If Shen Cong had one regret about leaving New Hefei, it was the Huoshan Oasis.

He had never dared venture there to see it for himself — only heard secondhand accounts of the Iron-Eater looming like a small mountain, and the Disaster Locusts, a terror beyond reckoning. He had never experienced the ambient Activity of the Huoshan zone firsthand, never learned how dense it truly was. The secrets buried in those meteorite fragments remained out of reach.

There was no helping it. Even in the earliest days of mutation, fully-armed military units had taken catastrophic casualties at Huoshan and retreated in rout. A great deal of time had passed since then. Mutation had reached entirely new heights. Shen Cong couldn’t guarantee he’d come back alive.

The Iron-Eater. The Disaster Locust swarm. The Dragon Hornets. Run into any one of them and he’d be gambling his life on luck.

But now, an opportunity to make up for that regret seemed to have landed right in front of him.

Seize it.

The decision was immediate. He would establish camp at Machang Town and stay put for the next several days. He would turn this suspected Huanglishu Mini-Oasis inside out — and find the meteorite fragment, if one existed.

Maybe then he could finally begin to unlock the secrets of Activity itself.

Shen Cong had given the pearl-producing mutated river mussels a name: Pearl Mussels.

The largest of them he called the Old Pearl Mussel.

He dropped the Old Pearl Mussel into a freshly dug water pool. His plan for the next few days of investigation: don’t kill it yet. Keep it alive. Watch what happened when it crossed into the Lv1 era. See if anything remarkable emerged.

Let it blaze a trail for evolutionary research.

The Old Pearl Mussel clamped its two shells shut and refused to move. Shen Cong didn’t press it. He simply angled one of Great Vajra’s cameras at it and left it recording continuously. Sooner or later, something would reveal itself.

The Old Pearl Mussel got to live. Its descendants were not so fortunate.

Every other Pearl Mussel — large and small — he slaughtered wholesale, cracking them open to retrieve the pearls inside. Sizes ranged from football-sized down to marble-sized. White and lustrous, with a faint iridescent shimmer when held up to the sun.

“I’ll call them… Activity Pearls.”

He wasn’t putting much effort into naming things anymore. Couldn’t be helped. Early on, evolved creatures had been rare enough that each one warranted careful thought — names aspired to elegance, accuracy, resonance. Now, with the ecosystem slowly recovering and the deep abundant zone all around him, the sheer variety of evolved beasts and evolved trees made that impossible. As long as a name got the job done, that was enough.

Pearls were edible. Shen Cong picked up a marble-sized Activity Pearl without much ceremony and tossed it to Blackhead.

Crunch.

Crunch.

Blackhead chomped it down with evident satisfaction, then broadcast a very clear more, please. Shen Cong tossed it another one and waved it off.

With Blackhead sent packing, Shen Cong stared at the pile of Activity Pearls and considered his options. Raw or cooked?

He bit into one raw first, to get a sense of it.

It wasn’t as hard as he expected — more like crunching through gristle, the sound crisp but the resistance modest. The flavor, however, was unpleasant. Astringent, faintly bitter.

“Cooking it is.”

Cooked Activity Pearls weren’t exactly delicious, but boiling drove off the bitterness. With a dab of chili sauce, the texture was actually quite acceptable.

After eating, a wave of dry heat spread outward from his stomach and diffused through his entire body.

But his Activity Value didn’t rise.

The Activity locked inside the pearls had dispersed into his body — he could feel that much — yet there was no sign of enhancement. None of the familiar surge he’d come to expect.

“What is this?”

He waited. The pleasant rush of strengthening never came. He ate through an entire pot of them, and still nothing — just the heat, no enhancement. “Why isn’t it doing anything? It can’t even top off my expendable Activity reserves. This is worse than evolved meat.”

It made no sense.

He couldn’t explain it.

That was when Blackhead crept back over, projecting the unmistakable emotional signal of I want more. It had developed a taste for Activity Pearls. Shen Cong was already disappointed enough that he simply tossed it a dozen marble-sized ones without argument. Blackhead scooped them all into its mandibles and trotted briskly toward the ant burrow.

Went halves with the Antgod.

Great Vajra was an extension of Shen Cong’s own body — he felt everything that happened inside it at all times. He caught the moment Blackhead and the Antgod divided up the Activity Pearls and swallowed them down.

The Antgod burns through enormous quantities of metal scraps and Activity cores every day just to sustain egg-laying. Eating Activity Pearls makes perfect sense for her. As for Blackhead — it stopped developing a while back, so it’s become selective about food. Only eats good things.

He paused.

Activity Pearls should be good things. But what exactly do they do?

No answer presented itself. He shelved the question for now.

The next morning, Shen Cong rose, washed up, and began suiting up in his Half-Activated Armor before heading out to continue operations — draining the remaining lakes of the Huanglishu reservoir cluster one by one.

That was when he noticed the problem.

The armor that normally fit him perfectly felt, today, slightly small.

Small. Ill-fitting.

“The Half-Activated Armor shrank?”

He stared at it, puzzled. Half-Activated Armor was forged from a failed metal lifeform — an organism whose Activity was not truly alive. It had no autonomous will. Without deliberate guidance, it wouldn’t change on its own.

Which meant it hadn’t changed.

I have.

Shen Cong immediately produced a measuring tape and took his own height.

What he found surprised him.

His baseline height had always been 177cm. Not short, not particularly tall — he’d always wanted a little more, but his body had settled into its final form by age twenty-two and stayed there.

The tape measure now read 180cm.

“I’m six feet tall.”

The surprise was immediate, and then his mind was already moving. What changed? What happened overnight to make this possible?

The answer was obvious: the pot of Activity Pearls he’d eaten the night before, the ones that had produced no measurable enhancement.

Except they had done something after all.

Activity-based food came in three categories: Activity fruit, evolved meat, evolved vegetables. Evolved vegetables — tree leaves from things like evolved willows, Veggie Mulberry, Activity Sweet Potato leaves — provided small amounts of Activity for daily consumption and kept vitamins topped off. Evolved meat supplied protein and replenishable expendable Activity reserves. Only Activity fruit could genuinely strengthen the body, raise overall Activity Value, provide the upgrades that mattered.

Activity Pearls appeared to be a fourth category entirely. They provided no vitamins, no protein, no expendable Activity. They didn’t raise overall Activity Value or strengthen the body in the conventional sense. But they stimulated physical development.

A third round of physical development, as Shen Cong thought of it.

“Good.”

He measured himself again. And again. 180cm. The height gain alone made his field of view feel meaningfully wider — but the real prize was what physical growth actually meant.

If the 177cm version of Shen Cong, pushed to his absolute limit, represented a capacity of “1” — because the body was only so large, could only contain so much — then his new limit, after this growth, might have risen to something closer to “1.1.”

He had felt, lately, that further strengthening was getting harder. The marginal gains were shrinking.

Now, perhaps, there was room to sprint again.

“One more bull of strength might be within reach after all.”

(End of Chapter 201)