The further he pushed, the more remains appeared at the roadside. Human bodies. Jin beast carcasses. Three iron-person vehicles.

Two of the vehicles still carried active Activity signatures — their iron people were alive somewhere, just separated from their carriers. He left those untouched. The third, an armored vehicle, was bleeding Activity: its iron person was dead. He dismantled it. Talent 1.471H — slightly higher than the ambulance, but still modest. Base-level iron people in the Eastern Theater Command hadn't had the same opportunities as the senior leadership: the meteorite fragment exposures and large-scale raw metal consumption that lifted the ceiling on the upper tier's Talent simply hadn't been available to them.

There had been incidents, early on, of iron people killing other iron people to absorb their raw metal. The Command had investigated one such case, confined the perpetrator, and repurposed his carrier vehicle as a processing platform. The lesson the Command drew from it was clear: a carrier vehicle, in the broadest sense, occupied roughly the same role for an iron person as an Activity core did for a jin person.

This had led Shen Cong to a distinction he'd been refining since his conversation with Nan Guohua.

Jin cores and ordinary metallic-transition bone were different products of the same process. Superficially similar in defense, density, and structural strength — but bone-gold created through normal skeletal transition couldn't produce the sharpening reaction that made jin cores useful as weapons, and couldn't serve as totem focal points.

Jin cores were categorically distinct.

And the variety of tissue types that produced jin cores in different species was becoming hard to ignore. The Golden Jiao's horn-like protrusions: muscle. The Swiftclaw Leopard's tail whip: a fusion of bone, muscle, and skin. The Jin-Skin Dolphin's sharkskin: outer integument. The Six-Horned Dragon's gill-horn cores: gill tissue. None of these were bone. Each was something else.

In the conversation where Nan Guohua had mentioned his plans to write a comprehensive reference work and unify the terminology, Shen Cong had suggested: "Jin core is jin core. Bone-gold is bone-gold. Keep them separate."

The Command's existing nomenclature…