Summer weather changed without warning. Yesterday it had been pouring rain; today the sky was clear.

Shen Cong slept straight through to noon, and only then did the tiredness of his late night finally lift.

The thunderbolt giant fir had rooted itself in this stand of shorter firs and showed no sign of walking on. It was awake now. The hole cut into it the night before had already healed a little under halfway shut, and in another day or two new wood-copper would fill it in. Sunlight came down, the air hazy with rising vapor, and the fir's gray-brown bark glinted with a metallic sheen.

Shen Cong stood on the roof of the Vajra Fortress, using Fir–Cicada Language to translate the feeling carried in the thunderbolt giant fir's Activity waves.

The old tree spirit had the feelings peculiar to a plant.

"Growing." "Nutrients." "The sunlight feels so good." "So much water down below." "Absorb, breathe, photosynthesize." And so on.

But when Shen Cong spoke to it in Fir–Cicada Language, the thunderbolt giant fir reacted in a way nothing like the dragon-claw pagoda tree had.

The dragon-claw pagoda tree had never reacted at all. It had only given off its own feelings as muddled Activity waves.

The thunderbolt giant fir put out a fluctuation with a question in it. "Mm?"

Shen Cong sent one back. "Mm?"

So the thunderbolt giant fir sent another. "Mm?"

Shen Cong sent one over again. "Mm?"

That went on for better than ten minutes, one man and one tree, mm-ing back and forth. Shen Cong found it a dull way to hold a conversation, but he got something out of it all the same.

The thunderbolt giant fir's intelligence was probably of the lowest kind, newly sprouted, and as clean as a blank sheet of paper.

"You could say this tree is a bare machine for now. A computer with no software installed… If I teach it something, that amounts to installing software. Could I just tame it outright?"

Shen Cong turned it over in his mind.

Taming a tree. There was something appealing about…