"The four-legged snake is larger than the Golden Jiao, so its Talent is naturally higher than the Jiao's 2.874H. Among individual jin beasts, the standard holds: bigger body, stronger Talent. Humans are the exception."

The disconnect between human body size and Talent was something Shen Cong had never quite resolved. He'd seen humans who grew to enormous size — Ran Tai from that grape grove camp, the one he'd made an example of early on, had been a massive specimen. But Ran Tai had been more disease-changed than anything else, no Activity core, no bonded vehicle.

Every jin person and iron person he'd encountered had stayed physically normal. The body didn't change much.

He set the question aside and, noticing the four-legged snake had lowered its guard, conducted a careful scan. What he found was strange. The snake had twenty Activity cores — the claws on its four feet.

"Those claws are razor-sharp and high in Activity Value. If I could cut them off and work them, I'd have enough material for quite a few quality bone-gold weapons."

He was still mulling this over when the four-legged snake finished the last of the banyan yogurt in front of it, turned its head, and began nudging him again. Shen Cong understood immediately. He walked deeper into the banyan grove, dug up a sphere, and rolled it over.

This time, however, the snake didn't crack it open. Its tongue whipped out and it swallowed the sphere whole — shell and all — then immediately pushed at Shen Cong for more.

Storing food? Like those animal carcasses it was carrying before?

The thought amused him. He wasn't stingy about it; he went back into the grove and dug up an armful more, tossing them one by one to the snake.

The four-legged snake swallowed thirty spheres in a row before finally stopping. Then it nudged several back toward Shen Cong.

It had run out of room.

Shen Cong took his turn. He cracked the outer casings and extracted only the basketball-sized milk-white spheres inside — the actual yogurt, the part that mattered. The…