The Iron-Eater: thirty meters in height, forty-one meters in length, believed to be a pangolin mutation. New Hefei's classification: Super-Heavyweight.

The Xuanwu: twenty meters in height, seventy meters in length, fifty-five meters in width, believed to be a snapping turtle mutation. Shen Cong's private classification: Nuclear-Weight.

The Great Earth Dragon: thirty meters in crawling height, eighty meters in length, twenty-five meters across the shoulders, believed to be a Komodo-type monitor lizard mutation. Shen Cong's private classification: Nuclear-Weight.

Among the jin beasts encountered or documented in the Eastern Theater Command's territory, seven or eight more fell just below the Xuanwu and Great Earth Dragon in the rankings — what Shen Cong had placed in the Super-Heavyweight tier. Four of those were still alive. Two of them were known to be in the Luoma Lake Oasis: one a large green ranid — the Command called it the Green-Skin Frog — and one an oversized felid, the Command's designation being the Great Lynx.

Visual documentation on Super-Heavyweight and Nuclear-Weight creatures was sparse. Most of what existed was long-range footage, captured at distance. Shen Cong had understood, in an abstract sense, that these creatures were terrible.

But abstract understanding hadn't given him an accurate reading of what "terrible" actually measured.

At some point during his recent growth — once his Talent had cleared 3H — he'd felt his confidence expanding to fill the new space. He'd started to believe he could kill Heavyweights with ease, hold his own against Super-Heavyweights. When he'd been near Huoshan County, he'd even entertained the idea of poking around the Iron-Eater's territory.

The Great Black Bear had just walked past him at five hundred meters, and the ground had trembled with each step, and the pressure aura coming off it had filled the air like a sea tide — and now Shen Cong understood, in a way that wasn't abstract at all, what a Super-Heavyweight jin beast's presence actually felt like.

That pressure, vast and total, was suffocating to make contact with.

Suffocating enough that Shen Cong wasn't certain he could fight at full capacity while inside it, regardless…