The Provisional Government had been split apart by the trouble the rebels, the false emperor and the evil art had made for it. But a camel that starves to death is still bigger than a horse, and the Provisional Government's manpower and materials were still enormous.

The capital had once been the country's center of politics, science and education, with more than twenty million people living in it. Too many of them died in the apocalyptic storm, and hard on the storm came days of heavy rain. A great many survivors who had not yet come out of their shelters drowned in the flooding. It was a pitiful way to go.

When they counted the capital's survivors afterward, there were not quite a hundred and eighty thousand. Fewer than one in a hundred.

The disasters did not stop after that. More survivors were rescued over time, but the total kept falling, and by now — some dead, some split away — a little over two hundred thousand people were left.

Fortunately some solid fortifications, the high-security research laboratories above all, had preserved a great many research workers for the Provisional Government.

But because they had been buried so deep, they had missed the first wave of Firestarter energy, and most of those research workers had not become evolved individuals.

Among the survivors now were three academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, two of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and a large number of professors and specialists besides.

For sheer scientific strength they stood head and shoulders above every other survivor organization, and the Eastern Theater Command's laboratory could not compare… The trouble was that in Activity research, whether a man was an evolved individual mattered enormously. A man who was not one could not understand Activity, and a man who did not understand Activity could hardly do research on it.

The Eastern Theater Command's laboratory was stuck the same way.

The development of the C2 Mutagen was a great blessing. Once all those research workers were injected with C2 and became evolved individuals, their scientific strength combined with a…