Tremors spread out from the island.
The surface of the water, especially near the island, was covered in countless tiny bubbles.
On shore, Scarhead stood up, and the Orbital Ridge Crocodile in the water dove beneath the surface.
Famu raised the upper half of his body and roared at the moon, his scales overlapping layer upon layer. The colossal creature, seemingly forged from black iron, was like a demon descending beneath the night sky.
This was no roar a snake could possibly make.
Famu knew that himself. During his time as a researcher, he had worked in the field of paleontology. By then, humanity had already been able to use the Life Scepter System's gene bank to perfectly recreate a living tyrannosaur. A Typhon's roar was remarkably similar to the roar of a perfectly recreated tyrannosaur,
but to Famu now, that roar sounded even more terrifying than it did to humans. Half its frequencies were beyond human hearing, yet a Typhon could hear them as clear as day.
Vibrations below twenty hertz rolled along the surface of the water.
The creatures of Blackwater Swamp hid in their nests, burying themselves in the deepest mud. To such small creatures, the roar Famu let out was an overwhelming calamity.
The tremors spread outward from him, reaching a stretch of Blackwater Swamp's waters a hundred meters across. A glimmer of gold appeared in those deathly pale eyes, only to go out in an instant.
The Furnace Core had captured the prey it craved.
It had matured, beating within Famu's body. An endless stream of power burst from the Furnace Core and spread along his nerves and spine to his entire body.
Just as Xing Rui had expected.
Famu's Furnace Core was that of the purest Child of the Earth, following a savage ecology where muscle was power.
The Furnace Core set his body resonating, and a second compensatory growth began.
For a Child of the Earth that was not pureblooded, triggering a second compensatory growth was extremely difficult.
A Typhon reached adulthood at sixteen and its peak size at thirty. From then until it died of old age, it grew almost no larger.
A Child of the Earth's Furnace Core fine-tuned its body throughout its life, adjusting the proportions of its muscle groups and the hardness of its bones to adapt each Typhon to the waters where it lived. But the Furnace Core never guided a Typhon to grow larger.
Once a Typhon reached its peak size, any further growth would increase the pressure on its muscles and bones exponentially. It would need more food and more energy to keep its body in balance, and during the process, its bones and muscles would become more fragile than before, and it would also become slower.
In the vast majority of waters, this was a terrible survival strategy.
But a second compensatory growth was another matter.
It was the privilege of a pureblooded Child of the Earth, appearing only in the strongest individuals of the population. They were larger than all their kind, and their bones and muscles were nothing less than superb biological materials, enough to support the massive size of a pureblooded Child of the Earth.
They were kings.
His bone density and muscle strength continued to increase. At this moment, the rainy season's hunts paid their interest.
The second growth provided by the Furnace Core required an enormous amount of energy, and Famu happened to meet the prerequisites for initiating it.
The fat reserves of an entire rainy season, the nutrients accumulated from hunt after hunt, and the giant bird in his stomach that had yet to be fully digested.
That limp golden corpse was now turning bit by bit into calcium, phosphorus, and protein, while vast amounts of energy flowed through his blood into his bones.
The tremors were still spreading.
Famu stopped roaring, dove into the water, and swam toward the deeper area.
He returned to his nest at the bottom of the swamp, using the thick rock walls and the water's surface to isolate the unusual changes in his body.
Famu coiled up in the cavern. He fell asleep and sensed the Furnace Core.
The power of the Child of the Earth, the Typhon, could not do without it.
After studying it for some time, Famu discovered that his former ability to fine-tune the bones and muscles of his body came from the power of the Child of the Earth. When the Furnace Core was active, it could independently improve a Typhon's body: for example, increasing a Typhon's explosive power on land, boosting Famu's strength in water, and speeding the healing of a Typhon's wounds when injured. The many habits and powers of a Typhon that defied biological convention were all sustained by the Furnace Core.
The biological Furnace Core, a symbol of nobility.
Then Famu suddenly had a thought: the Furnace Core could passively adjust a Typhon's body structure, so could he use the Child of the Earth to actively adjust his own?
Rather than making minor adjustments to his structure to crawl on land, Famu immediately wanted to improve his organs.
For example, the backward-hooked serrated teeth that Famu disliked most.
These were standard teeth for pythons and boas, curved backward like rows of small fishhooks. The lower jaw was made up of two independent halves that could move alternately. This kind of tooth had only one purpose: to lock onto prey. Once the teeth had secured the prey, they would constrict it to death, then open their mouths to one hundred and eighty degrees and swallow prey as heavy as themselves whole.
This was a constrictor's equipment, and for predators among pythons and boas, it was already close to perfect.
But Famu preferred bone-crushing teeth that could kill with a single strike, cutting through a prey animal's flesh as well as crushing its bones.
With a Typhon's size, if it had a mouthful of sharp teeth, a single bite would make even the subsequent constriction unnecessary.
Famu didn't need to think too much about killing prey smaller than himself, but the rainforest was clearly not short of colossal creatures.
A Typhon's teeth were more than adequate for hunting, but Famu would not be content just to fill his stomach. He needed equipment to contend with hunters of the same level, but against such hunters, a Typhon's bite really had little killing power.
Just like when Famu had pushed Xing Rui aside and then clamped his jaws around Xing Rui's neck: he had enough strength, but the structure of a snake's teeth and jaw muscles meant that its killing power was bound to be lacking. The idea of one Typhon biting another Typhon to death was truly absurd. The best approach was to coil its body around the other's neck and crush its bones bit by bit.
But given the structure of a snake's neck, it would be too much of a waste if its bite had no killing power.
A flexible neck and the explosive power of a sudden lunge would let him bite an opponent first, before the enemy could touch him. Once he had bitten down, he would have seized the initiative.
Famu kept sketching out a process diagram in his mind for the Child of the Earth's adjustments.
For a reptile, Famu had a perfect configuration in mind.
It belonged to the rulers of primordial Earth, before humanity.
First, he had to see whether the Child of the Earth could reshape his teeth. This was evolution ahead of its time, and what the Child of the Earth needed to do was compress that long span of evolution into a few months.
To get teeth like that, he first had to change the structure of his entire skull, with both the tooth sockets and jaw muscles properly configured.
A snake's lower jaw was more complex. If Famu's idea was to be realized, the lower jaw would become thicker and heavier after the Child of the Earth adjusted it. Besides that, the quadrate bone needed adjustment, and some rotational freedom had to be sacrificed. That meant Famu would have to give up opening his mouth to one hundred and eighty degrees.
Famu was not greedy. He knew he could not have both a bone crusher and a throat capable of swallowing an entire animal whole.
This was a choice.
And Famu had never hesitated over a choice.
He wanted those bone-crushing teeth. As for swallowing, he could tear his prey apart before eating it. That was safer and more convenient, and his killing power against large prey would increase rather than decrease.
Famu was a hands-on researcher. After trying to use the Child of the Earth to adjust the muscle groups in his lower jaw and getting results, he quickly began putting his idea into practice.
The Child of the Earth was a delicate scalpel. It should not be expressed merely as a symbol of strength, Famu thought.
The blueprint was being laid out.
The creature on the blueprint was a dragon.