A good night's sleep.

And then the next day came — April 19.

Shen Cong woke with an excitement he couldn't quite keep a lid on. Today was the day he'd break into nuclear-grade.

Nuclear-grade wasn't a change in kind. It was only a way of carving up Talent, and in substance it didn't mean a great deal. The one division of Talent that genuinely mattered was the pressure aura — having one and not having one were two different tiers. Still, for all that nuclear-grade brought no concrete benefit, it stood for the sheer height of a Talent.

Nuclear-grade went by another name as well: peerless. That came from the Eastern Theater Command's early reckoning that nuclear-grade was the highest tier there was, a rank without equal.

But there were plainly far more terrifying Talents above nuclear-grade, and that three-hundred-meter humpback whale was the proof. Shen Cong hadn't named that tier yet. He was holding out for a name that was faithful, expressive, and elegant — and without feeling a creature of that tier's might for himself, he couldn't truly take the measure of what its strength amounted to.

Breakfast was a few pagoda beans. Their nutritional value was still an open question, but they went down without any indigestion.

This really was a metal a man could eat.

Breakfast finished, morning exercises done.

The work of devouring fire-spirit mediums formally began.

Alloy, resonate, draw out the Firestarter grains; the grains complete their change of nature and become part of the iron core; the Talent rises. Shen Cong had run this sequence so many times it had gone thoroughly fluent, and the minutes and the seconds slipped past.

In the space of a blink, two and a half hours.

He'd already devoured the seventh cubic meter of fire-spirit medium, and was working through the eighth.

The full sequence ran to its finish.

And Shen Cong instantly lost all interest in the action-romance feature playing on his computer screen. He shot to his feet, drew a deep breath, and let a smile break across his face — because in that…