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…