The mercury lake quietly mirrored the westering sun, glinting with a mirror-like brilliance, lighting up its surroundings bright and dazzling — the scenery utterly gorgeous.

This plainly didn't look like an iron core or a natural carrier vehicle.

Liquid metal, in Shen Cong's memory, apart from metal melted at high temperature, meant only mercury (quicksilver), which was liquid at room temperature. Gallium and cesium were liquid at indoor temperatures too, but one required 29.76 degrees Celsius, the other 28.44, and weren't liquid most of the time.

Only mercury became liquid at anything above negative thirty-nine degrees.

At room temperature it could also evaporate. Mercury vapor and mercury compounds were mostly chronically, acutely toxic. When wealthy ancients were buried with the dead, they'd pour mercury into the bodies of young boys and girls — begun while they still lived — so that after the children died, their skin would stay fresh and lifelike.

In many legends and tales, mercury held a special place.

Of course, that had nothing to do with the mercury lake before him. The viscous liquid metal in this lake wasn't ordinary mercury — or rather, it was very like a mercury that had been activated into life.

Shen Cong watched the mercury lake with bright, piercing eyes, the Third Eye already sweeping the surface countless times, trying to find what was special about it.

He could feel the mercury lake radiating a very strange Activity oscillation, yet couldn't perceive what oscillation it was. "Could this be another kind of special Activity wave?"

Visual inspection being useless, Shen Cong turned to ask, "How much do you know about the mercury lake?"

"Very little." Miao Huafeng answered. She was a very short woman of twenty-seven or -eight, an iron person, her Talent second only to Chen Xiuni's. "Every time you observe the mercury lake, there's a feeling of wanting to drink it down — but obviously it can't be drunk. An iron person drank it once before. The result: dead."

Chen Xiuni took up her words. "Later we studied it. This mercury, once it leaves the mercury lake, is…