The first one Shen Cong hunted was the White Dragon King.

The white light blooming off the White Dragon King had to be hiding a great many useful secrets, as far as he was concerned.

"What the Three-King Tribes prove is that intelligence arising in a Firestarter Spirit is plainly harder to control than intelligence arising in a beast. Even a nuclear-grade evolved beast, tamed by humans long enough, will have its wildness ground away. But a Firestarter Spirit's wildness comes out of its 'bloodline.'"

Hunting and preying on Earth's creatures was a way of thinking already present in a Firestarter Spirit's earliest chaotic consciousness.

That was why Shen Cong had always taken a Firestarter Spirit for something like a "natural enemy" of Earth's creatures.

As a predator, and as a Mechanist, one of Earth's eight new intelligent species, Shen Cong would not allow any life form of a higher order above his head. A natural enemy, still less.

So hunting Firestarter Spirits was his own proper business.

The Baijiazhuang settlement also sat in a medium-sized oasis. The White Dragon King lay in a lake, and the lake seemed to be a hot spring, burbling up hot bubbles. Jin cores could be seen breaking the surface here and there. The jin cores' grade was not very high, but every so often the White Dragon King would pick one up and chew it, thoroughly at its ease.

But its time of ease had come to an end.

Shen Cong had felt out the settlement's fighting strength and knew nobody here could stop him. There was not even one who could stand a single exchange. Still, Shen Cong did not charge straight into the settlement to pick the White Dragon King off. For one thing he had no wish to slaughter his own kind indiscriminately. For another, staying outside guarded against a trap inside the settlement.

He loosed his pressure, drew it into a single thread, and sent it straight at the White Dragon King in the hot spring.

Splash!

Stung by Shen Cong's particle-grade pressure, the White Dragon King came awake…