"Reporting to the Commander, we have broken through the American lines. The US forces are in retreat, and our troops are encircling the British." The signalman tried to suppress his excitement as he reported the latest news to Hu Xiushan.

Even the normally cool-headed Hu Xiushan looked up in astonishment. The frontline units deployed for this offensive were the 11th, 12th, and 13th Armies of the World People's Liberation Army (WPLA). From a combat effectiveness standpoint, Hu Xiushan had felt they were capable of contending with the Americans, but he hadn't expected these three armies to actually shatter the American defenses.

After thinking for a moment, Hu Xiushan stood up. His orderly noticed that his eyes had widened slightly. Hu Xiushan ordered: "Head for the front lines now."

The battlefield was located in the Canadian plains. The vast expanse was a mess, littered everywhere with destroyed equipment from both sides. Along the designated corridors, large numbers of troops were racing eastward in vehicles. Conversely, there were few pursuing units on the road where the Americans had retreated.

The Americans were, after all, the Americans; their combat effectiveness was not poor. They were capable of turning back for a counter-strike or planting mines on the road. A road that looked ripe for pursuit was not necessarily advisable.

The jeep carrying Hu Xiushan stopped on a road that had already been cleared of mines. Canada did not lack forests, and both sides of this road were lined with trees. Tied to almost every tree on both sides of the road was a killed Black man—judging by the uniforms, they were American soldiers.

The executioners had not hidden their views; written in English either on the trees or on the bodies themselves was the word "TRAITOR."

Just then, a truckload of Black infantrymen passed by. Seeing the scene of such a brutal massacre, the Black soldiers in the truck immediately became agitated.

Hu Xiushan had heard that these African Black soldiers could communicate in simple Chinese, but when they were emotional, they would still curse in their native tongues. Presumably, the unintelligible words were the local dialects of the Black soldiers' homelands.

"Bury them," Hu Xiushan ordered. As a soldier, he did not like this kind of propaganda. It wasn't that he didn't want his troops to have a fighting impulse, but excessive excitement could affect the cold-headedness required for combat.

The jeep continued forward, and more of the war's horrors unfolded before Hu Xiushan. The place where Black American officers and men had been executed was not the only one; large-scale execution sites appeared in several locations.

From the layout of these sites and the general condition of the Black corpses, these massacres had all occurred before the battle. That is to say, before being defeated by the three Black WPLA armies, the US military had already conducted large-scale killings of Black people within its own ranks, only to be completely defeated in the subsequent combat.

Hu Xiushan tried to find the connections here but found that they weren't necessarily absolute. There were many reasons for the American collapse. For instance, under high-intensity attrition, the quality of US Air Force pilots had declined rapidly. Originally, the cost of Chinese Air Force bombing of the American interior was very high; now, they were able to bomb targets over 600 kilometers behind the ground front lines.

Furthermore, the elite units of the US Army were also exhausted—for example, the 1st Marine Division and the 1st Cavalry Division had each been rebuilt twice, committed twice to the most intense combat, and completely drained. In the latest fighting, the combat effectiveness shown by the 1st Marine Division was as weak as a toddler compared to when they first fought the Chinese army.

But these factors had existed before, and previously the Americans had still been able to continue fighting. Even with high casualties, they hadn't shown such a poor performance. It was only after the units with a Black proportion of around 70% became the main force of the offensive that all of the US military's internal contradictions exploded. Hu Xiushan was forced to conclude that perhaps political factors truly could play a massive role, much like the "Four Sides Song" that signaled the end for Xiang Yu.

But since the situation had reached this point, Hu Xiushan had no intention of letting the opportunity pass. With the Americans in retreat, the position of the British became prominent. Li Runshi, who had ordered the Black army to North America, had decreed that the primary target for strikes should be the British. Hu Xiushan naturally executed this order resolutely.

Soon, Churchill received news that two British armies were surrounded. In the report, the British cursed the Americans as "shit-eating bastards." In the front-line distribution, the British were to the north and the Americans to the south. When the Americans fled, they ran directly south, able to hide within US territory once they crossed the border. The British couldn't flee south and were surrounded by the surging Chinese army.

