The entire afternoon went to the problem of finding the meteorite fragment.

It had to be in the central barrier lake — the radial ring patterns he’d mapped earlier confirmed this was the radiation epicenter. But that only narrowed the search to the area of the lake itself, which was still an enormous surface. He couldn’t reduce it further.

He brought the drone out and flew it directly above the lake center, running repeated passes to build something like a satellite image. Then he analyzed the footage piece by piece, looking for the densest tree growth and deepest coloration — drawing out curved lines, trying to find a convergent center point through normal distribution.

Every curve found a different center. The results were scattered across the lake and its surrounding area with no coherent clustering. No normal distribution emerged. The center refused to resolve.

He tried the Geiger counter next, walking the entire lake bed to find where radiation peaked.

The counter jumped continuously the whole way around. No clear maximum. No useful gradient.

By evening he’d accomplished nothing except digging several meters-deep test pits at the most likely candidate sites, all empty. The sky was darkening. He returned to Great Vajra and filed the problem away for tomorrow.

Night. Great Vajra’s exterior lights burned in the dark.

Shen Cong stood in the light, looking at the Old Pearl Mussel clamped shut in its pool. In his hand was a new blade — the Tyrant Broadsword, freshly ground from the Water Tyrant’s sickle-leg Activity core — and he was preparing to pry the shell open.

That morning, before heading up the hill, he had sensed it: the Old Pearl Mussel had crossed into Lv1. Formally entered the Lv1 era. By The Huoxue’s terminology, it was now in the Peak Breakthrough Phase — on the threshold of a qualitatively new state.

Time to begin the research.

He wasn’t the only one who had theorized about what the Lv1 era would look like. The Research Institute’s specialists had discussed it at length. The general consensus: the organism’s body would enter a breakthrough state and undergo remarkable changes. These changes would likely be gradual rather than instantaneous — evolution wasn’t a video game where leveling up added a fixed number of stat points. The transition would take time.

Shen Cong wanted to document every step of the Old Pearl Mussel’s breakthrough. Lay groundwork for his own eventual crossing.

The Old Pearl Mussel was not cooperative. Shell clamped tight, no indication it intended to open.

He wedged the Tyrant Broadsword into the shell gap and applied force.

He had roughly ten tons of strength behind him.

The shell didn’t budge. He worked at it for a long time and couldn’t create a gap wide enough to fit his arm through. The Old Pearl Mussel matched his strength — which shouldn’t have been possible, but apparently was — and the shell itself was harder than expected, dense and metallic as a tungsten alloy plate.

Crack.

The junction between the blade’s handle and body snapped. The weakest point of any bone-gold weapon, as always.

He stood there holding a broken handle.

Conventional prying wasn’t going to work.

“You’re forcing my hand,” he said.

He found a Spike King Javelin and drove it through the narrow gap he’d managed, probing until he felt it contact mussel flesh. The creature was simply too large — a few javelin wounds provoked no reaction at all. Five or six minutes of repeated strikes. Bloody javelin tip. Shell still shut.

“Keep pushing me,” he said.

He gathered scraps of flammable hide, soaked them in gasoline, lit them, and blew the dense smoke through the shell gap — the same oxygen-deprivation technique he’d once used against the Giant Stag beetles in their nest.

The hides burned to ash. Smoke poured back out through the gap in lazy curls. The Old Pearl Mussel held on and didn’t open.

“Still pushing me.”

He switched approaches immediately. He went back to Great Vajra, retrieved an oxygen hose, directed a burst of pure oxygen into the shell interior, poured in a small vial of gasoline after it, and applied flame.

Foom.

Fire inside the shell. He could hear the gasoline burning, could hear the mussel flesh sizzling. Ten minutes of continuous burning. Not a single sign the shell was opening.

You may be strong, but the mountain stands unmoved.
You may be aggressive, but the moon shines on the river regardless.

This was getting difficult.

He didn’t want to kill it — not yet, not while it was in the Peak Breakthrough Phase and the whole point was to observe what happened. He also couldn’t simply smash the shell, since the shell was the Old Pearl Mussel’s Activity core; destroying it would directly threaten its life.

Time for something nastier.

“Keep this up and I’ll have no choice but to kill you,” he said, and reached for the Pepper Water.

He soaked a cloth strip in it, bound it to a section of inert steel pipe, and extended it through the shell gap.

It reached the mussel’s soft flesh.

Sizzle.

Pepper Water that had dissolved a Water Tyrant’s face at the 2H Talent level hit the mussel’s unprotected tissue. The result was instantaneous. The moment the cloth made contact, the Old Pearl Mussel’s shell snapped open — and where the Pepper Water had touched, the flesh collapsed inward like plastic foam held to a flame.

Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.

Shen Cong moved fast. Three large hydraulic jacks — Great Vajra’s alloy-reinforced ones — wedged into the shell rim.

He withdrew the Pepper Water immediately. Any more and he risked actually killing it.

The Pepper Water gone, the Old Pearl Mussel stopped registering pain and tried immediately to close again — and found three hydraulic jacks holding it open.

Seventy centimeters of gap, held.

“You could have just cooperated,” he said, strapping on his headlamp and beginning his examination.

The Lv1 era was an interesting definition to begin with — a designation Shen Cong had constructed himself, based on the theoretical limit of Activity capacity within a biological organism. It marked an evolutionary threshold.

But evolution — or mutation — was continuous and gradual. There were no jump cuts. No moment where an organism went from Lv0.999 to Lv1 and suddenly doubled its attributes. The transitions around that threshold would be subtle: a creature at Lv0.999, Lv1, and Lv1.001 shouldn’t look dramatically different from one another.

Small differences, certainly.

The critical unknown was what happened at the ceiling itself. Activity Value hitting its absolute maximum — and then what? Did evolution stop entirely? Did some qualitative transformation occur? No one had observed it before.

Now, for the first time, Shen Cong had a live Lv1 specimen in front of him. He intended to use it properly.

“Two very large pearls.”

His first observation: two pearls, each encased in a thin membrane and pressed against the inner shell wall. Large — approximately fifty centimeters in diameter each, elliptical and slightly irregular.

He noted them and moved on.

River mussels were mollusks. Beneath the two hard shell halves, everything inside was soft tissue, contracted into a dense mass. No capacity to defend itself. With the shell held open, there was nothing preventing thorough examination.

He worked his way through the interior systematically.

And then he found something.

The Old Pearl Mussel’s flesh — compared to the Pearl Mussels he’d butchered earlier — showed a change. Subtle. But unmistakably strange.

(End of Chapter 209)