"If my fate is mine to command, I can plant golden lotuses in the fire."

Shen Cong muttered the line like an oracle. He had no idea where he'd picked it up. It seemed to be from some novel he'd read; it had sounded like a great line for showing off, so he borrowed it.

He wasn't really sure what it meant.

But lately he really had been "planting golden lotuses in the fire," by studying his own proto-Firestarter.

A proto-Firestarter was what took shape once the Life Wall was broken and the mind threw off its organic form of thought: a brand-new source of life, source of intelligence and source of energy. It mimicked the workings of a celestial body. The Activity inside it seethed without end, like a volcano erupting, shot through with bolt after bolt of energy lightning, and all of that was the trace of thoughts flaring up and dying away.

Whether the universe has life is unknown.

Whether celestial bodies have life is just as unknown.

But in the universe, in every celestial body, the Earth included, countless bursts of energy are born and die every moment. Strip it down to the essentials, and maybe a celestial body is a proto-Firestarter.

"Even I can't fully see into the mysteries of the proto-Firestarter. Life really is the strangest thing there is. What you understand about yourself will only ever be half-baked." Shen Cong was an atheist and didn't believe in any creator, but the life that nature had produced left him in awe.

There was no way to crack every secret and understand the nature of life.

Then Shen Cong thought: Now the dual-brain Firestarter Spirit is in my keeping, and with fire cloud state interference its Superbrain collapse has begun. I have to concentrate through the whole process and record every detail of how a Superbrain evolves into a proto-Firestarter, so I can recall it whenever I need to.

Only by understanding what a proto-Firestarter was made of could he open up the next stage of evolution.

When it came to evolution, Shen Cong was…