The entire afternoon went to the problem of finding the meteorite fragment.

It had to be in the central barrier lake — the radial ring patterns he'd mapped earlier confirmed this was the radiation epicenter. But that only narrowed the search to the area of the lake itself, which was still an enormous surface. He couldn't reduce it further.

He brought the drone out and flew it directly above the lake center, running repeated passes to build something like a satellite image. Then he analyzed the footage piece by piece, looking for the densest tree growth and deepest coloration — drawing out curved lines, trying to find a convergent center point through normal distribution.

Every curve found a different center. The results were scattered across the lake and its surrounding area with no coherent clustering. No normal distribution emerged. The center refused to resolve.

He tried the Geiger counter next, walking the entire lake bed to find where radiation peaked.

The counter jumped continuously the whole way around. No clear maximum. No useful gradient.

By evening he'd accomplished nothing except digging several meters-deep test pits at the most likely candidate sites, all empty. The sky was darkening. He returned to Great Vajra and filed the problem away for tomorrow.

Night. Great Vajra's exterior lights burned in the dark.

Shen Cong stood in the light, looking at the Old Pearl Mussel clamped shut in its pool. In his hand was a new blade — the Tyrant Broadsword, freshly ground from the Water Tyrant's sickle-leg Activity core — and he was preparing to pry the shell open.

That morning, before heading up the hill, he had sensed it: the Old Pearl Mussel had crossed into Lv1. Formally entered the Lv1 era. By The Huoxue's terminology, it was now in the Peak Breakthrough Phase — on the threshold of a qualitatively new state.

Time to begin the research.

He wasn't the only one who had theorized about what the Lv1 era would look like. The Research Institute's specialists had discussed it at length. The general consensus: the organism's body would enter a breakthrough…