Too many ideas. Shen Cong spent the entire first half of the night buried in experiments.

There was a long queue of them. The Cicada Song was the priority, but the Butterfly Daze Powder couldn't be tossed aside either — and he also wanted to know why the Golden Cicada itself could shrug off the Daze Powder entirely.

Above all, he wanted to learn the Cicada Song.

He worked away until midnight. New breakthroughs were few, but he now had a direction of attack, and that made every experiment meaningful — at minimum, he could eliminate a raft of confounding factors, and from there build all his hypotheses and derivations around the Cicada Song alone.

The experiments would never truly be finished. Early the next morning — March 12.

Arbor Day.

Shen Cong didn't sink back into the bottomless experimental queue. He set out instead, intending to scout the survivor organization that might exist in Laiwu City. With luck, he could trade for useful information. Building the cart behind closed doors solved nothing — sooner or later you had to lift your head and look at the world. Passing back through Yiyuan County, Shen Cong had already engineered an entirely new way of breathing.

To guard against any Butterfly Daze Powder still lingering in the county ruins.

The "entirely new way of breathing" was a face mask, packed with a layer of the activated charcoal used for water purification — experiments had confirmed that activated charcoal adsorbed Daze Powder just as well.

He packed the Hell Plant Armor's faceplate with activated charcoal, then fashioned an enormous set of nose plugs for the Four-Legged Dragon to keep the powder out.

"Remember — mouth shut, or you'll get poisoned all over again," Shen Cong instructed.

The Four-Legged Dragon's mouth was simply too big for a proper mask. Plugging the nostrils was all that could be done.

Jin beasts were sparse in the Yiyuan County ruins — presumably the Painted Fairy Butterflies had caught them all — and even now, with the Daze Powder thinning, none had moved back in. So the whole…