"Milu, what method did you actually use to compress the Firestarter fragment into a fluid?" Shen Cong asked the one question that mattered most.

There was no denying it: the milu's luck was enviable.

At the beginning of the end it mutated stronger than the other animals and plants. Then it found a Firestarter fragment, and then it hunted a Firestarter Spirit. Finally it figured out the supercritical state of a Firestarter fragment and absorbed the energy in one go, entering particle-grade, level with Shen Cong, the strongest human alive.

Set against the milu's luck, Shen Cong's own road to particle-grade had been hard.

He had set out from Wuwei in Wuhu, and on the way to New Hefei the angry sparrows swarmed him. Blowing up Liu Zheng's fire truck was what showed him an iron core could be fused and devoured. That was his first Talent gain.

A week or two of work dug a meteorite fragment out of the Huanglishu Mini-Oasis. He took its radiation, and that was his second.

Near the fog city of Xuzhou, he risked his life hunting the Black-Iron Giant Bear, then buried himself in research through several explosions until he came up with the Banner Body-Strengthening Method. That was his third.

After that, around Mount Tai, he hunted Firestarter Spirits alongside Yellow Great-Immortal and the other huge beasts and came away with a great deal of fire-spirit medium. That was his fourth.

Last of all he went to Baoding City and used the Primal Energy Fluctuation Method he'd traded the China Rescue Team for to push himself up into particle-grade.

Every one of those gains came from chasing it without stopping—traveling the world at his own risk, trading, searching, researching. Endless effort had bought him the position he held now.

The milu, knowing nothing about anything, had evolved all the way to particle-grade without a real scare along the way.

And it was about to become a Primal Beast, one of the eight species.

Its luck was extraordinary.

Something hard to name flickered in the milu's huge eyes. "Human, you're strong. This method…