Five hundred meters out, Shen Cong kept sizing up the dragon-claw pagoda tree.

The Four-Legged Dragon eyed it too, curious — left eye, then right eye. In all her life, this was the first time she'd seen a great tree that could walk.

It reminded her of the Mechanical Vine, back in the day.

Her gaze went vicious at once. "Bopo… moving tree… kill… hate…"

"Easy now." Shen Cong patted her enormous head.

The Four-Legged Dragon stuck out her tongue, licked her own eyeball, and produced a noise of indeterminate meaning: "Mm…"

At five hundred meters, observation yielded nothing conclusive.

Shen Cong gave the order. "Little Four, forward."

She obediently trotted a couple of quick steps ahead, closing to three hundred meters — inside the clear field of Shen Cong's Third Eye.

The Third Eye opened, and in an instant every detail of the dragon-claw pagoda tree poured into his mind.

It was an enormous specimen, and judging by externals alone, not so different from an ordinary dragon-claw pagoda tree. It had just entered its flowering period, branches lush and full, trunk and limbs gnarled and winding. The bark looked rock-hard, yet it could twist — the branches flexing into tentacles that slowly levered the trunk forward.

Where the branches stabbed into the ground, they left the small holes.

The taproot dragged along the earth, plowing that long trail — three meters across.

The many branching roots around the taproot dragged too, and together they raked out the ten-plus-meter-wide track.

Every time the branches moved, you could hear it: a creaking, groaning protest from the branch-trunk joints, like something about to snap. The bark puckered and split into stress cracks. In other words, the pagoda tree's branches couldn't rotate freely — every flex damaged bark and tissue.

The dragon-claw pagoda tree paid this no mind whatsoever. It just kept its head down and marched.

Though "head down" wasn't really the phrase.

Shen Cong rode the Four-Legged Dragon alongside the pagoda tree for five hundred meters — an hour's worth of its walking — and never located its head. Or its…