Finding no one at Shaoguan cast a shadow over Shen Cong's trip to Guangzhou.

The sea had grown so warm it was nearly hot water, too hot for many marine jin beasts to live in. So they had taken over large stretches of land near the coast.

Guangzhou lay in the Pearl River Delta, which ought to be marine jin beast territory too.

The Pearl River Delta's population had been staggering. A great many people must have survived the disaster and formed survivor groups. Once the marine jin beasts started coming ashore, those groups would surely have moved inland.

And Shaoguan and Wuzhou were the cities they were likeliest to move to.

In the new world, it wasn't that ruined cities made good places to settle in themselves. It was that the spots where those cities stood were, by and large, the best spots for people to live. That was why nearly all of the new government's twenty cities had been built on the ruins of old ones.

Apart from the Pearl River Delta, Lingnan was mostly mountains.

Wuzhou sat where three rivers met, and so did Shaoguan. Both were good places for people to make a home.

Of course, in the new world there was one more big factor in deciding where to settle: an oasis. An oasis was what truly drew humans and evolved individuals to live somewhere. It came first, above everything else.

"The Activity here at Shaoguan is thin. It must be in a barren zone, and that's why no settlement grew up. Still, barren zone or not, there's plenty of life around here, yet not one human footprint. That's pretty strange."

Shen Cong had a hunch, and not an altogether happy one. He drove the Four-Armed Vajra on, towing the Train Convoy.

Still heading south.

With the Train Convoy in tow he couldn't go fast, and with Firestarter Spirits to hunt every so often, progress was slow. But from Hunan into Guangdong the mountains and rivers were lovely, and the scenery along the way was well worth seeing. Signs of the great earthquakes were everywhere,…