The biggest change Great Vajra showed after entering the Lv1 era was its Activity state — and the loss of alloying capability. Fortunately, self-repair remained: when the vehicle took damage, alloying returned to restore it, and extension was still fully functional, actually faster than before.

The speed of it gave Shen Cong an involuntary thought: You’re going to be able to transform.

Since they’d entered the Lv1 era simultaneously, the bond between him and Great Vajra had deepened. Great Vajra was no longer a metal object he had to concentrate effort to guide — it had genuinely become a part of his body, the way a limb was. He’d already had one moment where the boundary between himself and the vehicle had seemed to dissolve entirely.

He worked until past midnight recording data, then forced himself back to the bedroom despite having no desire to sleep.

The next morning: clear sun again, snowmelt accelerating.

He woke from a dream to an overwhelming sensation — as if countless tiny ants were crawling through his body from the inside. Every surface of his body prickled with it, deeply uncomfortable.

“What’s happening?” He gritted his teeth and tried to think through the discomfort. “Has entering the Lv1 era been a mistake for me?”

There were no examples of an iron person crossing into the Lv1 era. The path was his to discover alone. From Juchao District to New Hefei, from New Hefei to Nanjing — he’d sought larger organizations, hoping for data and accumulated wisdom that could guide his own evolution. He’d found organizations. He hadn’t found the answers.

The Old Pearl Mussel’s Lv1 transition had been full-body metallic invasion — with life functions intact, the flesh-gold retaining all its original capabilities and gaining more. “Is what’s happening to me now the same thing — my muscle tissue beginning to transform toward flesh-gold?”

“What am I becoming?”

He went to the laboratory, found a cutting tool, and opened his own arm.

He watched the cut carefully, looking for evidence of flesh-gold. The skin parted cleanly. Blood flowed — warm, red, unmistakably human blood. He cut away a small piece of tissue, set it on the lab table, quickly bandaged the wound, then cleaned the blood from the sample and examined it.

Normal tissue. No metallic invasion visible.

“Either the transformation has barely begun and isn’t showing yet, or this isn’t flesh-gold at all.”

He stared at the small piece of himself on the table. Then, after a moment, he ate it.

In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Xiahou Dun takes an arrow through the eye. His eyeball comes out. He shouts that the flesh his parents gave him cannot be discarded, and swallows it. Shen Cong felt broadly the same way — this was tissue his body had produced, it should go back into the body rather than be left on a laboratory table to rot.

He swallowed it without particular difficulty.

Whether it was the act of cutting the wound — redirecting his attention — or something else, the crawling discomfort in his body had eased somewhat. He found he could focus again. He turned his attention to the question.

He noticed Great Vajra was still drawing in ambient Activity. Some of it was being channeled into the vehicle’s framework — a specific reaction that appeared to be gradually increasing the structural strength of the metal. A different process from anything he’d observed before.

The rest was being transferred to Shen Cong through the continuous low-level Exchange.

“Where is this Activity going?”

He closed his eyes and extended his perception inward, tracking the exchanged Activity through his own body.

He found it almost immediately.

The Activity was accumulating in his bones.

“Bones?”

The connections arrived rapidly. Activity core. Bone-gold. Jin core.

“Is this what’s happening — not flesh being invaded by metal, but my bones undergoing metallic transformation? Like an evolved beast’s Activity core — the bone structure completes metallic transformation first, and then the rest of the body follows?”

He thought of the Old Pearl Mussel, but that was a soft-bodied organism — its Activity core was the shell itself. In the Lv1 transition, it had been impossible to determine whether any internal bone-equivalent structure had changed first.

“Is it really transforming my skeleton?”

He sat with this and felt his anxiety ease slightly. If that was actually what was happening — it might not be bad at all.

His physical capability had been capped at twenty-bull. The limit wasn’t arbitrary — it was architectural. His bones had a maximum load-bearing tolerance. Push beyond it and the force of his own strike would fracture his own arm before it reached anything external. That structural limit was the wall his strength kept hitting.

If his bones became metallic — Activity-core material — the load-bearing capacity would reach a level that was genuinely difficult to imagine. He carried a Beyond Three-Star Talent. Even the Golden Jiao hadn’t reached that. A skeleton built from Activity core material, at 3.012H Talent, would be something without comparison.

Let it be that.

THUD. THUD. THUD. THUD.

He worked the sharkskin punching bag — fast combinations, full power. With each impact he felt the internal crawling sensation diminish slightly and his physical response sharpen. Probably psychological displacement, a redirection of mental attention through physical activity.

But it worked. His body settled.

An hour of bag work before he made breakfast. After eating, he checked the ant burrow.

Black Three had emerged from its pupa. And the Antgod had produced a second oversized egg — the specialist-tier type.

He rested a hand on the Antgod’s head.

“Your level hasn’t increased in a long time. You’ve been eating enormous quantities, but all the Activity goes into your eggs. Aren’t you going to evolve yourself?”

Evolution… eat… colony… grow strong… evolution…

Her answer, in fragments, was clear enough. For her, evolution wasn’t measured by individual power — it was measured by colony strength. The same philosophy as the Dragon Hornets, the Pox Flies, the White Bone Beetles, the Treasure Bees: survival through collective growth rather than individual escalation.

Other insects had taken the opposite path.

He had thirty-odd Water Tyrant eggs in storage — representatives of an insect that had gone to the extreme of individual power, two creatures of Beyond-Two-Star Talent. The Water Tyrants were dead now. Only the eggs remained, still sealed, the question unresolved.

They were formidable. Ferocious. Among insects, they were apex predators in the same tier as tigers. As companion creatures, they would be extraordinarily powerful.

But Water Tyrants were aquatic — adapted to ponds and lakes, requiring water for survival. With his nomadic existence, carrying them was impractical, and in dry terrain they’d simply die. The environmental constraints were severe.

And he had the Vajra Ant colony now.

Individual Vajra Ants were weaker than Water Tyrants, but the colony’s growth trajectory had no apparent ceiling. Their evolutionary potential was something he was genuinely excited about.

“Keep the eggs with the highest Talent readings. The rest—” He looked at the sealed eggs. “—cook them. It’s been a long time since I had anything like eggs.”

(End of Chapter 243)