After the molt, Blackhead buzzed with barely contained energy — and promptly fed its shed exoskeleton to the larvae.

Shen Cong's expression did something complicated.

The larvae ate with evident enthusiasm. The shed shell apparently contained nutrients they needed.

Blackhead circled his legs like an excited dog, antennae tapping against him repeatedly in the ant equivalent of affection. It had also developed a new skill: vocalization. By scraping an abdominal plate against the floor, it produced a high-pitched rasping sound — a frequency so high that Shen Cong had to pay attention to hear it at all.

He crouched down and ran a thorough check. The mandible Activity cores had completed their metallic transition fully. The resulting material was entirely unlike the metal of the Old Pearl Mussel's shell — this was an alloy, a composite rather than a pure element. Which specific alloy would require analysis equipment he didn't have. He'd need to find out through the Eastern Theater Command at some point.

He patted Blackhead's gleaming head and sent it back to manage the colony, then left the ant burrow.

On the roof of Great Vajra, the sun was out and the air was clear.

Good weather for training.

He'd come up without the Half-Activated Armor — just himself, working through what the Lv1 era body could do. Stretches first, then jumping drills. Then he dropped into a plank position and ran through a set of standard push-ups, moved to single-arm push-ups, knocked out a hundred reps on the left, a hundred on the right, then transitioned to one-finger push-ups — index finger only, both hands, another hundred total.

None of it was particularly tiring. His body had stopped registering conventional exercise as load. The point wasn't to exhaust himself — it was calibration, learning how the new body felt in motion, building the muscle memory to use it cleanly.

After finishing the two hundred one-finger reps, he went into a handstand. Balanced on both palms, then lifted one hand. Single-arm handstand. Then he let the palm rise off the surface, settling onto five fingertips, then four, then…