The Four-Legged Dragon slept until late afternoon. Her wounds had scabbed over by the time she woke.

Shen Cong spent the interval hauling water to rinse Great Vajra clean. "This creature's saliva is genuinely foul. I'm going to have to train her out of the random licking."

Establishing a perceptual link and acquiring the Four-Legged Dragon as a companion had not made things simpler. She was clearly intelligent — thoughts with structure, some logical coherence — but her fundamental animal nature meant her obedience had nothing like the automatic compliance he got from a dog toward a person.

The perceptual link wasn't mind control. It was a communication channel.

Shen Cong's understanding of the mechanism was incomplete — New Hefei's research hadn't produced definitive findings — but his working model was this: a kind of thought-synchronization effect built on Activity resonance between linked organisms. Non-coercive in nature. The Antgod, Blackhead, the Four-Legged Dragon — none of them were compelled to follow his commands.

What happened instead was closer to the caterpillar-following effect. A lead caterpillar walks; the ones behind follow instinctively, without conscious decision. When Shen Cong's higher-intelligence mind produced a clear directive thought, the linked animal's less developed mind had no logical basis to counter it, and so it simply... followed the thought. An effect that resembled obedience without being obedience.

The key variable was intelligence. Higher intelligence meant more available counterweights — a mind capable of developing competing logical frameworks to push against the dominant thought. Lower intelligence meant less capacity to resist, and the following effect held more firmly.

Blackhead followed his directives with almost no deviation. The Antgod was the same — full compliance, consistently. Both had relatively patterned, lower-complexity cognition. Once Shen Cong set a following thought, it held without interruption.

The Four-Legged Dragon was more intelligent than either, and would be harder to maintain influence over as a result.

The Mechanical Vine was the extreme edge case in the other direction — perceptual link established, but plant cognition produced nothing that resembled thought. The transmission was essentially continuous environmental feedback: comfortable, uncomfortable, uncomfortable, comfortable.…