Frequency-hopping breathing.

The gravity-forging environment bonus.

The special-state breakthrough from fusing man and vehicle.

Absorbing a Firestarter fragment as a supercritical fluid.

One trip through Henan had brought the Chinese Empire's one million two hundred and fifty thousand people under him and handed him four ways to raise Talent. Shen Cong felt he had come out well ahead.

"The one that helps me most is absorbing a Firestarter fragment as a supercritical fluid. I feel that once I absorb enough of it, I might enter a whole new realm of Talent. The metal base of my body would make another jump toward the source nuclide."

Frequency-hopping breathing could probably raise his Talent by 0.15H to 0.3H. As for the gravity-forging environment bonus, it was still untested, but at most it would be a change of a few tenths. The special-state breakthrough from fusing man and vehicle was only a theoretical method for raising a Colossus's Talent, and how much he could take from it was unclear.

And all of those changes could probably only reach Talent at particle-grade and below.

They wouldn't apply to the Talent that went with a higher metal base. Only absorbing a Firestarter fragment as a supercritical fluid was likely to work at every stage.

A Firestarter fragment was that strange a thing. The world had changed because of it.

"Water's supercritical fluid is called supercritical water, so a Firestarter fragment's should just be called supercritical fire? No, no. Not vivid at all. Better to call it flowfire... Flowing water, flowing fire. Faithful, expressive, and elegant, all at once. That settles it. Flowfire."

Absorbing flowfire was hard, mainly because Shen Cong, as a Mechanist, specialized in Activity waves and didn't keep enough Activity Value in reserve to hold a high-intensity Activity storm together.

Taking in that one thread of flowfire had hollowed him out, and he needed half an hour at least to recover.

He could spend that time practicing frequency-hopping breathing.

He also used the Super-Thunder Wave station to contact the new government, asking after the progress of its various experiments and of the work…