Wuhu City on the far bank of the Yangtze showed no sign of human activity. It lay in a barren zone, and the trees were not thriving. Shen Cong made a circuit of the ruins and satisfied himself there was nothing to find.

Only a few evolved beasts without the sense to know better — no tiger in these mountains, perhaps, and they had grown used to lording it — actually attacked on sight of the Vajra Fortress and the four-legged dragon.

The largest was a super-grade jin beast, and not quite 3.5H at that. Shen Cong did not need to lift a hand. The four-legged dragon went straight at them, and after a round of butchery came back with a few jin cores in its jaws.

Nothing gained at Wuhu, so Shen Cong turned north.

He did not cross back over the river. He found what was left of the Nanjing–Wuhu Expressway instead and followed it up to Ma'anshan City. The Eastern Theater Command had swept Ma'anshan once and taken its survivors away, so there was no trace of human activity here either.

North again along the expressway, then, and he came to Nanjing City.

Nanjing had been the Eastern Theater Command's station once, and had afterwards been left to the death-eaters to avoid the contamination from the nuclear strike. When the death-eaters were wiped out Nanjing came back under the theater's rule — but by then the theater's center of gravity had already shifted north, to the Huai'an and Xuzhou country.

Then the ocean jin beasts came, great stretches of Jiangsu's rich coastal land fell, and the theater had to shift its weight again, inland into Anhui.

It set up a camp at Chuzhou City to link the two provinces, later made a settlement of it, and built a new camp in Nanjing's Jiangning District. Companies and independents poured into the Nanjing ruins in numbers, using the city as a bridgehead to work the hills and forests around it for resources.

Birds die for food; men die for wealth.

The forests of the new world were dangerous, no…