As his strength had grown — and particularly as his mastery over Activity had deepened — Shen Cong's sensitivity to force had reached an almost surgical level of precision.

Every punch he threw, he could read the result as it happened.

A master craftsman who has spent decades handling heavy objects develops an instinct for weight — a brief feel in the palm and he knows within a kilogram. Shen Cong surpassed that kind of intuition, because he had Activity as a second, wholly distinct mode of perception. Activity was a particularly strange substance — the Command's researchers still couldn't define what it was. But for Shen Cong as an iron person, Activity was a structural component of his own body, something he experienced as a kind of radiation that could be clearly and directly felt. Mysterious as that sounded, it was simply the reality of his existence. The way eyes produced a visual picture of the world, Activity produced its own picture — a separate layer of perception that was uniquely his.

This was why a brief touch on a jin beast, jin person, or evolved tree gave him their level information. He was "looking" at them through Activity, the way you'd look at a stranger and immediately read their height, build, and rough age. The only way to fool it was to deliberately mask your Activity radiation frequency — the equivalent of wearing a hat, sunglasses, and a disguise. Without that active concealment, the read was automatic.

Activity could be understood as a seventh sense, beyond the standard five plus whatever you called instinct.

With seven senses establishing his perceptual framework — and all five standard senses progressively sharpening along with his physical development — his capacity for judgment had expanded far beyond the ordinary human range. He could see further, hear further, smell further, and process all of it faster. Even without Activity perception, the enhancement to the baseline senses alone would have made him a fundamentally different kind of creature than he'd been a year ago.

That charged strike was thirty-five tons. My skeleton and muscles…