The four-legged dragon, cocky beyond all reason, had gone off to duel the dragon-claw pagoda tree.

Shen Cong's face was dark. Being defied by his own battle-pet did not sit well with him at all — a battle-pet was supposed to obey absolutely, not put on airs with its master.

"That little worm needs teaching a lesson!"

The four-legged dragon was enormous. But in the eyes of a Shen Cong on the verge of becoming a peerless iron person, size like that was so much decoration. His physique had been strengthening by the day, keeping pace with the explosive climb in his Talent — he'd stood one meter ninety once. Now he was two meters twelve.

What exactly had triggered this latest growth spurt, Shen Cong couldn't say for certain.

He guessed at two causes. One was that he'd kept steadily eating Activity Pearls, which aided the body's development — enough small changes eventually forcing a change in kind. The other was that his body's capacity for holding Talent had hit its limit, so it had no choice but to grow larger and make more room.

Think of it as a bucket.

You could pack it with stones, then sand, then water, over and over — but the volume was fixed. The only way to break past that volume was to enlarge the bucket itself. The Firestarter grains held inside a fire-spirit medium were violently active by nature; even jin beasts could swallow and digest them. That they could break Shen Cong's physical limits was hardly hard to understand.

At two meters twelve, his physical qualities had doubled outright.

Burst force, endurance, speed, agility, resistance to punishment — all of it climbing explosively. Once, super-grade jin beasts had been easy work for him while ultimate-grade ones came hard. Now, with a good weapon in hand, an ultimate-grade jin beast cost him little effort. Throw in the Mushroom weapons and Shen Cong wouldn't flinch at a peerless jin beast either.

Out in the ocean there was a humpback whale three hundred meters long, its Talent and combat power beyond estimating.

But…