A single plant had consumed an electrical tower.

In this strange new post-Apocalypse world, something like this could happen. And honestly, it wasn't even that surprising anymore. Iron people merged their lives with vehicles. Metal came alive on its own. A plant assimilating a steel tower was another entry in the same category. Once you accepted that Activity had fundamentally changed the nature of metal — turned it into a component of biological systems — the rest followed.

The Mechanical Vine parent plant absorbed the metal and didn't convert it to nutrients. It merged with it. Made it a structural element — like a trunk, like a skeleton. What kind of growth pattern is that?

He stood there with the metal fragments in his hand, looking at the still-standing tower, the severed tendrils covering the ground around it, and the large lizard methodically destroying those tendrils for emotional satisfaction.

His thinking moved quickly.

The Mechanical Vine's structural properties were exceptional. Its tensile strength and flexibility combined in a way that the Jin-Skin Dolphin King's sharkskin came to mind as a comparison — it had wrapped around the Four-Legged Dragon and held her despite everything she threw at it, which said something about what it could do. And this vine could grow through metal. Assimilate metal. Incorporate steel lattice into itself while the steel kept its original form and didn't significantly change its properties.

Most critically: the metal fragments in his hand still carried Activity. Not an intensified "more vital" quality, but stable Activity — enough to transplant and maintain, the way the cutting in the pot had been transplanting and living.

Interesting.

He was turning the fragment over in his hand, and without thinking about it he compressed the metal scraps into a ball and pushed Activity into them.

The response was immediate and unexpected.

New growth appeared from the compressed metal — fine tendrils, emerging from nothing, extending rapidly outward the way a grapevine sends out new shoots in spring. He hadn't expected this. He added more Activity. The tendrils kept growing, extending along his hand, finding the Hell…