At nine in the morning, Shen Cong reached Shankou Town and met his little brother, the Snail Traveler.

The Snail Traveler was munching on jin trees, swaying idly, and the moment it noticed Shen Cong it gave a docile greeting — it was deeply fond of Shen Cong, and held him in awe.

Shen Cong asked at once, "Big fella — did you find the thing you came to find?"

"No… it's right here… I can't feel it…" the Snail Traveler answered, meaning that the mysterious object drawing it in was somewhere in this area, but it couldn't sense the location precisely.

So it had simply settled in here to graze. As a snail, it had none of Shen Cong's urgency about the mysterious object. In its world of thought, something drew it, so it came. Whether it found the thing or not wasn't within the range of its considerations, and whether it seized the thing or not went unpondered too.

Its IQ was a touch lower than Yellow Great-Immortal's.

Perhaps the snail's brain evolved slowly, whereas the Siberian weasel had a certain intelligence to begin with. The development of a brain required not only enlargement but sufficiently differentiated nerve cells forming a complex structure before sound thinking could arise.

Take an insect like the ant — with only a supra-esophageal and sub-esophageal ganglion, its differentiation wasn't complex enough, and even enlarged, it still couldn't produce more sophisticated, logical thinking capacity.

A snail's brain wasn't necessarily more complex than an ant's, so however much the peerless jin beast Snail Traveler evolved, its IQ was limited, its thinking ability likewise limited.

The four-legged dragon and Yellow Great-Immortal were different — they had, first of all, a complete and sufficiently complex brain, and once such a brain evolved, its thinking ability grew stronger.

The more complex the brain, the more it thought.

The four-legged dragon was forever wanting to kill jin beasts stronger than itself, to forestall threats to its position; Yellow Great-Immortal openly declared the mysterious object belonged to it and forbade others to lay a hand on it.

Both were…