He had left the Eastern Theater Command on March 8 and returned to it on May 18 — better than two months away.

Tancheng County, once desolate, had been built up into a military garrison and was exploring the Linyi City oasis in full swing. Progress hadn't amounted to much, unfortunately. As a large oasis, the place held a great deal of appeal for super-grade and ultimate-grade jin beasts, and along the way Shen Cong saw several that fell somewhere between super and ultimate.

Where these colossi, so rarely seen in the past, had all sprung from was anyone's guess.

Shen Cong's own guess was that the trouble still traced back to the Firestarter Spirit. When it had come climbing up out of Huangqian Reservoir, the pull it exerted on the world around it had been enormous. So the colossi within a few hundred li had all set off toward Huangqian Reservoir — only for the Firestarter Spirit to die before they arrived, carved up between Shen Cong and Yellow Great-Immortal.

And with the pull gone, these evolved beasts, having already left their original territories, hadn't been willing to turn back. They'd pressed on a certain distance further and then discovered the Linyi City oasis.

The Linyi City oasis had a fine environment, so they had simply moved into it and stayed.

Once settled, each had staked out its own sphere, and that was how the Beijing–Shanghai line had come to be cut off by evolved beasts.

Today, unluckily for them, these evolved beasts ran into a bored four-legged dragon that had fought a battle that morning and whose blood was still up. Any evolved beast on the road that offered a challenge got set upon and thrashed. The ones it could kill it killed outright; the ones it couldn't kill still got a beating.

Shen Cong didn't rein it in.

His attitude toward evolved beasts leaned neutral. He couldn't be bothered with pointless hunting, but he didn't mind them being killed either — men and beasts were different, after all. Kill one evolved beast, particularly a high-grade one, and…