Just as Shen Cong was getting ready to leave the Shiwandashan range, he noticed the sky changing. The clear sky began filling with great masses of fiery cloud, and the air turned heavy and close.

There was no wind.

Everything was still, as if time itself had stopped.

"What's going on?" Shen Cong had the odd sense that the free Activity around him was about to set solid. "Brother Dao, do you feel anything different?"

Brother Dao might be brain-dead, but its powers of perception were second only to Shen Cong's. It took a moment to savor the air. "Shen Cong, it's kind of stuffy. Not nice at all."

"Can you tell what's happening to the weather?"

"Dunno-lah!" Brother Dao said coyly, pitching its emotional waves toward the sound of Cantonese. It had heard a lot of Cantonese in the Southern Theater Command lately and had started putting on airs with it.

"Back, now."

Shen Cong immediately drove the Train Convoy off toward Guangzhou, taking Brother Dao, the four-legged dragon and Yellow Great-Immortal with him. The drive went smoothly enough, but the weather grew more and more unsettling.

They had set out in the morning. By afternoon the whole sky was stained blood-red by the clouds.

The free Activity in the air had actually condensed into water vapor and was clinging to the trees and rocks. If the Four-Armed Vajra's cab windows went without the wipers for a few minutes, the moisture condensed out of the free Activity fogged them up and blurred the view.

Brother Dao had been sprawled on the roof, but after shaking itself dry a few times, it squeezed back inside Car One.

"Lousy weather. Muggy and damp!"

The four-legged dragon wanted to squeeze into Car Two too, but it was far too big to fit. All it could do was keep shaking its body to fling off the moisture.

It complained about the weather nonstop.

So did Yellow Great-Immortal. It had just entered the Lv4 — Nebula Era, and it was clearly smarter. When the four-legged dragon griped about the weather, it joined in with…