With sheer fighting strength Shen Cong had swept them aside like dead wood, and then done business — and everything became simple.

Maybe next time I run into a survivor organization, as long as they aren't too strong, I could give them a beating first and trade afterward. The thought struck Shen Cong all at once, as he watched how cooperative they had become about the trade.

There was nothing in the Wuqiao camp's stores worth trading for. It was a small organization of a few thousand people, after all. They had a good range of iron fruit, but what Shen Cong needed now was metal food, not ordinary Activity food.

Nor was there any need to build a Super-Thunder Wave station here.

There were four iron people in all, none of whom had ever had Firestarter fragment irradiation, none past Beyond-One-Star Talent, let alone Beyond-Two-Star. There was no using them for one.

As for what the Wuqiao camp knew about evolution, the only part with anything to teach was the working relationship between the humans and the spirit-monkeys.

That gave Shen Cong the vague shape of an idea — not a very good one, but not a bad one either.

"Tell me in detail how things developed between you and the spirit-monkeys. If there's value in it, I'll trade you information you need in exchange," he said.

Xu Guangzhong had been at a loss for anything that might move this man, and he laid the whole history out at once.

It was simple enough in the telling. The Wuqiao oasis had been the humans' camping ground first. Then the spirit-monkeys came, and the survivors went to drive them off — only for the monkeys to produce a great quantity of jin fruit and offer it to them. Xu Guangzhong and the others thought that interesting enough to let the monkeys live in the oasis.

And so the humans and the spirit-monkeys came to be neighbors.

Before long they began to notice the spirit-monkeys imitating human behavior — making tools, stripping the hides off animals, digging ditches to drain water,…