The Academy of Sciences' research covered a great deal of ground, running from Activity waves to the distribution of species, from the origin of evolution to how it might develop in the future. But most of it was on evolution itself, and above all on the evolution of human beings.

Shen Cong read with his whole attention.

The Eastern Theater Command, with Nan Guohua at its head, had put forward the metal contamination model to crack the secret of evolution. The Provisional Government had put forward the gene-replacement decay theory, which likewise tried to bring the whole system of evolution under one roof.

The gene-replacement decay theory was a theory still at the conjectural stage. In broad outline it went like this.

Activity was released after the meteors came down, and what it really changed was the component parts of DNA — deoxyribonucleic acid. Nucleic acid has four nitrogenous bases, and different sequences of them make up the whole of DNA. DNA carries out the instructions of heredity and directs how a creature develops and how the machinery of its life runs.

Under the stimulus of Activity, metal replaces the foundations of those four nitrogenous bases: guanine, thymine, cytosine and adenine.

Guanine's chemical formula is C5H5N5O. Adenine's is C5H5N5. Thymine's is C5H6N2O2. Cytosine's is C4H5N3O. As you can see, they contain the elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen.

Because carbon is one of the components, most life on Earth is classed as carbon-based life.

"In our research we found that an evolved individual's metabolism is extremely fast, and that every cell in the body is going through it. It begins with the demon core — the jin core, in your words. This metabolism may have been assimilating and replacing all the carbon-based DNA with a metal base from the very start." Tao Zhongyang added his explanation from the side.

The coding of DNA builds the whole living body.

Once the DNA has been replaced by that particular metal, what the coding produces is naturally a metal structure.

"Don't you divide evolution into Lv0, Lv1 and Lv2? Set against our theory,…