After civilization collapsed, humanity became beasts clad in armor and wielding deadly weapons. The old order vanished without a trace. Beneath the shell of technology and intelligence, humanity returned to an age of tearing one another apart—the human civilization of Zom Planet had regressed in a single step to something resembling tribal warfare. Now the planet was divided among tens of thousands of city-states, warlords, independent kingdoms, marauding legions, and governments-in-exile. It had taken them six thousand years to advance from the Bronze Age to the nano-age, yet only sixty years to return to this state of fragmentation. Moreover, judging by the situation, human civilization would never rise again this time.
Hao Ren discovered that the region he was in lay in the planet's northern hemisphere, one of the key areas where the Great War had first broken out. The incident in which the nanomachines went out of control had occurred only a few hundred kilometers from here. The ruins that remained there were now called the Gray River. No one knew how the nanomachine disaster had ultimately stopped, but traces of the terrifying machines could still occasionally be seen across the wilderness: when Hao Ren had driven here earlier, he had seen eroded-looking depressions and strange crystal pits scattered across the ground. Those were the nanomachine swarm's handiwork.
That was not wilderness. That was a melted city.
At the beginning of the war, humanity had still been divided into several relatively clear factions that attacked one another. The evolved had banded together into the New Human Legions, while the naturals had split into several great nations. But as the war continued, the factions repeatedly split and reorganized. Once order could no longer be maintained, everything devolved into a chaotic melee like a pile of loose sand. By now, the