Mass distribution of the 490 dense cores (gray histogram) and 46 MDCs (red histogram) of NGC 6334 (top). Sample is estimated to be complete down to ~15 M_⊙. Distributions of the deconvolved FWHM (middle-left), temperature (middle-right), mass (bottom-left), and volume-averaged density (bottom-right) for the 32 reliable MDCs at various evolutionary phases (blue = starless candidate, green = IR-quiet protostellar, red = IR-bright). MDCs become more massive, hotter, smaller, and thus denser along the high-mass star formation process.