Sent off to rest, Yu Minxia left the meeting room in a daze, still unable to fully believe that Boss Huang and Commander Hu were one and the same man.

Yet it was, unmistakably, iron-clad fact.

The theater's senior leadership convened an emergency Standing Committee session to deliberate on rescuing the Ji-Mou-Dai region's survivors. A female soldier named Wang Hui was assigned as a guide, showing Yu Minxia around Xinyi City to help her understand how far the Eastern Theater Command had come.

Xinyi City, once a heap of ruins, had become a proper camp — built up, developed.

With the marine jin beasts' threat coming ashore, the theater's headquarters had relocated from Huai'an City to Xinyi City, and development here had only accelerated since — especially with the Liaoning dismantled and shipped in to establish an industrial base. Xinyi City could fairly be called a place transformed.

Neat, orderly streets. Grand buildings.

Everything built with an eye toward withstanding the next super-catastrophe.

On the streets, large vehicles rumbled past constantly. Ever since the Liaoning brought back several hundred iron cores, the Eastern Theater Command's iron people had, almost to a man, finished devouring raw metal, further remodeling their carrier vehicles into ever more formidable machines. And the Liaoning's own contingent — over a hundred iron people — had received Firestarter fragment irradiation.

With iron people advancing, an entire industrial base built around them had taken shape — and with industry came the room for human ingenuity to actually be put into practice.

The theater's development would only accelerate from here. Too little time had passed yet to see it fully, but as the iron people grew stronger and stronger, they would inevitably reshape humanity's entire position in this world.

At the very least, they had to hold the line through the fifteen-odd years it would take the second-generation mutants to grow up.

The first wave of jin people mutated at the apocalypse's onset were, almost without exception, low-grade — none of Beyond-One-Star Talent, and no way to raise their Talent further. The second-generation mutants, though, started at mid-grade jin…