Under Huang Caishan's direction, the Chinese Empire was being reorganized in an orderly way, and Shen Cong had wedged Bao Zhiwei in as Huang Caishan's second. He himself was off talking with Hu Wei.

"Anything big happen in the new government?"

"Nearly all of it went to you over the Super-Thunder Wave station. On the standing committee's side, the original plan was to cross Chengde and push into the Northeast for a look around. That's the Northern Theater Command's territory, and there could be large survivor organizations there. But the Chinese Empire turning up made the government change targets."

"And besides that?"

"Chen Xiuni, Zhang Changde and I killed a Firestarter Spirit over at Qingdao. We'd been sent to look over the Qingdao harbor, to see if there was any word of a carrier coming back. There wasn't a trace of one—but we turned up a Firestarter Spirit instead."

As of 2022, China had three aircraft carriers in the water.

So far only one had come back, the Liaoning.

Hu Wei went on. "Between that Firestarter Spirit and the Superbrains you gave us earlier, Chairman, we've brought along twenty-one iron people and fitted Superbrains to their battle-trucks. Chen Xiuni is evolving fastest right now. She has a good chance of being the second Mechanist after you, Chairman. I'll probably be the third."

Firestarter Spirits were powerful, and a single earthquake would send several of them crawling out at once. But their total numbers were still small, so there was a limit to how many iron people the Superbrains could remake.

And the Superbrains in animals and plants hadn't finished developing.

Growing the Mechanist species was hard going.

Still, the iron people who had chosen to evolve into Mechanists so far were all strong ones, so the species could hold its fighting power at the top end. Quality, not quantity.

"You can handle the Firestarter Spirit hunts on your own from now on. If you run into one that's hard to kill, get in touch with me," Shen Cong said to Hu Wei. "And make contact with Bao Zhiwei afterward. He's…