Huang Caishan immediately set about arranging for people to be sent to Xinyi City, to report Shen Cong's support plan to the theater and to have research personnel dispatched out here to work through the long-distance communication technology together.

There and back would take two or three days at the least.

The Vajra Fortress had completed its metal-steel evolution, but Shen Cong didn't leave the mercury lake straight away. Instead he called in the specialists who had been studying the mercury lake, to hear what results they had come up with.

There was an iron person among the specialists too — not a specialist himself, but there to assist with the research.

Shen Cong had never disclosed the mercury lake's secret, so the theater had sent its own people out to study it. They had tried a great many approaches, resonance among them: diluting the Vajra's blood and attempting to alloy with it. But this iron person's Talent was weak, only as far as the slick-gold stage of the Lv1 Pure Gold Era, and he couldn't absorb any of it.

Even so, there was one point in their findings that Shen Cong found genuinely illuminating.

There was a great deal of liquid metal in the mercury lake — even after two rounds of absorption Shen Cong had taken up less than a tenth of it. But in the eyes of the Eastern Theater Command's research personnel, that quantity was far too small. They knew Shen Cong alone had absorbed a tenth of it, which meant it was certainly usable, and with as many iron people as the theater had, one mercury lake would nowhere near suffice.

So the question of how to increase the Vajra's blood in the mercury lake had become a research direction of its own.

They brought in a great deal of genuine mercury and fused it with Vajra's blood, and after repeated groping experiments they finally turned up evidence that Vajra's blood simply was activated mercury — and successfully activated mercury into Vajra's blood themselves.

The material that catalyzed mercury's activation into Vajra's blood was Firestarter…