Bone-gold. Flesh-gold.

Shen Cong had a strong impulse to take a cross-section of himself and study it properly. He managed, ultimately, not to.

His research on several Lv1 — Pure Gold Era jin beasts — including the feline that had jumped him during the Xuzhou reconnaissance — had already given him most of what a self-dissection would reveal. The metallic composition of bone-gold and flesh-gold was peculiar in the same way: the material had transformed, but its structural role within the body remained intact. Bone still provided the load-bearing framework; cartilage at the joints retained a degree of flexibility; the spongy marrow channels at the center of long bones — yellow marrow and red marrow both — continued functioning as they always had.

Now he was in the connective-gold stage.

Proper connective tissue was beginning its metallic invasion. Yellow marrow, which contained large concentrations of fat and was classified as proper connective tissue, was almost certainly part of what was now changing.

Red marrow is the primary blood production site. Yellow marrow doesn't produce blood under normal conditions, but when red marrow production drops, yellow marrow can convert to compensate. If my yellow marrow undergoes metallic invasion, will that conversion still be possible?

And I've been consuming fog fungi daily. My blood is already shifting toward blood-gold.

He looked at the blood running down his forearm from the test cut he'd made to confirm the flesh-gold transition.

Where the blood pooled on his skin, something caught the light oddly — either a surface reflection from the lamp above, or a metallic luster that hadn't been there before. He couldn't be certain which.

Something has changed in the blood. I just can't isolate it visually yet.

The one thing I can actually observe: my breathing has changed. The same lung capacity — around 25,000 milliliters — but my respiratory rate has dropped. Longer intervals between breaths, same oxygen exchange. If blood-gold is increasing oxygen utilization efficiency, that would explain it.

If that was what was happening, blood-gold wasn't a bad development.

Oxygen was an extraordinarily reactive element, central to metabolic chemistry…