One stroke of Mind Storm, and the Slime King was ground to grit.

Shen Cong stood in the soft black drift of sand, digging here and there with a spade forged out of jin core.

The four-legged dragon came over as well, eyes bulging, staring at the Slime King that had recently had it running with its head in its claws and which had now simply melted and caved in on itself. It was thoroughly shaken.

Clang.

Shen Cong's spade struck something hard, and he dug it straight out. It was the jin-core arrow he had loosed earlier, its surface already corroded. He turned it over in his hands a while; the jin-core arrowhead was still reasonably bright, but the metal shaft was on the edge of being scrap.

So this is how the Slimes eat metal?

Looking at the ruined shaft, Shen Cong frowned and thought it through. Every evolved individual needed to draw in nutrition, and jin fungi were no exception. The iron-skin vegetable and the mouse wood-ear were plant-leaning jin fungi, taking nutrition from the ground and the air. Fog fungi could feed on animal blood. Bug cores parasitized human bodies.

So plainly the Slime devoured by taking food into its body and enveloping it.

Having worked through that much, Shen Cong pulled the head off the jin-core arrow, dropped it in his pocket, and tossed the shaft aside. He hadn't come here to research what Slimes ate; he wanted to find the Slime's core. He had judged the Slime to be a jin fungus, but there was something of the Firestarter Spirit about it.

It could change shape, after all.

Perhaps there was a core somewhere, driving the many Slimes to scatter and gather.

He dug all the way to the bottom and still found no such core. This was the Slime from the central portion, blacker and brighter, richer in metallic sheen.

No core? Shen Cong stopped digging. Could it be this Slime King isn't a single entity at all — that it's all the small Slimes aggregated together, with no distinction between them, holding…