The ginkgo tree's leaves were pure gold.

The fruit was oval-shaped, roughly the size of an infant's fist. The outer casing peeled away to reveal a white nut shell; the nut shell cracked open to yield a yellow-green kernel inside.

Shen Cong named it the White Silver Fruit.

Twenty meters from the ginkgo tree, the Four-Legged Dragon stopped and refused to go closer. Her psychological shadow from the incident was evidently substantial. He stationed her on perimeter watch and went to study the tree alone.

Talent: 2.016H. Like the yogurt banyan, the ginkgo had entered the Lv1 era — bark fully metallic, the metallic transition spreading inward through the trunk. This was the highest Talent he'd recorded in any tree specimen. The trunk radiated a faint pressure aura, which was why nothing nested in it and no insects had colonized the bark. The tree stood alone in its own cleared space, trunk requiring four or five adults to span with linked arms, seventy to eighty meters of height, massive and asymmetric.

The filamentous roots he'd torn away that afternoon had already withered — dried and contracted to nothing. He dug with the Condor-bone shovel and exposed a section of root system. Same structure as the killer peach tree's: the filamentous feeding roots were a specialized secondary structure growing from the main root network. Function: resource extraction from prey. Growth rate: fast. Decay rate: equally fast.

Post-apocalypse plant evolution, as he'd been observing for months, concentrated in two directions. Some species developed aggressive Activity fruit production. Others developed prey-capture mechanisms. Both were responses to the same new selection pressure — Activity radiation transforming every organism's fundamental relationship with its environment.

"I'll take a carry pack's worth back and run experiments. Find out what the White Silver Fruit actually does."

He filled a pack, swung back onto the Four-Legged Dragon, and covered the return distance at a pace that made the hillside blur. Great Vajra was where he'd left it.

He loaded the fruit and had a sudden thought. He turned to the dragon. "Little Four — where's your den? Where do…