Nan Guohua took in what Shen Cong had told him, questioned him closely on it, and then said he would need to think it through in detail and digest it properly. Among evolved persons at present, only Shen Cong had reached the deep stages of the Lv2 Pitch-Black Era, and his perception of his own body ran far past any other iron person's.

And only Shen Cong had nothing better to do all day than turn his own body over in his mind, feeling out every last thread of change in it again and again.

What he supplied was authoritative by definition.

The information was handed over; the rest was waiting. Waiting for Nan Guohua's team to come back with a better picture of the evolution ahead — the substances gland-gold secreted, the metallic gradation of the nervous system. Both mattered enormously, and both were things Shen Cong badly needed to understand.

With that business finished, it was already midday.

Nan Guohua settled down to eat in the laboratory. Shen Cong stood by and watched — watched other people eating with relish — and felt wretched in a way he could not name. There had been a time when he could treat a meal as a pleasure too. Enjoy the taste of things. Enjoy his stomach turning over from hunger to fullness.

Now he could not eat.

All he could do was interrupt somebody else's meal. "Director Nan. What's this about crustal movement?"

Yesterday he had heard Liu Yiwu mention it: the theater had been studying conditions at sea and had found that the metallic matter in the Earth's crust was being corroded by the Firestarter and releasing Activity, which might bring on crustal movement.

Shen Cong took a considerable interest in that.

The modest goal he had set himself was to become the predator at the top of the food chain. The distant one was to go and see what lay far away — the future was the sea of stars.

But he could not conquer the Earth yet, and where the Earth's own disasters were concerned, the will…