What was Great Vajra?

The question had nagged at Shen Cong for a long time. The Jianhu Laboratory's proposed framework — "the entanglement of biological and mechanical magnetic fields interacting with Activity radiation" — was a compelling concept, but it didn't explain what a carrier vehicle actually was at its fundamental level. Other interpretations had been floated: the carrier vehicle as a kind of external skeleton; the carrier vehicle's raw metal as analogous to a jin core's function in a jin beast, making the vehicle an externalized extension of that core. Various angles, each with partial validity.

None of them satisfied him.

The establishment of life-integration involved too many unknown factors. Existing theory couldn't explain it from first principles, and Shen Cong knew it.

This uncertainty had grown into genuine confusion once he reached the Lv1 — Pure Gold Era.

His own body's evolution was clear enough: bone, muscle, connective tissue, each structure undergoing metallic invasion in sequence, progressing steadily toward complete metallization. That was his path. The destination was knowable, even if the journey was long.

But what was Great Vajra's path?

Alloying plastic components and crystal elements into metal? What happened to the electrical systems if everything became conductive?

Since the Lv1 transition, Great Vajra's changes had been subtle. Its Activity had solidified, and the vehicle was gradually converting its materials to something with bone-gold-like properties — growing harder, denser, more resilient. But it had also lost the rapid alloy-and-extend capability it once had, which was precisely why Shen Cong had been forced to press the natural carrier vehicle iron box into service as a fabrication platform for new equipment.

The Eastern Theater Command couldn't help here. Their iron people were still just short of the Lv1 threshold themselves.

So Shen Cong had been working through it independently, feeling his way toward an answer. What he was looking for wasn't upgrades to Great Vajra's equipment — weapons, armor, propulsion systems. Those things made the vehicle more capable in specific functions, but they weren't a fundamental transformation of what Great Vajra was. A truck with a better engine and…