A century after the Great Collapse, all the modified beings recorded in the Classic of Mountains and Seas have escaped. The wasteland has become a free hunting ground for mutated beasts, and human life is worth less than anything else.
Drinking water that’s been filtered three times is a luxury. No one dares light a lamp at night for fear of attracting beasts. When the Regulators show up, you keep your head down, because they’ll take your food and supplies whenever they please. Ordinary people scrape by in the cracks in the wall, and few live past thirty.
The Qingrang settlement was once just another place waiting to die: crumbling walls, half a sack of moldy grain cakes, and residents who were either too old or too young. One beast tide could wipe them all out.
Then Shen Ze arrived with a survival manual based on the Classic of Mountains and Seas.
He led the settlement in dismantling a steel mill and repairing machine tools. They dug a well that reached living water, built exoskeleton armor, hauled alloy ingots back from a Level Two Station, and carried an energy core home from Yushan. The beast dens everyone else feared became Qingrang’s supply depots.
While others were still fighting over half a cake, Qingrang was eating hot meat, lighting lamps at night, and standing tall enough to tell the Regulators no.
No one knew that Shen Ze often sat staring at the manual late at night.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that the rules of this apocalypse were wrong, or that the paths he had walked and the beasts he had killed were all following some repeating pattern.
But he had no time to dig deeper.
For now, he would protect the people around him and make sure they could live like human beings.
Once the settlement was secure, he would head west, to the foot of Mount Buzhou, and ask whatever was hidden there:
[What gives you the right to raise people like livestock?]
