The roadway ahead had been excavated into something that could barely be called a road at all.

"—me, or everyone else."

A light wind. The temperature had dropped to a few degrees above zero. With the Half-Activated Armor over the Swiftclaw Leopard and Golden Jiao hide underlayers, he wasn't cold.

"I keep running from pursuit — the living and the dead both chasing me."

"Hunted by the scavengers still breathing."

"Haunted by the ones who died because I wasn't enough."

"So I live on the wasteland."

"Only one instinct left."

"Survive."

He finished the monologue, turned sharply, got back in the vehicle, and drove toward Heliuqu — there was another northern road, the Shansheng Line, worth trying.

Half an hour later, the Shansheng Line showed the same thing: the road had been cut.

The yellow sand that had blanketed everything after the apocalyptic storm had washed away considerably since then. What remained underneath was broken rock and rubble — nearly undrivable even for Great Vajra. Not impossible, but slow. He'd have to doze a path meter by meter, the same way he'd carved his way from Wuwei to Juchao District at the very beginning. Days of travel time spent mostly on road-clearing.

"Set up camp in Heliuqu tonight. Figure out the path forward tomorrow. And hopefully the death-eaters decide I'm not worth the trouble." He paused. "I'm in a bad mood."

He found a reasonably open area in Heliuqu and stopped.

The night's work began.

He wanted to examine the captured sharkskin and core weapons from the rat-catchers, think through some new equipment ideas, and work through a question that had been sitting at the back of his mind: how exactly did death-eater evolution work?

It seemed to fall somewhere between jin people and iron people.

Jin people evolved through forming and developing a jin core. Iron people evolved…