The four-legged dragon drank with great enthusiasm, and kept inviting Shen Cong to join it.

Looking at that silvery-white liquid, crystal-clear, nectar fit for immortals, Shen Cong found himself thinking of a drink called live bamboo wine. Live bamboo wine, so the story went, was made by choosing young bamboo, boring holes in it, pouring liquor inside, and leaving it a year or two to grow and quicken — a purely natural green product, wine with life in it.

"Could these mutated moso bamboos be the kind live bamboo wine is grown in, and they mutated afterwards?"

Then he shook his head. He knew live bamboo wine was a gimmick and nothing more. Alcohol would certainly hinder the bamboo's growth, and if the ethanol concentration inside ran too high the bamboo would metabolize it away itself. Take it out after a year or two and it would long since have stopped being wine at all.

Besides, even if the moso bamboo had mutated, there was no reason for the live bamboo wine inside it to mutate along with it.

"So the big bamboo produces this itself? The smell's very rich. Little Four's drunk a good deal of it and it clearly isn't poison. Even if it were, it couldn't poison me. I'm a metal life now." Shen Cong caught a double handful of the liquid and looked at it closely.

It was silvery-white and perfectly clear, like transparent mercury — or transparent Vajra's blood — with a metallic sheen moving in it.

The four-legged dragon had drunk a great deal of it with nothing wrong, so Shen Cong could not resist a taste of his own.

The liquid went into his mouth, and in an instant sweetness and a piercing cold filled it. In the heat of high summer the taste was like drinking Sprite; down his throat and into his stomach it went, and left him cool right through to the heart.

"That's good!"

One mouthful, and the aftertaste went on and on.

Since he had lost his sense of taste for organic food, it had been a long…