Churchill was furious but had no choice but to request that the US government dispatch American troops to save the British. The American reply was lukewarm: "The US military is constructing a defensive line at the border to prepare for the subsequent Chinese invasion. Once the defensive line is complete, we will counter-attack."

Hearing this response, the flesh on Churchill's face trembled. If China were going to invade US territory, they would have done so long ago—why wait until now? Even if the US government was making up lies, they could at least show some sincerity!

However, the worst news didn't come in the following days. The 500,000 surrounded British troops contracted their lines urgently, and their temporary defensive positions actually held against the Chinese attacks. Churchill began to feel a glimmer of hope; if the British troops in northern Canada could reinforce them in time, the surrounded forces might be able to break out and escape.

At this time, Hu Xiushan was outside the encirclement, carefully observing the combat effectiveness of the Black troops. The American collapse under these Black units' offensive had forced Hu Xiushan to re-evaluate the Black army. Therefore, he had assigned them the task of attacking the surrounded British.

From a combat perspective, the Black units fought very well and were very methodical, even showing a certain flair in many attacks. However, the British, though tired and nervous, were clearly not affected by fighting a Black army and fought equally by the book. The combat between the two forces was a very conventional attack-defense battle.

Seeing that the Black units didn't possess any extraordinary combat capability—even failing to utilize their skin color advantage in night combat to any effect—Hu Xiushan finally confirmed one thing: political factors indeed have a massive influence on military affairs.

The reason the Americans were so heavily affected wasn't that their combat effectiveness was inferior to the British, but that the proportion of Black people in the US was over 10%. Thus, the US was truly terrified of the Black people they oppressed rising up to resist systemic racial discrimination and oppression. This internal friction had caused a deviation in the US military's focus, leading to a great defeat.

Britain and Germany, on the other hand, had very few Black people within their borders. While they were unwilling to be defeated by a Black army, they only wanted to resolve the problem through combat and didn't worry about Black soldiers in their ranks causing trouble. There were essentially no Black people in the German army, and the number of Black people in the British army was extremely small—nothing to worry about.

Having resolved this doubt, Hu Xiushan felt great admiration for Li Runshi. With such a level of understanding of politics, Li Runshi would surely have an outstanding performance in the future war.

Hu Xiushan quickly set aside his thoughts and began rotating frontline units, restoring the main assault force from Black units to Chinese troops, while simultaneously preparing to strike any reinforcements sent to the surrounded pocket.

As it turned out, even after the rotation was complete, the British reinforcements in the west showed no movement. Hu Xiushan waited no longer and immediately ordered a general offensive. On June 9th, the surrounded British headquarters surrendered, and 500,000 British troops were completely wiped out. The Chinese army subsequently continued to advance, finally arriving on June 16th at Winnipeg, Canada—the missile launch site they had originally planned to capture in 1943.

At 10:00 PM on June 18th, the sky over the US Great Lakes region finally darkened. As a high-latitude region in the Northern Hemisphere, the sky turned dark very late as the summer solstice approached.

At this time, residents in Chicago and Detroit who were still awake saw a series of "shooting stars" streak across the sky. Unlike the fleeting meteors people were used to, the light at the tails of these shooting stars grew brighter and brighter, and they were getting closer and closer. Finally, they crashed into the ground, letting people feel the tremors coming through the earth.

At this time, the accuracy of navigation systems was not entirely reliable. Even though the Chinese missiles used laser gyroscopes, the hit rate of the 48 DF-2C missiles launched at the "Motor City" was a bit hard to describe.

According to statistics after the war, out of the 48 missiles, 15 hit the city area, while the rest landed in the suburbs. Another 9 flew directly into Lake Illinois beside Detroit.

However, the one and only missile to hit a valuable target actually landed in an empty lot in Chicago's urban area. But this lot was the site of the city's power distribution center. Dense clusters of transformers were destroyed in one stroke, leading to a massive blackout in Detroit's automotive production zone.

