Elsewhere, a thousand miles away.
The mountain forest here was different from those elsewhere. The trees were so tall they hardly seemed native to Blue Star, their trunks so thick it would take more than a dozen people joining hands to encircle them.
Their crowns intertwined high overhead, forming a green canopy. A strange, delicate fragrance filled the air, and a single breath seemed to open every pore in the body.
The source of the fragrance was a fruit.
The fruit was only the size of a fist and a deep, dusky blue all over. Its skin was so thin it was almost transparent, and light could faintly be seen flowing inside.
It grew atop a protruding rock. There were no shrubs or weeds around it, only bare stone and a thick layer of moss covering its surface.
The fragrance spread from the fruit in waves, like some silent summons, drawing every Evolver within hundreds of miles.
The first to arrive was a solitary middle-aged man who wielded a pair of short blades. His movements were sharp and efficient; he had clearly been a trained fighter even before Spiritual Qi Revival.
He had only just reached the edge of the rock when he heard something cutting through the air behind him. Forced to roll sideways to dodge, he looked back and saw seven or eight figures darting out of the woods. There were men and women among them, some alone and others in groups.
Every gaze was fixed intently on the fruit.
No one spoke, and no one demanded to know who the others were or where they had come from.
Before an opportunity like this, words were superfluous. Only those who survived would be qualified to reach for it.
The killing erupted in an instant. The middle-aged man with the twin blades cut down a tall, thin man trying to circle behind him, but before he could pull his blade free, a flexible sword thrust in from the side and mangled his wrist.
The sword's wielder was a woman in her forties. Ruthless in her attacks, she struck home and then, without hesitation, stabbed at another young man standing in front of the rock.
The young man didn't even have time to scream before he fell, clutching his throat.
At the same time, a group of Evolvers in matching black combat uniforms came around from the north. Their covering fire and close-combat assaults were well coordinated; they were clearly an elite squad dispatched by some faction.
They eliminated several independent cultivators along the way, and just as they were about to reach the fruit, a violent tremor suddenly came from beneath their feet.
The protruding rock was rising.
No!
Not just the rock! The entire stretch of ground was rising.
The soil split down the middle, cracks spreading in every direction like a spiderweb. Rocks, trees, earth—
Along with the Evolvers locked in combat, everything was lifted up by an irresistible force.
Everyone stopped what they were doing. Some tried to jump down, but when they looked below, the ground was already gone.
As the soil fell away, it revealed a layer of dark shell.
The shell stretched on and on, from dozens of meters to hundreds, then thousands, as if it had no end.
Someone finally realized what it was. His face turned deathly pale, and his lips trembled as he uttered two words: "It's alive..."
It was a giant tortoise, more than three thousand meters long, breaking out of the earth as though a mountain that had slumbered for ten thousand years had suddenly come to life.
Its limbs were as thick as pillars holding up the sky. With every step, it left an enormous pit dozens of meters deep in the ground.
It carried an entire small mountain forest on its back, complete with trees, rocks, streams, and that dusky blue fruit.
The fruit wasn't growing on the rock at all. It grew in the very center of the giant tortoise's shell, its roots buried deep in the gaps between the plates.
The giant tortoise slowly raised its head. Its eyes were ancient and indifferent, holding no anger, no killing intent, not even the slightest emotion.
It merely gave its back a shake, a tiny movement, like an ox shaking a few flies off its back.
Everything on the "little mountain" on its back—trees, rocks, earth, and every Evolver still standing there—was shaken into the air.
No one had time to react. The well-coordinated elite squad,
the woman with the flexible sword,
the middle-aged man with the twin blades—
the force of that shake crushed their bodies like eggs in an invisible hand, the sound of bones breaking dense and brief.
Severed limbs mingled with bloody mist, scattering on the mountain wind.
A moment later, peace returned to the forest on the giant tortoise's back.
The trees took root again, and the rocks settled back into place. Only the little dusky blue tree still swayed gently at the highest point, while the fruit on it hadn't so much as trembled.
The giant tortoise lowered its head again and slowly drew its limbs back to the edges of its shell, settling down once more like a mountain.
The mountain breeze brushed past, and the delicate fragrance lingered.
Several days later, people from the Spirit Rejuvenation Investigation Bureau arrived.
It was a small formation of three armored vehicles and two helicopters, with an emblem few people recognized painted on the vehicles.
They stopped far outside the mountain forest, venturing no deeper, much less approaching the central area where the giant tortoise lived.
Their leader was a man in his early forties, dressed in a training uniform without rank insignia, with a portable monitor hanging from his chest.
His expression was calm. "Do not open fire. Do not disturb it. Everyone remain silent."
After he gave the order, the monitoring team began carefully setting up their equipment.
Seismic detectors, spirit energy concentration analyzers, infrared thermal imagers, and even two new instruments brought straight from the laboratory, designed specifically to capture the frequency of Evolution Factor fluctuations.
From a kilometer away, this equipment could estimate an evolved beast's approximate rank, with a margin of error no greater than half a rank.
When the data came back, the operator stared at the screen in a daze for a full three seconds.
Then he abruptly turned toward the middle-aged man in charge, his lips pale, and spoke in an extremely low voice: "Third Tier."
The middle-aged man took the data tablet and remained silent for a long time.
Third Tier... He knew very well what that number meant.
The people at the Administration seemed to know very well what each rank represented.
And at present, the highest-level mutated creatures humanity had encountered were only Second Tier, and every encounter had come at a heavy cost.
Third Tier was already beyond the effective killing range of humanity's existing weapons systems. Conventional missiles probably wouldn't even blast through that shell.
More frightening still, the giant tortoise had not been born a Third Tier. Without humanity noticing, it had silently completed its evolution, transforming from an ordinary tortoise into a moving mountain!
Over the next few days, monitoring data came back one batch after another.
Once the compiled report was ready, the Administration convened a closed-door meeting overnight.
A passage in the meeting minutes was marked "Top secret · highest priority."
"Monitoring data from multiple locations shows that, under conditions of equal spirit energy concentration, some wild animals evolve significantly faster than humans.
Plants come next. The evolutionary rate of insects and microorganisms in certain special regions likewise cannot be underestimated. Humanity currently holds no inherent advantage in the evolutionary race."
"Unless more effective means of accelerating evolution are adopted, humanity faces a high probability of species extinction when Spiritual Qi Revival reaches its peak."
The news was strictly suppressed, but word inevitably leaked out.
Before long, all the major factions began pouring more resources into evolution, regardless of cost.
After returning to base, the monitoring team members who had seen the giant tortoise with their own eyes all independently did the same thing: they volunteered for overtime and increased the time they spent on evolution training each day.
They understood better than anyone that tortoise lying in the mountain forest.
If one day it grew hungry and raised its head to look around, everything around it could become its food!