"I'll form the head!"

That was Shen Cong talking to himself, because he was currently inside a state of mystery upon mystery. He could feel that he had become the fire-spirit heart, had become the Great Vajra, and he could see the Shen Cong beast inside "his own" body.

And the Shen Cong beast's body still held a consciousness of its own. It opened its eyes and looked at the fire-spirit heart.

For that split second, it was as though he were looking at himself.

Two selves, staring at each other.

His consciousness was still one thing, and yet it was as though it had split in two: he could set out from two vantage points, see two pictures, think through two problems. It was as though he had taken on the form of the Great Vajra, as though he and the Great Vajra had thoroughly merged into one, and with his own consciousness as the center he had turned the Great Vajra into a genuine living thing at last.

He and the Great Vajra had successfully fused. And he was the Great Vajra's brain, its skull, its head.

"Marvelous!"

Shen Cong no longer knew what emotion he was supposed to bring to this miraculous state. The change was too far outside the bounds of the imaginable; even feeling it with perfect clarity, it still carried the quality of a dream.

Back when the apocalyptic storm had first begun to blow, he had already become one living thing with the Vajra, able to feel the Vajra's vitality clearly, like a part of his own body.

But in those days, both the alloying capability and the perceptual link had been fairly weak.

As his Talent climbed higher and higher, the link had grown clearer and clearer.

And as his evolutionary grade climbed higher and higher, he and the Great Vajra had come to genuinely have the notion of two-become-one; when his body was wrapped inside the Great Vajra, it felt as though his thinking had passed straight through the Great Vajra and taken the form of a great truck, tearing across…