Hundreds of auto enterprises and nearby component factories all lost power and were plunged into darkness. Several unlucky workers, unable to stand steady, fell into machinery and were crushed to death by rotating equipment carrying its final inertia. There were over a hundred night-shift workers injured by falls or other causes.

The Ford syndicate suffered the greatest impact. In the past six months, the Ford syndicate had indeed tried to move its enterprises to other safer areas of the United States, but had never succeeded.

The United States did not lack land; the reason the relocation plan never started was primarily because the US government refused to pay to compensate for the losses caused by relocation. Secondly, the shipping on the Great Lakes made this the region with the lowest industrial costs in the US, and the Ford syndicate could never find a region that could effectively replace it.

They had procrastinated until they were hit by the missile attack.

On June 19th, after the opening of the New York Stock Exchange, Ford's stock plummeted, triggering a chain reaction that caused stocks across the entire United States to crash.

Hu Xiushan was unaware of this. He had already received a CMC order to continue advancing westward and launch attacks against the US Great Lakes industrial zone.

This order was clearly overly hasty, but it brought Hu Xiushan an unexpected boon. That was the US Air Force taking the initiative to launch a large-scale offensive, with fighters protecting a large number of bombers in an attempt to heavily bomb the westward-moving Chinese army.

Hu Xiushan had always hoped to fight a war of attrition with the US, particularly to exhaust the US Air Force. But the US Air Force was no fool; their operations were very cautious, and they didn't engage in such proactive sorties. Instead, they limited their combat objectives to providing air cover for the US Army and restricting the Chinese Air Force from strategic strikes—defense-oriented goals.

This time, the US military, driven to desperation, had taken the initiative, and since the roles of attacker and defender had changed, the results were bound to be different.

Just as Hu Xiushan expected, on June 19th alone, the US military lost over 1,700 aircraft of various types. The impact of this proactive sortie was not just the loss of equipment and personnel; it also created a flaw in the US Air Force's defensive system. The Chinese Air Force finally seized the opportunity to drop bombs on Detroit and Chicago—and more importantly, radio beacons.

Various signals were continuously transmitted from the radio systems. Search equipment, based on the location and angle of these signals, and through massive calculations, obtained many precise coordinates.

At 10:00 PM on June 20th, missiles visited Detroit again, and Chicago also welcomed missiles for the first time since its founding. With more precise coordinates, the hit rate for this round of missiles was greatly improved. Each of the two cities was hit by 64 DF-2C missiles, and more than half of them landed within the city limits.

The damage caused this time was far greater. Although the actual damage was far less than that of a single hit on a power distribution center, dozens of violent explosions occurring throughout the city had an unprecedented impact on the local populace.

At around 2:00 AM on June 21st, about four hours after the missile attack ended, the roads leading out of Detroit and Chicago were jammed with cars. The cars were stuffed with people and all sorts of belongings as American citizens fled in fear of death.

The massive traffic flow blocked the roads completely. Local police were no longer sufficient to handle it, and the military had to be called in to maintain order. However, facing a flow of cars and people that had no end in sight, the military was also helpless and could only blockade the roads. They were prepared to use force at the slightest sign of trouble.

Fortunately, it was only one day before the summer solstice; the sky grew light by 4:00 AM. The US military ultimately did not resort to mass killing, and the people of Chicago avoided a calamity.

On June 21st, all railways, roads, and docks were crowded with American citizens trying to flee. Facing the menacing checkpoints set up by the US military to the south, many citizens had an idea—they decided not to flee south but north, trying to enter Canada, then fleeing east through Canada, then turning south again to re-enter US territory. Or they abandoned their belongings and walked along small paths, bypassing the military checkpoints to flee south.

Whether south or north, on that day, more than half of the workers in Detroit and Chicago's factories did not show up for work, leading to the shutdown of thousands of factories in the two cities.

