In Beijing City, Shen Cong added another group of researchers to his small team and set them to work rebuilding the iron lion.

An Sanshun and his people had already rebuilt it into a lion that moved with ease. When Shen Cong sent his consciousness into Smartbrain No. 2, he could run it flat out across open ground.

Its material had been parasitized by mechanical vines and then reworked with heavy-armor alloy, and it was now about as tough as a super-grade evolved beast's defenses.

The structure followed the "mechanical–Activity wave principle" all the way down. There was no central control system to speak of—or, more accurately, the central control system was Smartbrain No. 2 together with the spirit-fire distributed through the body.

Every drive signal traveled on spirit-fire.

The power itself was electricity.

Taken as a whole, the iron lion was an assembly of hardware, and Smartbrain No. 2 was the software running it. When the lion needed to walk, Smartbrain No. 2 worked through the spirit-fire on every electrical component in each leg, switching them on and off, and out of those switches it could build any posture it liked.

Compare the iron lion's structure with the human body.

Smartbrain No. 2 was the brain. The spirit-fire was the nervous system. The Activity waves were the electrical signals running along the neurons. The electricity was ATP, adenosine triphosphate, which supplies the energy for muscle movement. All the mechanical structures were bone and muscle together.

Smartbrain No. 2 issued the order, the spirit-fire carried the Activity wave, and the Activity wave governed the release of electricity and the movement of the machinery. That was how it handled a complex instruction.

It was all exploratory work toward the Transformer rebuild to come: finding a way for such a machine to keep its mobility and its fighting power.

Now that the lion's body was this lively, Shen Cong wanted to go a step further and design a way for it to change shape. An animal shape was good for fighting. A car, a plane or a ship was good for getting…