[Earth Era, September 25, 2011] [Western Calendar, Sunday] [Xia Calendar, Xinmao year, eighth month, twenty-eighth day. Auspicious for ancestral rites, grave repairs, and erecting monuments. Avoid all other undertakings.]
The absence of Zone 1 mattered greatly to the Safe Zone.
For the people of the Safe Zone, Zone 1 had always been a mysterious, unknown territory.
For years, the area enclosed by those impenetrable high walls had seemed like an untouchable black hole to ordinary citizens.
The absolute exclusion zone extending ten kilometers around it, along with the Jokers of the "Lion Cards" and "Tiger Cards," whose names people knew but whose faces they had never seen, had shrouded this center of power in an intimidating mystique.
In the minds of countless ordinary citizens, the Secretary-General of the United Government, who issued orders in public, was merely a puppet working for the true rulers behind those high walls.
Still, no one had much objection to that. After all, they did not understand what the existence of Zone 1 truly meant.
As long as they could keep living without trouble, it seemed to make little difference who sat above the clouds.
Only after Qian Wendao took power, stripping away Zone 1's privileges step by step with an iron hand, forcibly tearing off its glittering finery and returning its benefits to the people, did they suddenly realize that the walls concealed nothing more than a pack of insatiable parasites.
Yet because of Ander's presence, Zone 1's high walls had remained standing, keeping outsiders away.
Now, Ander was dead.
Zone 1 had finally met its physical demise on the map of the Safe Zone.
Qian Wendao moved quickly. The day after Ander was killed, the Soaring Group's finest construction crews entered the exclusion zone.
The towering walls were ruthlessly leveled, and