On that same day, the US stock market continued to plunge. The curve reminded many of the terrifying situation of Black Friday in 1929.

Unlike the 1929 crash, even with such a total sell-off, there were still people who thought the market would bottom out and rebound. This time, no one thought the market would rebound; they watched as the stock indices performed a free fall in a true diving posture.

Various US stock exchanges even announced their closure without receiving orders from the federal government. Sure enough, less than ten minutes after the closure, a large number of FBI agents rushed into the various stock exchanges. The agents, wearing black suits, shouted: "Close the market now! All stock trading is to stop!"

Even after quickly learning from the shaken stock traders that the market had already closed, the FBI agents still blocked the doors and took control of the exchanges.

This shock was like a flooding river, instantly washing away a dam already riddled with holes. The chaos triggered by the shock began to spread across the entire United States.

In all major American cities, including Chicago and Detroit, banks were lined with depositors trying to withdraw money. Those who had already gotten their money ran to stores to sweep the shelves. Food and daily necessities were quickly sold out.

Those American citizens who could get their money first and buy goods were considered lucky. The subsequent mass of people blocked the stores. Since many males had gone to the battlefield, women made up the majority of those in the shopping frenzy.

When thousands upon thousands of women were squeezed into banks, stores, and streets, the scene was truly hard to describe. If it had been men so crowded, they would have started fighting long ago. Physical conflicts did break out among the women, but mostly in the form of hair-pulling and face-scratching. In these areas, high-decibel screams were the greatest attack. The police and soldiers who came to maintain order found their heads spinning and aching.

This chaos lasted for three days. The US government ordered 24-hour military control throughout the country. Various states subsequently issued their own military control orders, and the National Guard took to the streets to maintain order.

US industrial production came to a halt, and logistics were heavily impacted. The American war machine also couldn't withstand such a shock and took the opportunity to stop its attacks on the Chinese army in Canada.

On June 30th, Chinese vanguard units broke into the city in Canada and set up rocket launchers to begin shelling the American city of Sault Ste. Marie on the opposite bank. Meanwhile, the vanguards already headed toward their next target, Toronto, the Canadian capital.

Although the British army continued to fight, they had fallen into a completely passive situation. At the same time, the London Stock Exchange also announced its closure amidst a plunge.

When the financial system could no longer maintain the flow of funds, the era of "cash is king" began. The first thing people with cash did was engage in a shopping frenzy. This subsequently led to skyrocketing prices and market chaos.

To maintain order, the British government had to announce comprehensive controls, leading to a standstill in all production.

At this point, even the most resolute Britons realized that they might starve to death before a victory in the war was achieved. From then on, anti-war sentiment in Britain began to soar.

For an industrialized modern nation-state, as long as there is food and social order can be guaranteed, even if citizens are forcibly dragged into the army by conscription officers, they can still fight on. But their combat effectiveness can no longer be complimented.

However, when normal life in the cities of an industrialized nation can no longer be maintained, the citizens can find no reason to continue fighting. Industrial society differs from agricultural society in that the cities—the core power of the nation—rely on the constant flow of goods for resources. Once this flow has a major problem, it's like a human body with blocked blood vessels; it simply cannot persist.

Li Runshi received the report at 11:00 AM. After reading it, he truly couldn't sit still. He called Premier Wu Youping: "Premier, let's go for a walk in the streets."

On the other end, Wu Youping laughed: "Don't walk; let's drive around the city."

When Li Runshi reached the office building, a car stopped in front of him. The door opened, and Wu Youping, sticking his head out, smiled at Li Runshi.

Soon, the car they were in was driving through bustling streets. Watching the prosperous and stable city functioning with vitality, Wu Youping wanted to say something but suddenly choked up. Subsequently, the 50-year-old man covered his face and actually began to sob.

Li Runshi sighed but didn't try to comfort him. He knew this mixture of joy and sorrow was something Wu Youping had to process himself; others' words could not reach his heart.

Lighting a cigarette, Li Runshi felt a sense of emotion. This was war, and this was economics.