One lap took ten minutes, and then the iron lion's battery was dead. Without a power source that could keep it going, module components could only go so far, and that was why the Fire Cloud Totem couldn't wait.

Firestarter fragments were now known to have two states. Flowfire had no potential as a power source. The fire cloud state could produce an energy field, but nobody had found a way to draw energy from it steadily yet.

Back in the Four-Armed Vajra's modification workshop.

He cut the link to Smartbrain No. 2.

The iron lion went still.

Shen Cong came down from the second-deck carriage and watched An Sanshun's people take the iron lion apart and pull the black box that had recorded the run. Then he answered their questions about how the drive had felt.

"At high speed, the twist between the front half of the body and the back half needs work. Ideally it should turn a full three hundred and sixty degrees—it's not a real lion, after all. Be bolder with your ideas and get the fighting power out of it," Shen Cong said, going through the weak spots.

"If the two halves rotate, will that put a load on Smartbrain No. 2's control?" one of the researchers asked.

Shen Cong shook his head. "Plenty to spare, from what I could feel."

"All right. We'll make the changes as soon as we can."

"And the iron lion isn't fast enough. Can you fit a thruster on the tail?"

"We can fit one, but it eats a huge amount of power. The lion's built-in battery doesn't have the output or the capacity to run a thruster right now."

The rebuild still had a long way to go.

Once the iron lion report was done, An Sanshun brought over a photocopied document and handed it to him. "BOSS, this is the report on long-distance attenuation between the Superbrain core and the carrier-vehicle material... The new government's scientists worked on it with us, and the attenuation coefficient turns out to be tiny. You can practically ignore it."

Shen Cong…