Plastic People

Plastic People are sentient scavengers from the eastern plastic continent whose bodies, vehicles, and group tactics make them a distinctive threat in the wasteland. They gather in large numbers, use oil to make more of their kind, and can include cultivators among their ranks; their lack of vital organs also lets them endure injuries that would drive ordinary marauders away.

Identity and Origin

Yuan describes Plastic People as Lost Age trash that gained sentience and rose from a plastic continent to the east. The description connects them to the world’s accumulated remnants: they are not simply scavengers collecting discarded objects, but beings formed from a landscape of plastic waste. Their origin is also tied to their continuing activity. They seek out anything that reeks of oil, process it, and use it to build more Plastic People.

That appetite shapes how others assess them. When Yuan and his companions approach a station, he warns that the Spirit-train is an enticing prize for nearby Plastic People. Its defenses might deter a small raiding group, but the scouts’ presence makes a return with greater numbers plausible. He advises the crew to prepare rather than assume the warning signs will pass.

Bodies, Vehicles, and Survival

Plastic People appear in forms that blur the line between a person and a machine or vehicle. Yuan’s first glimpse of two scouts, watching from a blasted hill, makes them look like motorcyclists. Their plastic hands and faceless mannequin faces disclose what they are; they retreat behind the hill before he can shoot. In a later raiding force, some of the cultivators have bodies merged with their vehicles: one is little more than a plastic torso fused to a motorbike, while others are rubber masses filling car seats.

Their bodies are fragile, but that weakness does not make them easy to stop. Yuan tells Orient that they lack vital organs and do not know fear. They can pull themselves back together after being hurt or merge with wounded members of their group. In battle, those traits undermine the usual meaning of injury: losses do not necessarily remove a combatant from the fight, and heavy casualties do not reliably break the group’s advance.

Some Plastic People can cultivate, although Yuan characterizes them as unimpressive in that regard. The raiding party he later encounters includes a few First Coil cultivators, recognizable by how their bodies join with their vehicles. Their cultivation therefore appears alongside, rather than apart from, their scavenged machinery: people and vehicles become parts of the same improvised fighting force.

Communication and Tactics

Plastic People do not speak, and Yuan doubts they understand spoken language or think as humans do. He remembers Jaw-Long spending hours trying to communicate with a captive, without success. That failed attempt leaves more than a practical lesson: the group’s silence makes it difficult to interpret them through ordinary conversation, negotiation, or signs of fear. Yuan finds them unnerving partly because their behavior offers so little familiar human response.

They also travel in large groups, and their attacks can be poorly ordered without being hesitant. Yuan describes a raiding party of twenty-three vehicles, mostly cars with some motorbikes. Dirty mannequin bikers, trash trucks packed with humanoid figures whose black-bag faces and tableware hands mark their makeshift bodies, and cars assembled from scavenged parts advance in a disorganized formation. The few cultivators are embedded in this moving assemblage. Yuan’s image of the cultivators as shepherds herding a giant captures the force behind them: the group’s attack is organized around a much larger threat, not simply its individual raiders.

The Raid on the Spirit-train

The first warning comes from scouts near the station. After they withdraw, Yuan expects the Spirit-train to draw a larger attack, and directs those able to fight to take positions near the windows. Bucket reports that the train carries small artillery cannons that could be mounted on the roofs, though Yuan leaves their use dependent on Orient’s agreement. The exchange shows the group responding to the scouts as a credible danger while preparing the train’s defenses.

When the raiding party catches up, Yuan identifies its numbers and vehicles from the dust cloud. The Plastic People pursue the Spirit-train in silence, without shouts or threats. Even after Yuan tears through a third of their force and his allies reduce the warband to half its size, they do not retreat. Their capacity to recover or merge with the wounded helps explain why losses fail to stop them.

The raiders use barbed chains to harpoon the train’s windows and wheels. Their vehicles cannot derail Orient’s wagons, but the chains give the attackers a way to climb aboard. A Plastic Person with blades for fingers tries to enter the treasure car; a Molotov cocktail burns it away as Bucket attacks its vehicle. These encounters show the limits as well as the danger of the assault: the attackers can reach the train and press close, but its defenders can still repel individual boarders.

Narrative Significance

Plastic People turn the wasteland’s discarded material into both bodies and an expanding supply of attackers. Their oil scavenging is not incidental to their identity: what they seize becomes the means of making more of their kind. Their vehicle-bound cultivators and improvised convoy similarly make the battlefield difficult to divide into neat categories of person, weapon, and transport.

Their silence, resilience, and refusal to flee distinguish them from marauders whom severe losses might deter. The Spirit-train encounter gives those traits concrete consequences: ordinary damage does not end the pursuit, and defeating part of the force does not guarantee that the rest will withdraw. Plastic People are therefore threatening not because every member is individually powerful, but because their material adaptability and collective persistence make familiar expectations about injury and retreat unreliable.