The red-glinting stone, metallic in texture.

Mixed within it was a substance like a Firestarter fragment, capable of triggering the craving to devour.

Shen Cong had once tried every method to crack the secret of the Firestarter fragment — resonance, heating, electrolysis, corrosion, cutting — all of them failures, able at most to shave off a bit of debris at a time. But the debris was likewise hard to make use of; it seemed to react with no substance at all, only ceaselessly releasing Firestarter energy, catalyzing metal to release Activity.

And now, the red-glinting stone was, by Shen Cong's guess, a mode of using a Firestarter fragment.

"The meteor shower brought the Firestarter fragments. Most fragments, because they're hard to make react, formed the Oases one by one… Very likely one fragment, though, underwent a peculiar change, forming what is now the Firestarter Spirit."

"Just what form of thing is the Firestarter Spirit? Is it even a life body? If it's a life body, does it come from Earth's own pollution-evolution, or from life nurtured by the meteor shower?"

Shen Cong cupped the glowing stone in both hands, a thousand thoughts churning.

He even suspected the Firestarter Spirit was alien life.

Opening his mind wider still — maybe Activity itself was a hoax, a tool aliens used to remake Earth, waiting for Earth to fully metallize into an environment suited to alien survival, and then to colonize it.

Just like the opening of Transformers: Age of Extinction, where mechanical ships drop bombs to remake Earth into a metallic state.

Only this notion, too, was hard to make self-consistent.

If the aliens were really so formidable, able to guide changes in life-forms at will, why not simply kill off all of Earth's life outright? Why go to all the time and trouble of gradually changing all of Earth's life into a metallic form?

And besides.

If the Firestarter Spirit represented the aliens, it looked every which way like a creature with no intelligence — apart from imitating, all chaotic thought.

"Could it be the aliens are chaotic life bodies, like…