"You..."
What he said wasn't wrong, but coming from a scholar, the angle was strange.
The young scholar wasn't stupid. His eyes widened in shock, and he seemed to have picked up on something from Kraun's attitude. But at that moment, his feelings were too complicated for him to expose Kraun's identity. Instead, he silently thought, with a touch of malice:
If the Void Energy Department's experiment had failed, why couldn't the Department of Consciousness and Faith Studies' experiment fail too?
Teacher Glo's experiment had already lost to a Great One. The Sandlais experiment might soon lose to a mere mortal—and, as it happened, that mortal looked like one of Their believers.
Did that mean... the Void Energy Department's experiment, which had failed under the influence of a higher existence, was much closer to Them than the Department of Consciousness and Faith Studies' experiment, which had consumed enormous resources only to narrowly lose to a mortal?
Whether or not that reasoning came from Truth, at that moment the young scholar's twisted feelings outweighed his faithful devotion to the will of Truth. So he said nothing and left with his head bowed.
He couldn't convince himself that the other man was a scholar, but he could pretend he'd never seen that variable in the experiment.
Kraun had evidently realized that his excessive excitement had given away his identity, but fortunately, the crisis passed on its own.
He glanced at the young scholar's retreating back, then hurried to the shaft passage and climbed the iron ladder back up to Sandlais.
No one had discovered the scholar who had fainted in Sandlais. Kraun quickly changed clothes with him, then returned to his theater.
The three players had climbed out of the shaft before him. When Zhang Jizu saw the cover Kraun had set