Hao Ren did not hide his worries. After considering the many suspicious points in the Guardians' bizarre descent into madness, he immediately told the people around him what he was thinking.
The general consensus among the masses was to **** the mastermind behind the scenes. Everyone had long known that all the trouble in the Dream Plane was somehow related to it. Lily had even excitedly suggested listing that mastermind as the ultimate scapegoat, so that from then on, anything unpleasant that happened in the Dream Plane could be pinned on it. In short, everyone was delighted to have finally found someone so thoroughly blackened that even whitewashing would be impossible.
Even though they still had no idea what that mastermind actually was.
Before this, Hao Ren had already studied the Guardians' madness in his own way. Aside from the obvious changes in the Guardian Giant's appearance, he had found no observable negative force inside the Guardians' bodies. However, he knew his research was certainly incomplete, and Yggdrasil's corruption had proven that: the corruption originated on the illusory level. The contamination first spread through the immaterial realm, only entering the real world in its final stages. Since such "hidden contamination" existed, could the other Guardians have something similar inside them?
Little White floated around Throat of Toka. She first marveled at how enormous this fellow member of her race had grown, then plunged straight into the bottomless abyss of the Vertical Shaft.
After Little White jumped down, the nerve lines around Throat of Toka immediately reacted. Visible radiance surged from the depths of the cavern, leaping and spreading along the black tentacles and triggering flashes of electricity between the nearby nerve-pulse needle towers. Hao Ren had no idea what method Little White intended to use to examine this enormous body