The spirit-fire had begun to kindle, and though Shen Cong was still lying there like a corpse, his frame of mind had long since gone back to its old decisiveness.

The shape of the Lv3 — Burning Era was already plain to see.

The spirit-fire kept kindling, growing stronger all the time, and after long study Shen Cong finally found the key to it. It matched what he had imagined: he could not absorb Firestarter grains from outside himself. Only by drawing them out of the Vajra Fortress could he finish kindling the spirit-fire.

In its normal state, the relationship between Shen Cong and the Vajra Fortress was one of integrated life.

Even so, the two of them remained relatively independent individuals. To put it precisely, Shen Cong was the part that led the thinking, while the Vajra Fortress's iron core was the true center of them both — and his body no more than an extension of it.

"It may be the same for jin people. The jin core is the core, and the body is the extension." That he was not the center in the sense of life itself did not trouble Shen Cong. Body or Vajra Fortress, both were parts of him.

He could afford not to care which of them held the central place. But the core being split off from the body — that was a very serious hidden danger.

Freed from the body's constraints, the iron core could be built up again and again; the drawback was that its link to the body was not close enough. Above all, Shen Cong's body was relatively independent, a complete individual in its own right, with no attraction for Firestarter grains at all — it repelled them, in fact. Not until his body was paralyzed and withering did that repulsion weaken.

And so, at the very moment Shen Cong thought he could hold out no longer, his spirit relaxed, and the iron core's Firestarter grains were able to "slip in through the gap," kindling the spirit-fire in his nervous system and completing this stage of the evolution.