A great jin tree had been pulled up and carried off — there was no way Shen Cong was letting a mystery like this go uninvestigated.

He fired up the Great Vajra at once and gave chase northward along National Highway 205, which ran close by the ten-meter-wide trail. The residual track wove and wobbled its way north, running parallel to the 205 and never far from it — comfortably inside his Third Eye Radar's range. Shen Cong took the more convenient highway.

Starting from around Chonggou Town on the map, the trail wound steadily north.

Past Tanghe Town. Past Bahu Town. Past Tangtou Town. Then it turned onto Provincial Road 227 and kept going north. Along the way, Shen Cong stopped repeatedly to inspect the trail on foot, and found several more lengths of broken branch — every one of them from the same tree as the little yellow flowers.

The verdict was solid: a Beyond-Four-Star, fully metallized great tree really was being dragged north.

"And the whole way — not a single trace of a jin beast doing the dragging…" As the pursuit stretched on, Shen Cong's confusion slowly resolved toward an answer he hardly dared to imagine.

Here at Gegou Town, he found yet another short fork of branch — this one snapped off inside one of the small holes.

"No knife marks. No bite marks. No tearing. This branch was broken off. And from the way it broke — and the fact that it broke off inside one of the small holes — I can infer that the small holes were made by the branches. Every small hole along this entire trail was made by branches."

"The drag mark down the center would be the tree's taproot, and the surrounding holes were punched by the limbs…"

Shen Cong's breathing quickened. His own hypothesis struck him as inconceivable — and yet not impossible. "Could it be there was never any jin beast dragging it at all? That every one of these traces was made by the great jin tree itself? It pulled itself out of the earth,…