My Apocalypse System Arrives 10 Years Early

Chapter 500: Chapter 328: The Yellow River Roars, the Earth Pivot’s Divine Manifestation (Part 3)

The people below him were deathly silent.

Zhou Zhengyang was furious. ”It’s been this long, and we still don’t have a solid plan. What have you all been doing?”

Someone mumbled, ”It’s not that we can’t finalize one. We’ve already submitted several drafts.”

”A plan that doesn’t solve the problem? A plan that gets sent back again and again? Can you even call that a plan? At the rate of your previous proposals, by the time you finish dredging, the great flood will have come and gone years ago!”

”There might not even be a great flood,” someone muttered.

”’Might not?’ The entire world is bracing for the worst, and you’re telling me it ’might not’ happen? If the great flood does come, can *you* take responsibility for that?”

”Do you know why they call it the ’Suspended River’? It’s not suspended in the air—it’s a guillotine hanging over the heads of the three hundred million people in Huabei!”

Everyone fell silent. You could hear a pin drop in the conference room.

After a long pause, a young engineer in the corner, Cheng Mo, couldn’t help but air his grievances. ”Engineer Zhou, for the Kaifeng Xuanhe Section settlement project, we can truly only clear fifty thousand cubic meters of silt a day. That’s our absolute limit. We can’t do any more; it’s not for a lack of trying.”

”’Limit?’” Zhou Zhengyang snatched the laser pointer and jabbed it at the big screen. The cross-sectional diagram of the Kaifeng riverbed instantly magnified twentyfold. ”Do you know how much higher the bed of the Suspended River is than the city of Zhengzhou? Twenty-three meters! Do you know how thick the colloidal layer of silt is at the bottom?”

He grabbed an inspection report from the corner of the table and hurled it. ”Forty-two meters! Forty-two meters!”

The papers flew past Cheng Mo’s ear, hit the blast-proof glass, and scattered like snowflakes.

”Engineer Zhou, we’ve tried a new type of solidifying agent.” Lin Xue, a senior engineer, handed him a tablet, her finger swiping to a video of a collapsing revetment. ”But the water content of the silt is over seventy-five percent. The solidified mass can’t survive three tides...”

Seeing that Zhou Zhengyang was about to erupt again, the veteran engineer Wang Zhenguo grabbed his thermos and took a swig of cold tea. ”Old Zhou, cool your jets.”

Zhou Zhengyang said, ”Fine, we won’t talk about that. Let’s talk about the data from the experimental plot in Lankao. What is this bullshit? The survival rate for the newly transplanted reeds is less than three percent.”

The normally mild-mannered Zhou Zhengyang had been cursing a lot lately.

Just then, Zhou Zhengyang’s phone rang. He answered it, and after only a few words, his face filled with utter astonishment, which then morphed into boundless joy.

”Yes, yes, we will give our full cooperation.” Zhou Zhengyang nodded repeatedly, a grin stretching from ear to ear. ’This hot potato has finally been passed on, and of all people, it’s him.’

’It’s unbelievable.’

After hanging up the phone, Zhou Zhengyang was beaming. The others in the conference room exchanged confused glances.

Zhou Zhengyang said, ”What you couldn’t do, someone else has.”

”What?”

The entire room was stunned, every face etched with disbelief.

”Engineer Zhou, what exactly happened? How did they manage it?”

”Yeah, who could be that incredible? If they can really pull it off, I’ll bow down to them.”

”The higher-ups have ordered us to provide support and cooperate fully. However, everyone must sign a top-level non-disclosure agreement. Anyone who leaks information will face the consequences.”

Everyone: ”...”

...

「Three days later.」

Li Xiang started the project. A one-man job.

The area where he worked was strictly off-limits to unauthorized personnel. Staff from the relevant departments were positioned nearby to coordinate.

The upper reaches of the Yellow River, Longyangxia Gorge.

Li Xiang stood on a floating stone platform, a web of earth-yellow Spiritual Power spreading from the soles of his feet to the cliffs a kilometer away. A deep hum drowned out the roar of the water flowing through the gorge—the Superpower of the ”Earth Pivot World Record” enveloped the entire mountain range.

CRACK!

The steep cliff face suddenly softened like clay. Pulled by Li Xiang’s Superpower, hundreds of thousands of tons of granite became like tofu carved by an invisible chisel, a terraced, gentle slope visibly extending toward the riverbank.

An engineer surveying in the gorge, Old Zhang, stumbled backward, not even noticing when his hard hat fell off. ”This... Is this really something a human can do?”

Hukou Waterfall.

