Once his body had been peeled free of the Vajra Fortress, Shen Cong finally broke the link between the two of them, and his consciousness took hold of the body again.

He hurt all over.

Mottled patches of red-brown metallic sheen. That was blood-gold, from bleeding across a wide stretch of skin.

Shen Cong got up off the bed. Pain of this sort meant little to him, because pain worked differently in him now. It used to be a nervous system of flesh and blood that registered it; now the spirit-fire carried the sensation, and pain had become a signal rather than a sharp stimulus.

"So the thing I was afraid of is going to happen after all…" Shen Cong wiped the blood-gold off his eyelids, and something unsettled moved in his eyes.

He had run through a good many scenarios for himself and the Vajra Fortress.

One of the likelier ones was that the Vajra Fortress and his body would finish merging. Granted, one had been machinery built out of metal and the other a body of flesh and blood made of organic matter. But with metallization coming on, the two were plainly evolving toward the same kind of thing.

A jin person completed his evolution by absorbing his jin core.

An iron person's "jin core" was the iron core, outside him and separate. Special radiative fluctuations might let man and core answer each other. But once the spirit-fire was kindled their forms of life had already drawn close, so the ground for a merger existed. Either Shen Cong absorbed the Vajra Fortress's iron core, or the Vajra Fortress assimilated him as a part of itself.

"As it looks now, absorbing the Vajra Fortress's iron core is going to be hard. The only road left is being swallowed by it and becoming part of it."

He took a shower. The ulceration on his skin was already healing fast, closing into a great many fine scabs — every one of them a bleeding point, and every one a place where the far end of his spirit-fire connected to the Vajra…