"Cough. Cough."

Shen Cong pressed a hand against his chest — ribs that had very nearly snapped — and spat blood. Without the Half-Activated Armor, the Swiftclaw Leopard hide underlayer, and the Golden Jiao hide layer beneath that, his body would not have survived the Six-Horned Dragon's tail connecting at full force. The dying creature's last strike had carried the impact energy of a locomotive.

But the Six-Horned Dragon was on the ground. Blood pooling around it, the massive body running through its final involuntary convulsions and going still.

The pain ceased to register. Something far larger filled the space it had occupied — a satisfaction so complete it was almost physical. Alone, direct combat, and he'd brought down something roughly twice the size of the Golden Jiao.

"Ptah." He spat a mouthful of bloody foam, got up from the hillside, and walked toward the carcass.

Halfway there, he turned back to the winch, picked up the hand crossbow, aimed at the Six-Horned Dragon's vestigial eyes, and put several bolts in. The body didn't respond.

Confirmed dead.

He walked to the carcass, stepped up onto the skull, and placed his hands on the gill-plume horns to read the creature's data.

Talent: 3.247H. Activity Value: 2.714H. Lv0.836.

Above three stars.

The number stopped him cold. "That's higher than me and Great Vajra both — and we're at 3.012H. This thing was living in a crevice in the middle of nowhere, no Oasis anywhere nearby, and it reached 3.247H Talent?"

A Beyond-Three-Star jin beast was not something his existing framework could explain. He'd assumed extreme Talent required either proximity to a meteorite fragment or extraordinary circumstance. The Golden Jiao and the four-legged snake had both operated away from any confirmed Oasis. The meteorite fragment at Huanglishu had only raised Talent modestly. There was something driving Talent development that he didn't understand yet.

He filed the question away. No productive path through it right now.

He stood with both feet planted on the Six-Horned Dragon's skull, the afternoon sun hanging in the southeast, wind moving across the empty hillside, and felt something enormous…