Below the mist-shrouded waterfall, Li Xiang pressed his palms together and thrust them down. Seven basalt pillars, each a hundred meters tall, erupted from the water. Their spiraling patterns glimmered with a faint blue light under the rushing current.

Through the drone’s lens, the once-vertical cascade was sliced by the pillars into dozens of arcing water curtains. Rainbows danced in the resulting spray.

An old engineer watching from the bank lit a cigarette with trembling hands and took a deep drag. This was his hometown, and he had poured his entire life’s work into taming the Yellow River. ”A weight I’ve carried for half my life... I can finally set it down...”

Three drones circled overhead, recording every moment from different angles.

For a project of such a monumental scale, reporters from CCTV were naturally on-site, filming a documentary that would be stored in the national archives and recorded in the annals of history.

This had all been done with Li Xiang’s consent.

’After all, who wouldn’t want the chance to have their name immortalized in history?’

Throughout history, anyone who made a great contribution to controlling the Yellow River was immortalized in the annals.

The Mysterious Armored Man had become famous overseas, with many foreigners claiming he was from China. At first, most people in China hadn’t believed it, including some of those involved in this very operation. They had dismissed it as baseless rumors—a smear campaign from abroad.

But now, after witnessing Li Xiang’s power, they all believed it.

However, everyone had signed non-disclosure agreements and was forbidden from speaking about it. The time for declassification had not yet arrived.

As for Li Xiang scouring the globe for resources, he only ever plundered from Alien Races—specifically, those with hostile relations. He never caused any trouble within China’s borders.

Of course, some self-righteous types felt that what Li Xiang was doing was wrong. They clamored that it was blatant robbery and morally reprehensible.

What those people didn’t know was that the Beautiful Country had been using its US Dollar hegemony to ”harvest” the world for decades. The economic collapses and even bankruptcies of many nations caused far more destruction than Li Xiang ever did. Perhaps because its financial tactics were more sophisticated, the average person couldn’t see it, but the reality of the harvest was undeniable. Li Xiang was just a bit more direct about it; the essence was the same.

Why was it acceptable for the Beautiful Country to do it, but not for Li Xiang?

Besides, the Beautiful Country could be direct too, like in the viral realist song, ”I Steal Oil for My Country.”

Furthermore, Li Xiang’s targets were always properties owned by conglomerates. In contrast, the countries ”harvested” by the Beautiful Country suffered currency devaluation, stock and real estate market collapses, rampant inflation, and even constant conflict, leaving the populace destitute. The harm to ordinary people was much greater.

Li Xiang wasn’t just looting for the sake of it; he had his own plans. In the future, during times of crisis, a portion of those resources would be given back to foreign survivors to help them overcome their hardships.

If he didn’t gather these resources during peacetime, then given the nature of many foreign countries, they were doomed to extinction anyway.

Li Xiang was no saint. He simply believed in the principle of mutual dependency—if the lips are gone, the teeth grow cold. If the global resistance forces were stronger, the pressure on his own country would lessen. When it came to fighting the Space Exotic Beasts, they were all on the same side.

Kaifeng Xuanhe Section.

Under the moonlight, deep within the riverbed’s silt, Li Xiang stood clad in his Giant Whale Saint Armor, his expression solemn and focused. An Otherworldly Vortex tore a pitch-black rift open, and under the pull of his powerful Earth Superpower, centuries of dark brown silt surged into the void.

The riverbed sank at a rate of three centimeters per minute. On the levee, the monitoring instruments’ red warning lights gradually turned green. The old river worker on the night watch, Li Dahe, suddenly dropped to his knees and wept—below him, the turbid waters of the Yellow River were losing their violent, ocher hue.

Three generations of this old river worker’s family had held this post, diligently and conscientiously, for decades. Even though the Yellow River would now be completely tamed, he would still be involved in its maintenance, which was why he had been included in the operation.

Although the Yellow River had frozen over since the Apocalypse, the ability to withstand a super-flood and the extreme weather of the next few years made this undertaking more than worthwhile.

Zhengzhou Diversion Tunnel.

On the riverbank at three in the morning, Li Xiang flicked a finger, and an eighty-meter-diameter basalt tunnel erupted from the earth like a giant python. The construction crew leader, Zhao Gang, swept his high-powered flashlight across the tunnel’s inner wall, where a naturally formed, impermeable crystalline layer scattered the light like distant stars. Startled from the shadows, two night herons took flight, dropping a freshly caught Yellow River carp from their talons. It thrashed and fell into the main river channel, splashing beside the glowing water gauge that read, ”Navigable Depth: 4.2m.”