The great earthquake stopped at noon the following day. By then the Tianjin oasis had changed beyond recognition; scenery that had once been like primeval jungle was now a graveyard of trees.

Whole swaths of forest had toppled. Looking down from high above, you could see bald patches scattered here and there.

As for the Vajra Fortress, that morning it had been swallowed by a fissure opening directly beneath its chassis. From the surface there was no sign of the Vajra Fortress now—only a few inconspicuous knots of metal left on the face of the soil to serve as eyes and ears.

When the fissure split open, Shen Cong had all but seized the opening to stuff the Vajra Fortress in himself.

Because the brain-cloud's gradation had left his body uncoordinated and his fighting strength weakened, he needed to lie dormant somewhere quiet. So Shen Cong simply buried the Vajra Fortress. Given its sheer strength, no earthquake, however severe, was going to destroy it. He was prepared to live underground for a while and get through the uncoordinated stage of the brain-cloud's gradation.

As for Yellow Great-Immortal and the four-legged dragon, he had packed them both off outside to move about freely, so long as they didn't leave the area.

When the earthquake stopped.

Shen Cong was still buried underground.

Day after day passed. The Activity concentration at the surface began to fall and then steadied, up by roughly 80 percent from before. The Super-Thunder Wave station recovered communications again, though the quality wasn't very high.

Shen Cong kept silent, only monitoring other people's traffic.

From the traffic among the Eastern Theater Command, the Provisional Government, and the China Rescue Team, he learned that this great earthquake had again been comprehensive crustal plate activity across the surface. A great many fissures had opened, but because of Shen Cong's earlier inference, nobody dared go deep into a fissure and provoke a Firestarter Spirit.

Even so, the radiative fluctuation of Firestarter Spirits had been detected in several fissures, and evolved beasts had begun rushing toward them.

Which was to say that Firestarter…