Two roads meant a choice had to be made.

Shen Cong found it hard to decide. If he were a jin person, he would have taken the Superbrain form without a second thought, for the sake of raw strength. For a jin person, strength was a matter of the individual body, and without gigantism the gap in size could never be closed. But Shen Cong was an iron person, and an iron person had a carrier vehicle.

These days the Vajra Fortress spent most of its time serving as a motor home.

But the Vajra Fortress was not going to stop there. The Mind Channel was built. Man and machine could fuse at any moment, with the old hand at the wheel.

Shen Cong himself trembled with anticipation at how wild that ride would get.

So his need for gigantism was not urgent. He had fixed on gigantism only to get at the secret behind it, and now the secret had shown itself. It had to do with the structure of the brain. Higher intelligence grew inside the human brain, and it held humanity to a straight line through evolution.

Call it the grip of the ego.

Or call it intelligence protecting the body.

"Break that protection, that grip, and I can undergo gigantism and join the giants. Keep the protection, keep the brain as the foundation, and I stay one of humanity, with human traits."

Shen Cong's thinking ran further ahead. "And going by what I know so far, once gigantism happens and the brain evolves into a Superbrain, the body has to change with it. It becomes a body like a Firestarter Spirit's, with no internal organs to tell apart anymore."

"Keep the brain's structure and the body's tissue structure stays too. There would probably still be internal organs, and the diet would have to change — metal food to cover what the body burns... Keeping the fine structure of a human body means spending energy and replacing it."

"For now it looks like the Firestarter energy in the air is rich enough to cover that..."

"But as…