The milu stood in the lake with those huge antlers on its head. They had been jin cores once, but with the Lv3 — Burning Era the jin cores had atrophied, the spirit-fire had kindled, and the antlers had gone back to looking the way antlers should.

A lot of human evolved people started returning to their original shapes after the Lv3 — Burning Era too.

Habit is a frightening thing.

Plenty of jin people used to complain that their jin cores stuck out too far and made them look like animals—the women especially hated the state their jin cores left them in. Now that their jin cores had atrophied and their bodies had gone back to the way they were, a lot of those same evolved people found they missed them.

Maybe it was jin cores changing what people found beautiful that made so many of them choose gigantism.

What you looked like didn't matter. What mattered was how strong you were.

Earth had already changed.

The new world was forming a brand-new view of the world, of value, of life itself.

"What do you want to talk to me about?" The milu sent out its own feeling. It wasn't a Firestarter Spirit and had no power to reshape itself by mimicry; its vocal cords were built differently, so it couldn't learn human speech.

Even if its intelligence was no worse than a human's.

Shen Cong stood at the top of the Qilin Arm, his body ready to fight the milu at any moment. "An exchange of information," he said. "Tell me your story."

"What story?"

"How you went from an ordinary milu to what you are now—a particle-grade milu, full of intelligence."

Something blank came into the milu's eyes. "The old things are hazy. I can't remember."

"Then how did you get strong? You can't have always been this strong. Particle-grade isn't easy to enter. I'm particle-grade too, and I know exactly how hard it is to get in."

"I don't know... I remember green grass and a lakeside, and humans coming by often... I remember a meteor…