What did heavenly soldiers descending look like?
Probably like gleaming silver blade vehicles driving all this way for your sake.
This was a far suburb—almost beyond S City’s administrative boundaries, nearly bordering the neighboring province.
They’d studied the map painstakingly to find the way, must have taken wrong turns, and had to back the entire convoy up at some point.
To arrive before noon, they must have set out at dawn.
They rumbled into position, surrounding the village.
At first, the thugs were still asking: “Who are you people? What are you doing here?”
But when the young woman who frequently appeared on TV stepped out of the vehicle, the thugs understood.
Other people’s TVs had been cut, but the thugs’ own homes still had working televisions. They’d watched almost every live broadcast.
They were extremely grateful for how clever they’d been—cutting off the village’s means of receiving and sending information from the very beginning.
But the auntie who cooked for them came and went, and she could see everything.
The auntie told others when she came back. Entrusted by everyone, she’d risked stealing a phone during their mealtime and sent that message.
Everyone thought they’d have to wait, eyes strained with longing.
Who knew—the very next day, a massive convoy of silver blade vehicles came rumbling in!
The village bullies knew perfectly well what these people had come for. Just two days ago, this woman had executed a principal.
What that principal had done wasn’t much different from what they’d done.
People like that would never surrender quietly.
What was interesting about these people was that they all wanted to strike first—to decapitate the leadership and attack Jiang Cheng directly.
Jiang Cheng’s face was simply too recognizable—everyone knew her, everyone knew she was the soul of the operation.
But this battle didn’t even need to happen.
Several purple electric currents simultaneously pierced the air. The bullies’ fireballs, weapons, and electric currents had only just formed when they were directly shorted out.
Every one of them collapsed to the ground, convulsing.
The current vanished. Gao Yuxuan blew on his ten fingertips.
There really weren’t many actual bullies—only six. Plus seven followers, lackeys who’d joined for the spoils.
The bullies with superpowers were dragged up like dead dogs. The lackeys trembled with fear.
They wanted to sneak away, but the villagers—who’d suffered so much at their hands—weren’t about to let them escape. They rushed forward and pinned them down!
One struggled desperately: “You—you people from that new district—what right do you have to interfere with us! We don’t answer to you!”
Jiang Cheng ignored him and announced directly to the villagers: “I am the representative of the Tech District and Guangxiu District Provisional Governments. These seven are representatives of the other seven urban district provisional governments.”
“This is joint law enforcement by all eight urban districts of S City.”
“You may now testify about what you have suffered.”
After receiving the message and confirming the location, Jiang Cheng had contacted the other seven urban district provisional governments and proposed joint law enforcement.
All seven districts gladly agreed to come.
No single district should become too powerful on its own. The Tech District was indeed the strongest in terms of capability, but before public authority, everyone should be on equal footing.
Zheng Junwei especially admired Jiang Cheng for initiating joint law enforcement.
She hadn’t clutched power to herself—instead, she’d acknowledged all districts’ enforcement authority.
This created mutual deterrence—if any district’s leader dared to commit crimes, all the other provisional governments had enforcement authority.
The purpose of deterrence was never use—it was prevention.
The moment Jiang Cheng finished speaking, a massive wail erupted from the crowd.
Not one or two people—many, many people.
The details of the terrorizing and abuse didn’t need to be recounted. The villagers led the enforcement team to see the zombie pit.
In a pit nearly three meters deep, a pile of zombies was kept, covered with a grid of iron bars.
An old man wept, pointing at one: “That’s my son!”
Young people who’d resisted the bullies had been thrown into the zombies.
Over twenty women had been violated, ranging from eighteen or nineteen to their thirties.
The perpetrators included the six bullies and all their lackeys—thirteen people in total.
The nature of the crimes was extremely severe.
All eight district representatives unanimously agreed on the death penalty.
The villagers asked: “Can we carry out the execution ourselves?”
Their hatred ran too deep.
Everyone agreed.
The thirteen were beaten to death by the villagers with hoes and shovels.
Zhang Lesi had come along as the doctor—sure enough, some villagers needed medical treatment. Jiang Cheng had thought it through thoroughly.
Zhang Lesi asked the villagers: “Why didn’t you run away?”
This place was rural—zombie density was far lower than in the city.
Sister Pan sighed: “You city girls don’t understand.”
Sure enough, the villagers told Zhang Lesi: “How could we run? If one family runs, it drags down several other families.”
Many people in the village were related. If your family ran, your uncle’s family, your second uncle’s family, your third aunt’s family would all suffer the consequences.
Even if an entire clan ran, the neighbors would suffer.
In fact, even the bullies were related to many families. But even relatives weren’t spared from their cruelty.
Su Yu murmured: “How can people be this evil? How can people be this evil?”
