As Xiaoyun stared at the moped picture on the paper, his mind instinctively rejected any combat operation with it.

Little to no protection from the outside elements. He could already imagine jockey mutants and hunter mutants jumping onto the exposed soldiers.

Or a tank that could throw cars or any sort of rock, which would instantly wipe out two guys on a moped in a heartbeat.

"In a typical densely populated area like Yanfu’s metropolitan area, driving a moped through dangerous skyscrapers would be a death sentence.

That point has already been tested and solved. But in smaller towns and rural countryside, an army with a moped could potentially be a game changer."

Xiaoyun nodded his head slightly, signaling Yiming to continue.

"As you know, the biggest challenge in clearing a whole administrative district is the metropolitan area and the area around it.

If the soldiers are given a moped to travel, then it could drastically reduce the travel time between the HQ and the staging area.

And the last time I talked to Houqin, she told me we have enough mopeds to arm the entire army with no problem."

"We do?" Xiaoyun questioned, his face looking genuinely surprised.

"We do. And e-bikes can do the same thing as well. We have millions of all sorts of electric vehicles in warehouses that are just doing nothing.

The most important part is, we wouldn’t need to pay a single cent on it, assuming we do everything correctly."

"Correctly as in?"

Yiming quickly flipped the charted paper back to the previous page, as it showed the detailed map with dots.

"The vehicles we can just get for free since they’re just sitting there eating dust. To power them, we have red dots, which are the solar panels we had installed on the road."

"Installing more to match the number of mopeds you want to be running would cost money, don’t they?"

"Well, these mopeds and electric vehicles are just eating dust in the warehouse. We can easily convince them to hand them over."

The more Xiaoyun thought of the idea, the more he felt something was off. Something in the idea felt sketchy.

"Here’s the best part. All of these mopeds don’t use oil. Throw in the electric cars we have, and we can completely bypass the oil burden in the army."

"Where are we getting all this electricity when we have a shortage of it?" Xiaoyun questioned.

This time, Yiming fell into silence. All of his officers sat in silence, staring back at each other as if they didn’t know what to say.

"Last time I checked with the Energy department, they told me most of the solar panels had been installed to generate electricity.

Not to mention, aren’t these blue lines drawing power from nearby settlements like Foshan, aren’t they?"

The silence made Xiaoyun more intrigued as he pressed them further.

"There’s no way these red dots are enough to power the entire army’s moped needs... I can see only a fraction of them being useful."

"That’s the intention. We are only going to be using it on a small scale."

Yiming quickly added after realizing he had jumped into a hole that Xiaoyun had dug unintentionally.

"Hm. Then I guess I don’t see any issue with it. But I’m not going to help you convince the energy department to give you solar panels."

"Commander..."

One of the officers clearly looked a little annoyed, as Xiaoyun had managed to see right through the bait they had been setting up.

"Xiaoyun, you have to help us. This can potentially revolutionize the speed at which we clear the rural countryside." Yiming argued.

"I understand your concern. But we can’t afford to divert energy to the military when there’s already a massive energy deficit.

If it takes longer to clear some part of a city district, then so be it. There’s no other way around something like this."

As all the officers looked towards him with pleading eyes, Xiaoyun remained firm as he shook his head.

"Yiming, focus your attention on tomorrow’s meeting. The upcoming mission is more important than anything else."

"Yes, sir—"

"Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you this. The meeting with Li Zhen has been changed to this afternoon instead.

I’m going to bring you and Houqin to this meeting. You don’t need to bring anything. It’s going to be about the satellite data."

Yiming didn’t say anything back, only nodding his head in silence.

---

When Xiaoyun entered the meeting room with two people behind him, he was greeted with a warm welcome by everyone.

"Good afternoon, Governor." Li Zhen immediately said out loud as he stood in the center of the whole meeting with several police officers.

"Afternoon. Have you guys started the meeting already?"

"No, we were just waiting for you. Li Zhen, you can start now." Yuqi answered as she glanced over to the two people behind him for a second.

With the three of them quickly settling down near Yuqi, Li Zhen quickly grabbed the remote to dim down the lights a little.

"Since all of you probably experienced what had happened, I’m going to give just a short recollection of what happened last Saturday.

The air raid sirens went off around 5:30 in the afternoon, and multiple police reports indicated it was a country-wide alarm across cities and towns.

After twenty minutes of work, the alarm finally came to a stop... This man, Ding Wei, is the police officer who managed to turn off the alarm.

He had worked in the police force for three months, and he had previously worked in the National Space Administration before the outbreak."

Everyone’s attention immediately shifted towards the man Li Zhen pointed at. A young man with a young face, yet a surprisingly bald head.

"You can take it from here." Li Zhen murmured as he took a seat, letting the four officers take the spotlight.

"Thank you, sir... Ahem, I have to correct something first. I actually only worked at the National Space Administration as an unpaid intern."

Ding Wei’s answer surprised everyone a little. But he quickly continued the meeting with more words.

"We first looked through the old map and registry we had in the police station, and we managed to locate the main base that connected all the alarms."

As a map projection appeared on the whiteboard, everyone could see a detailed map of Guangdong province with thousands of red dots scattered all over the place.

"All of these alarm locations in the south are connected to this building in Guangzhou. After going there, the whole place was extremely dark."

The map instantly vanishes as a new projection appears. A picture of an entrance to some sort of abandoned building, seemingly taken from a phone.

Right on the main entrance door was a bold, spray-painted word. One that had seen through the element as the paint looked faded.

"The place had been cleared by our troops long ago, which is why the word ’clear’ was written on the door if you didn’t know."

Nobody in the room looked surprised, as hundreds of thousands of abandoned buildings had the same black paint in Guangzhou.

It was just a standard military procedure used to avoid double-checking. One that traces back to when they were still a small town in Luoping.

"With the alarm still going off in the distance, we decided to ask permission from the police chief for entry.

After getting the permission, we went in with our flashlights and tried to search the place for something to turn off the alarms."

The picture soon changed again as a whole video appeared this time, waiting for someone to start it.

"This video is the body camera footage of my fellow police officer. We had sped up the footage to only include the important part."

Everyone watched as the three police officers appeared on the screen.

Two of them were currently in the room, standing next to Ding Wei, with the third police officer assumed to be the cameraman.

"Ding Wei, I don’t think this is a good idea."

The only female officer in the camera shot murmured as the police officer stood in front of the building in the camera shot.

"We can’t wait any longer. How much more do you want to sit out and hear that stupid alarm go off like this?" The senior officer argued.

In the background of the footage, everyone could hear a faint siren going off constantly in the distance.

"Got permission. Officer Li just told us we can go in." Ding Wei murmured as he turned around with his phone back into his pocket.

Before any of the officers could speak up, the senior officer in the front already pushed the door open with a flashlight in hand.

"I still don’t think this is a good idea."

The person with the bodycam murmured as Ding Wei quickly followed the senior officer’s lead without any comment.

"There’s no way anything dangerous can be here. Come on, we are in Guangzhou, not on the border at Qingyuan."

As the female officer took the courage to follow the other two’s lead, the person with the camera finally took steps forward.

"Fine."