"Is Tianci and the baby okay?"

"Your wife and baby are perfectly fine. Just make sure to keep her in a good mood and avoid putting her on any hard labor."

Hearing the doctor give his final note as she came out from the other room with Tianci, Xiaoyun finally could let out a sigh of relief.

He was getting a little worried that something might have gone wrong as the two had been in the other room for a few minutes now.

"Will do, doctor. Thank you."

"No problem, Mr.Governor... Miss Tianci, as a advice for the problem you mentioned earlier, you should be safe as long as you don't overdo it."

"Okay..."

As Tianci and Xiaoyun both got up from their seat and headed out the door, they soon arrived at the hospital's parking lot.

"Finally, it's over... That thing took way longer than I had imagined." Xiaoyun murmured as he got inside the driver's seat.

"Xiaoyun, can you drive me to work? I still have an experiment coming up later." Tianci asked as her belly vanished right in front of his eyes.

"Sure."

As Xiaoyun inserted the key and started up the car, his mind suddenly got a little curious about the whole water thing.

"Tianci, what did you two talk about in the other room? What does she mean by overdoing it?"

Xiaoyun curiously asked as he drove the car out of the hospital's parking lot and into the main road.

"N-Nothing. It's just small little things."

Tianci's face blushed red as she looked away, not wanting to answer him, as the rest of the ride was taken over by the car music.

---

A few minutes of driving later...

"See you later tonight."

"See ya."

After watching Tianci go inside the building, Xiaoyun started up his car again as he began driving out of Luoping and into the administrative building in Guangzhou.

However, when he reached the halfway point, his car suddenly came to a stop.

"Hello? You serious?"

Checking the gas meter, he had more than enough to keep running. But the engine just wouldn't start, no matter how many times he turned his key.

As Xiaoyun popped the car hood open, he quickly exited the car before walking over to lift the car hood completely.

"Shit."

The moment he saw the engine, he knew exactly what was wrong. His negligence has destroyed the car's engine due to a lack of an oil change.

He couldn't even remember the last time he went to a car mechanic for an oil change, never since he had gotten this SUV for himself again.

"Fuck me. Why does it have to break down here?"

Looking around, Xiaoyun was in the middle of the road. It wasn't a highway exactly, but there wasn't much sidewalk to begin with.

It was the same road he once walked from Guangzhou to Luoping when he was saving Yuqi right at the beginning of the outbreak.

"No fucking signal either... I really need to start putting more funding into telecommunication, don't I?"

After taking his key out of the car, Xiaoyun began walking down the road all alone. He wasn't about to wait for someone to drive by.

Even though he knew that every hour a bus usually drove through this road, he just didn't want to gamble that the bus would stop for him.

"It's just a thirty-minute walk. It can't be that bad."

---

By the time Xiaoyun's phone signal came back online, he had only been walking for five minutes.

Rather than calling the police to pick him up, he continued walking down as he witnessed rows upon rows of cabins forming small neighborhoods.

They were built when he first connected Guangzhou and Luoping together, going as far back as almost a year ago, when he first started expanding outside the walls.

A sense of nostalgia hits him as he sees the demolition tape all over each of the buildings, with wild grass growing almost halfway to the cabin's window.

"It's been two years already... Time really flew by fast, hasn't it?"

As Xiaoyun took a left turn to check out one of the small neighborhoods, more memories flooded into his brain.

It was one of the first small-scale neighborhoods he and Yuqi had designed to meet the surging population after Guangzhou's liberation.

An experimental design that was first put into practice outside of Luoping, as the area where he stood was outside Luoping's wall.

Seeing each one of the buildings labeled with the demolition tape made his heart ache. Especially when he encountered the public bathhouses.

All the concrete, all the wooden logs, all the hard labor used to build all these, only to end up with the fate of demolition.

It felt wasteful in every way possible. But he himself was the one who signed the authorization for it to happen.

No one lived here. No one wanted to live here. It was really just that simple.

Everyone chose to live back in the cities where furniture and utilities are fully built—a massive reverse migration from Luoping to Guangzhou.

Housing shortage had been completely erased, a relic of the past that no longer poses a threat to the government.

Ironically, the new reality had become more houses than people. People could freely choose to live where they wanted.

They no longer needed to put their entire lifesaving and their salary into a bird nest that could barely support a family.

All they needed was a week's worth of salary to pay off a month of rent in a luxury apartment that they could only dream of before the outbreak.

"Hey, Governor! What are you doing here?"

A loud voice from behind snapped Xiaoyun out of his thoughts as he quickly turned over to the main road.

Two police men in a cop car had just pulled over to the street, their eyes looking a little curious at him.

"My car just died a few blocks down the road. Do you guys mind giving me a ride?" Xiaoyun asked as he approached the police car.

"Of course. Come on in."

---

As Xiaoyun hopped out of the police car, he was right in front of the administrative building in Guangzhou.

Before going inside, he quickly called a towing service to tow his SUV to a repair shop. With that done, he finally took his first step into the building.

After taking the elevator to the top, he was a little surprised to see Jianlin missing in her usual cubicle outside the main office.

"What took you so long today? Did something go wrong with Tianci's appointment?" Yuqi worringly asked as the door opened.

"She's perfectly fine. My car just broke down halfway to here... Anyway, I'm going to need you to drive me back home today."

Taking a seat next to her, Xiaoyun quickly flipped through the agenda for today, only to find everything had been done already.

"You aren't going to the logistics department today, then?" Yuqi curiously asked as she started to put away her pen.

"Houqin can call me if she does have something important to report... What are you working on right now?"

As Xiaoyun tried to take a little peek at her work, Yuqi immediately closed her notebook before throwing it into her drawer.

"It's just some notes... Ahem, to be honest, you didn't even need to come today. Everything had already been done."

"How about your plan with the whole city and town checkup?" Xiaoyun asked, choosing not to press her on the notebook.

"I already finished writing the legislation and sent it to Jianlin to implement it in Foshan to test it out first."

"No wonder she's not outside in the cubicle... Then there really isn't much to do for the two of us today at work?"

"Yeah..."

As the room fell into silence, Yuqi's phone suddenly got a notification as it rang for a second on the table.

"What's wrong?"

Xiaoyun curiously asked, noticing the frown appearing on her face the moment she picked up her phone.

"They caught the roadside bandits. But a police officer is currently in critical condition during the raid on the bandit's hideout."

"What! They are just a bunch of robbers with muskets... How could they possibly be hurt by them?"

"I don't know... Can you go to the police station to check? You can take my car instead."

As Yuqi threw her keychain over, Xiaoyun caught it midair before running out of the room straight to the elevator.

"How did Li Zhen pull off such a blunder?" Yuqi murmured to herself as she couldn't understand how such an accident could occur.

Unable to think of an explanation, she didn't bother digging into it as she took out her notebook from the drawer again.

But this time, she also took out a book from a different drawer. One that happened to have a title in French.

"Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body, which means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free..."