Whether it was Hood's line of thought or the front-end calculations, both had run into an unavoidable gap:
Zhang Yingying, that humanoid battery, had already been reduced to doing nothing but shouting "666" from the sidelines. She clearly wasn't putting in any more effort.
Dumb Sand itself had only slightly increased its energy consumption within the Formatting Domain, but there was no way it qualified to drive such a massive energy drain—an optimization that required even greater Computational Power.
Was Ronan supporting it?
Perhaps that was a barely acceptable explanation, but the problem was that Ronan had clearly said before that he needed to maintain "objectivity" and minimize disturbances to the experimental conditions.
From the looks of it, he had basically done that. There was no need to deceive himself!
Unless...
Unless his true experimental target was none other than this dim-witted monster that only knew how to crawl forward!
What Live Class? What examples? They were all just a smokescreen—once Hood thought of that, enlightenment washed over him, along with the urge to pick up Dumb Sand and snatch it straight back to the laboratory.
Fortunately, though he worked himself to the bone for Apocalypse Laboratory, he had not yet gone so mad as to disregard everything else. Calmness and reason pushed his thoughts one step deeper:
If Ronan had been secretly supporting Dumb Sand's "evolution" all along, how had he done it?
First, the channel. Ronan was unquestionably a powerhouse on the Mental Side, the creator of the "Cage" theory, and a master of mental perception. The safest route was naturally intervention on the Mental Layer.
Hood knew his own limits. He understood very well that compared to their expertise in energy-information structures on the Material Layer, the Mental Domain was the weak point of people like them—and