Sister Pan said: “That’s how rural areas are. You young girls must never go to the countryside—go to the big cities. Big cities are much better. They’re more tolerant.”
After the execution, the villagers asked Jiang Cheng: “What do we do now?”
Jiang Cheng said: “You’re too far from us—that distance is hard to manage. It’s best if you govern yourselves. Elect a village committee.”
One advantage rural areas had over cities was that they didn’t worry about food sources.
Jiang Cheng had one particularly important matter: “Do you have wheat or rice seeds?”
The villagers said: “We have wheat. We can’t grow rice here—that needs the south. But we do have dryland rice. Do you want it?”
Jiang Cheng was overjoyed: “Yes! We want all of it!”
A problem that had plagued the Tech District for a long time was finally solved—the source of staple grains.
In the city, they’d only found sweet potatoes, potatoes, and corn—things that barely counted as staples. But the true staples, rice and flour—from rice plants and wheat—those seeds were impossible to find.
The villagers went home and brought out plenty for the enforcement team: “Is this enough? There’s more if you need it!”
Sister Pan knew farming and inspected it: “Enough, enough.”
The eight districts divided the seeds and headed back to the city.
The vehicles drove far away. Looking back, the villagers were still gathered at the village entrance, waving and wiping their tears.
Su Yu sighed: “People are worse than zombies.”
—
After leaving the suburbs and reaching the fork where they’d enter the city, since everyone was heading in different directions, they stopped the vehicles to say goodbye.
When Zheng Junwei shook Jiang Cheng’s hand, he said: “Jiang Cheng, the matter of establishing a city-level government should be put on the agenda.”
Jiang Cheng nodded: “Alright.”
On the way back, Zhao Yi asked quietly: “Are we going to establish a city-level government?”
But Jiang Cheng said: “Let’s wait and see. Right now, what I’m considering first is residents returning to their homes.”
The Tech District had taken in too many residents. The burden of food consumption was extremely heavy.
Now that the city environment was gradually becoming safer, Jiang Cheng was considering sending residents back to their own homes.
If each district dispersed and shared the burden, the Tech District’s pressure would be much lighter.
But that was only one reason. Whenever the topic of “establishing a city-level government” came up, Jiang Cheng always had a strange feeling.
Was that it?
It seemed like she’d won again.
This trial of hers seemed… too simple?
The first time, she’d treated zombies as the greatest enemy.
But this time, as she savored it more and more, she began to feel that zombies might just be a prop.
The real difficulty lay with “people.”
She had decisively changed course—not to spare no effort in eliminating zombies, but to do everything she could to solve the problems “people” faced.
If this counted as winning, it still felt a bit too easy.
To be fair, Jiang Cheng’s feeling was correct.
How could it be that simple?
And people really were prone to blind spots right under their noses.
Every day, she thought about solving various problems and doing great things—yet she’d overlooked the most basic things.
It was also because, although they called themselves a “government” and did some things a government should do, they ultimately weren’t a real government—they lacked experience.
Someone called Yang Xinyan and got through to Jiang Cheng—
“Is this Jiang Cheng? We’re the water treatment plant. We can’t hold on much longer.”
Jiang Cheng, someone whose mind usually spun so quickly, felt her brain stall for several seconds after hearing this—buzzing!
The water treatment plant!
How could she have forgotten something so fundamental?
It was probably inertia.
Because during the first zombie crisis, after Mayor Zheng established leadership, he immediately sent people to secure water, electricity, gas, communications, and other basic livelihood needs.
As a public official, he naturally had access to vast information and resources he could mobilize—like the Eastern Military Region’s forces and massive supply lines.
His management was top-down.
But Jiang Cheng was different. Jiang Cheng first had to face survival—she had to leave her home and fight zombies.
First fight in the courtyard, then in the building, then find food, confirm she could survive, and only then think about anything else.
Hers was bottom-up.
Bottom-up meant surviving first—no information, no resources, everything on her own.
In the early days of the second zombie outbreak, she’d lived under extreme pressure every day. Every day was either rescuing people or on the way to rescue people.
Because the early days of an outbreak were the busiest time for rescue.
Every day, she was busy from the moment she opened her eyes to the moment she closed them.
By the time everything was sorted out in the mid-to-late stage, she was already supporting over a thousand refugees.
By that stage, not just Jiang Cheng, but everyone—including the Tech District’s residents and refugees, including everyone in the other provisional governments—had all overlooked the basic livelihood issues, blind to what was right in front of them.
Because last time, Mayor Zheng had secured the basics so well—water, electricity, and gas had never been cut off. That feeling carried over to this time, as if everyone assumed that running water, electricity, and gas were simply a given.
Ordinary people were, after all, just ordinary people—it was hard for them to imagine how much effort the government had put in behind that “smooth operation.”
And that real government was gone.
Jiang Cheng, in the end, was only an imitator.
Leave a Reply