On the matter of reproductive isolation, Shen Cong had thought altogether too much.

Back at the lymph-gold / gland-gold stage of his metallic gradation there were plenty more changes worth his thought and his research.

Metal food was one of them.

At present only the dragon-claw pagoda tree's pagoda beans were edible, and they still tasted bitter. No other jin tree had evolved as far as metallized iron-fruit or jin-fruit.

Jin tree evolution divided into five stages: bark, veins, roots and leaves, flowers and fruit, and heartwood. Most jin trees were currently at the vein stage, a small number at roots and leaves. Only the dragon-claw pagoda tree, with its remarkable Talent, had completed metallization outright — flowers, fruit, leaves, root hairs, every part of it wood-copper.

Shen Cong had picked a good quantity of jin leaves that had turned to wood-copper, wanting to test whether they could be eaten.

The results were disappointing. They couldn't.

Never mind that chewing them took enormous effort, several passes of the teeth before a jin leaf would grind down at all. Once they'd gone into his stomach, they came out again at the other end exactly as they had gone in. Undigested.

Whether metal food was viable in the end, Shen Cong had no way to explain.

In any case he could still eat organic matter for now. His appetite was small, but he felt no unbearable hunger, and the question of food didn't demand much of his attention yet.

Lymph-gold / gland-gold. No telling how much longer the evolution takes to finish. I can feel the endocrine work is done — it must have moved to a finer level now. Changing the essence of life.

Changing the essence of life meant substitution at the level of the genes.

From the inside out, metal replacing organic matter.

Of course.

All of this was Shen Cong filling in the blanks for himself.

He simply felt that this was roughly how it went. He hadn't observed it closely and hadn't gone looking for evidence to argue the point. As far as he was concerned, the…