Shen Cong woke up different.

The eyebrows he'd lost had returned as faint dark shadows. His eyelashes were pushing back through the lid margins. On top of his head, black traces had reappeared where his hair had been.

Everything that had fallen out was growing back.

His gums itched. Small teeth were pushing up from the tissue one by one, silver-white in the light. The two front teeth had grown to about half their final size — they'd started silver, but were now shifting gradually toward white, as though something resembling enamel was forming over the metal surface.

He tapped them. The quality was unmistakably different from his old permanent teeth. These were metal, clearly and completely.

His fingernails and toenails had also begun growing back — thin, translucent, with a metallic sheen. Strange. Eye-catching.

"This looks like nail polish."

He studied himself carefully in the mirror: hair, teeth, nails, all of it. Overnight, his skeleton had essentially completed its transition from bone to metal. The speed was far beyond what he'd expected.

Could this be the banyan yogurt?

He'd drunk a large amount of it last night with no detectable Activity response whatsoever. But what if it worked like the Activity Pearls — not raising Activity Value, but promoting physical development? The timeline lined up. Two days ago he'd lost all his hair, nails, and teeth. Yesterday, regrowth had been slow. Then he drank the yogurt, slept, and woke up to find everything sprouting at once.

The only variable was the yogurt.

"Blackhead — come here."

Blackhead trotted over. Shen Cong ran a scan immediately.

The exoskeleton was noticeably more lustrous than yesterday. And Blackhead's Activity Value, which had been stuck for a long time, had increased.

After the meteorite fragment exposure, Blackhead's Talent had reached 0.41H. But for an extended period it had stalled at 0.36H and refused to climb further. Shen Cong had noticed this pattern before — not just in Blackhead, but across his insect companions broadly. Nearly all of them seemed to hit a wall at some point.

The Antgod's Talent was 0.774H; her Activity…