The Liaoning's arrival stirred up an enormous commotion in Lianyungang Harbor, where fish and shrimp had massed — shoals of fish-type jin beasts launched attacks on the carrier in droves.

The Liaoning's outer hull was chewed up worse than ever.

But none of that mattered anymore. Once the communications base station was set up, the Theater Command had already relayed to the Liaoning the carrier's "homecoming" plan — demolition.

An aircraft carrier damaged to this degree no longer mattered. What mattered were the iron cores.

So long as the iron cores could be hauled back, an industrial base could be established in short order. An iron core could only extend itself — it couldn't be cut or destroyed — but luckily, the iron cores aboard the Liaoning weren't especially large. Once the Liaoning ran aground on the shallows near shore, the Theater Command immediately rigged an aerial cable line between the carrier and the beach.

Then they began cutting away the iron cores, along with the "metal-iron" surrounding them.

Metal-iron was a term newly added to The Science of Evolution. Through long-term tracking of Lv1 — Pure Gold Era carrier vehicles, the laboratory had found that once a carrier vehicle entered the Lv1 — Pure Gold Era and its Activity solidified, the alloyed metal surrounding the iron core gradually began taking on properties similar to metal-change.

So, to pair with the term "metal-change," the term "metal-iron" was added.

Metal-iron and metal-change were still different things: metal-change was irreversible metallic gradation, whereas metal-iron was a reversible change in property. Cut metal-iron away from a carrier vehicle, and it would immediately begin losing Activity — in roughly a week, it would lose all Activity entirely and become ordinary metal.

A carrier vehicle missing a portion of its metal-iron could regain the ability to alloy quickly; once alloyed, the metal would be infused with Activity at once, then that Activity would solidify, and it would then become fresh metal-iron.

This process, too, would take roughly a week, for the new metal-iron to reach the same strength as the rest of the carrier vehicle.