"Totem engine power function curves — complete."

Shen Cong closed the laptop and shut down the Golden Fleece Goat horn totem engine. He detached the horns and set them aside. They were going to become fishhooks.

Several things had occupied him since returning from the Xuyi County camp.

He'd spent time studying the blue canna's predation mechanism — luring insects in with small bait, observing the capture and drowning process, watching the digestive sequence through to completion. He tested the digestive fluid. Nothing useful. The whole plant, on further examination, offered nothing of practical value.

He pulled it out of the greenhouse and threw it outside.

The Water Tyrant eggs also received attention. He'd kept several of the highest-quality specimens in cold storage. His experiment: expose them to the outdoor cold, allow them to begin losing Activity, then retrieve them at the point of critical Activity loss and attempt to establish a perceptual link by injecting Activity.

Results were disappointing. Of the five eggs he'd reserved, four died outright once they lost Activity. The will to survive apparently wasn't strong in the embryonic stage.

The fifth accepted the Activity injection and established a perceptual link.

The emotional signal coming through was chaotic and blunt — murky, aggressive, with a baseline disposition toward Shen Cong that ran somewhere between wariness and attachment.

A Water Tyrant embryo. Apex predator even among insects. A lot of wildness baked in from the start.

The four dead eggs went into the pan. Rougher texture than chicken eggs, but edible, and nutritionally dense. His appetite had been running at extraordinary levels lately — the ongoing skeletal metallic transition apparently demanded significant caloric input — and high-Activity meat and fruit were increasingly necessary to meet it.

He still couldn't predict the direction his Lv1 era body was developing toward. The path was opaque. What he could feel, dimly, was that the sequence probably mirrored the Old Pearl Mussel: skeleton fully metallic first, then metallic invasion spreading to the surrounding tissues.

Skeleton. Muscle. Membrane. Organs. Fluids. Marrow. Brain.

Is that what the Lv1 era is? A full metallic…