The four-legged snake lying beneath the golden tree. Shen Cong stood with the specific feeling of something important being absent — the same scene from long ago, when he'd first encountered the killer peach tree and found an animal collapsed beneath it, rooted into the earth, already beyond recovery.

Little Four was Heavyweight class. At the top of the local food chain. And still taken by a method that wasn't even particularly sophisticated — just effective.

"The road of evolution is full of obstacles. Maybe one day I'll go down for any number of reasons — lying in a field somewhere, being eaten by scavengers, or becoming fertilizer for something that grows over me."

When you start to believe the world has become safe, that's usually when the blade comes up.

Stay vigilant.

He picked up a stone from the ground and threw it at the golden tree's trunk. The stone shattered on impact. The tree didn't move.

He walked closer. Still nothing.

Not a Mechanical Vine type — not a tree that could actively move its branches. He circled it, tested the root zone, repeatedly broke off sections of the filamentous roots to observe the response.

What he was looking at, based on the leaf shape and overall form, was a ginkgo tree mutation. Leaves a pure, flat gold, fan-shaped with no clear front or back surface, radiating outward from the stem. Clusters of yellow oval-shaped fruit covered the upper branches — dense, partially obscured by the foliage, several clusters already splitting open to expose white kernels inside. Some leaves had already fallen. A thin scatter of gold covered the ground, including the area around the four-legged snake's body.

The snake had been here long enough for fallen leaves to accumulate on it.

"A ginkgo that can't move its trunk — so how did it catch Little Four? The filamentous roots match the killer peach tree's method roughly. No visible means of active propulsion."

His eyes moved to the fruit clusters. Killer peach tree: Activity peaches that caused drowsiness in animals, then the roots finished the work. Yellow fruit,…