Absorbing Vajra's blood around the clock, running experiment after experiment around the clock, with the occasional trip out to check on the dragon-claw pagoda tree — that had been Shen Cong's entire routine for three or four days running.

Over these few days, he could feel it every day: his skin-gold was undergoing a furious metallic gradation.

As the Great Vajra's metal-iron transitioned toward metal-steel, Vajra's blood kept exchanging over to Shen Cong through that special channel, accelerating his covering epithelium's metallic gradation.

Shen Cong didn't actually know whether the exchanged Vajra's blood accelerated metallic gradation across all his tissues, or only worked on the skin-gold stage specifically.

To find out, he'd gone to Chen Xiuni and, for the price of a few Activity-rich sweet potatoes, borrowed her cargo truck.

He'd meant to have her truck absorb some Vajra's blood too — a whole lake of the stuff, and Shen Cong could never use it all himself anyway. Unfortunately, likely because Chen Xiuni's carrier vehicle was still only at the connective-gold stage, its evolutionary degree wasn't sufficient, and it couldn't fully absorb Vajra's blood at all — so naturally, there was no way to observe Vajra's blood's effect on it.

"Only the skin-gold stage can manage even a grudging absorption. Which means even if Vajra's blood accelerates bone-gold, flesh-gold, connective-gold, and smooth-gold, there's no way to actually make use of it. And at the skin-gold stage, without using resonance to dilute Vajra's blood, absorption still isn't possible either… Perhaps Vajra's blood has an accelerating effect specifically on the Lv2 Pitch-Black Era."

Shen Cong held out real hope for this conclusion.

If it really worked that way, his evolutionary speed would leap forward enormously.

"March 15, I completed smooth-gold and began skin-gold. Today is March 25 — ten days, and my skin-gold stage is already nearing its end." Clenching his fist, watching the dim metallic sheen surface across his taut skin, Shen Cong couldn't help the corner of his mouth curling up. "This is exactly the pace I need!"

With skin-gold's completion drawing near, a metallic sheen had become visible on…