Squawk, grumble!

Out on the battlefield, the four-legged dragon's yelps of pain came one after another.

Shen Cong had assumed that after half an hour of probing and stalemate the four-legged dragon had worked out some clever way to handle the dragon-claw pagoda tree. Turned out it was still the stupid way — swinging its jin-core claws to shear off the pagoda tree's branches and the fruit hanging from them.

It did manage to cut down a fair number of fruit-laden branches.

But the pagoda tree's lashing boughs had beaten it bloody in the process, blood-gold scattered across the ground. Its two forelimbs had it worst; the scales there were already split and shattered.

All that, for a few mouthfuls of fruit.

Still, the four-legged dragon's ferocity was up now, and it didn't back off — it went wilder instead, taking the whipping and hacking desperately at the pagoda tree's branches all the same. Screaming, spilling blood across the earth, claws never stopping, until it had cut the pagoda tree's foliage down like rain.

The pagoda tree couldn't speak.

All it could do was push its feelings out on its Activity wave — anger, danger, injury, nutrition, hold the line, kill the enemy.

The fight ran a full twenty minutes.

The pagoda tree's crown was a ring smaller; the four-legged dragon was bathed in its own blood. But for all it had lost, it had gained plenty too — the fallen branches carried a great many ripe dragon-claw pagoda fruits, long golden-yellow strings beaded like a chain of knuckles, not unlike honey-locust pods. This was the pod that trees of the pagoda family bear.

The dragon-claw pagoda tree's pod was, naturally enough, a dragon-claw pagoda pod.

Whimpering and grumbling about the pain, the four-legged dragon swallowed the dragon-claw pagoda pods down.

Watching this, Shen Cong couldn't help wondering. He'd seen the four-legged dragon eat plenty of times, and it was the same as him — it only ate the parts that hadn't turned to metal. But this time it was eating fruit that had already metallized. That was out of…