The Firestarter Spirit.

The fire-spirit heart, the Superbrain.

Firestarter fragments, Firestarter grains.

Shen Cong had already conceived the ambition of developing the Vajra Fortress into a Transformer.

The future he saw was himself standing at the summit of the Earth, driving the Vajra — a super life form that changed shape at his whim — out into the deep of the cosmos, following the direction the Firestarter had come from, searching out the place the Firestarter had originated. If the seeds of metallic life the Firestarter had brought weren't unique to this world, then there had to be more metallic civilizations out there.

A vast design rippled through him, and it broke his field of view free of the Earth's constraints and threw it up at the stars overhead.

How should the swallow and the sparrow know the ambitions of the swan?

You're all still struggling away down here on Earth. I'm about to campaign out into the sea of stars.

He let the reverie run a moment, then reined it back in.

Shen Cong returned to his own patch of ground in the Mount Tai region, and used the eighty thousand cubic meters of low-quality fire-spirit medium he couldn't carry with him to concentrate on cultivating the Vajra-Ant colony.

Start them young: the major-worker larvae only just hatched out of their eggs would begin raising their Talent right now.

Laying the foundation for the evolution to come.

Around the feeding work, he also picked up his saved game of Red Alert where he'd left it. This mission was the flight to the moon to wipe out Yuri's base.

Exploit the bug to sell barracks in bulk, then churn out a great heap of rocket troopers, then go berserk with Apocalypse Tanks... roll straight over the top of everything and beat little Yuri into the ground.

One level cleared, and he felt wonderfully refreshed.

He left the cave.

Mounted the four-legged dragon and started wandering the foothills of Mount Tai. This vast Mount Tai region was essentially Shen Cong's to range across as he pleased. He meant to have a…