The signal flare went up.

The ordinary crews who'd been waiting in the jin-beast vacuum belt came hurrying onto the battlefield to haul away the corpse of the ultimate-grade jin beast. Shen Cong had already taken the eight jin-core teeth, and no one said a word about it.

By the principle of distribution according to contribution, Shen Cong could have laid claim to at least eighty percent of the croc's carcass. The White Silver Fruit that had crippled the croc was his; the tunnel had been dug by his Vajra Ants; the dragon lance that killed it was his to drive; and the one who'd fought it up close was, again, him. Everyone else had only done containment work — and had botched even that, badly.

He could have swallowed the whole corpse and no one could have called it greed. Taking only eight teeth, a little hide and flesh, and the claws off the forelimbs was already open-handed.

On top of that, Shen Cong had turned up a clutch of croc eggs. No one had dreamed that buried in the mud where the croc sunned itself were twenty-one of them. Gazing at those Activity-rich giant eggs, white-shelled and mottled with black, the theater brass who'd come along with the transport crew went glassy-eyed — no doubt picturing the Eastern Theater Command raising a dozen-odd ultimate-grade saltwater crocs of its own.

The theater worked fast. In little more than ten minutes the croc's mountainous corpse was carved apart and dragged off, the twenty-one eggs carried away with it. Even the blood-red earth soaked with blood-gold was shoveled up and hauled off in beast-hide sacks — panned later, it would give up its blood-gold. To the theater, all of it was raw material of enormous worth.

Metal-change material — especially from a jin beast of high Talent and high evolutionary stage — was profoundly useful. For all that these were now special-property alloys, they kept properties no ordinary metal had, which opened onto no end of applications and let you forge metal-change armaments.

First, metal-change — jin cores included — was…