Voldemort simply sat there in silence, his slender fingers unconsciously tapping the open copy of Introduction to Genetic Engineering.
Candlelight cast flickering light and shadow across his deathly pale face. His red eyes were unfocused, as though gazing somewhere far away.
He was thinking.
Snape had just supplied a great deal of intelligence: hot pot, elixirs, Muggle factories, management theory, and educational psychology.
Those fragments of information were being rapidly analyzed in his mind, steeped as it was in dark magic and paranoia.
Centrifuges and tablet presses... novel as these things sounded, Voldemort despised them from the bottom of his heart.
To him, they were merely Muggles using clumsy physical methods to imitate magical effects because they could not wield magic.
Why bother with a centrifuge when a Severing Charm could do the job?
It was simply a matter of making the Severing Charm more precise.
As for management theory, that was even more laughable.
Did powerful wizards need management?
The strong needed only power and fear to make all things submit.
That old fool Dumbledore had actually gone off to study Muggle pedagogy. He had clearly gone senile, forgetting that he was a wizard who could make the entire wizarding world tremble.
No, that wasn't right.
Voldemort's pupils suddenly contracted.
He seemed to have fallen into a misconception, a mental trap Douglas Holmes had dug for him with his own hands.
Whether it was that seemingly profound Muggle science or the absurd management theory Snape had described... could all of it be nothing but a smokescreen?
Had he, Tom Riddle, the most extraordinary genius in the history of the wizarding world, really been naive enough to believe that the weapons his enemy displayed were all he possessed?
He had been too fixated on that blood sample.
Too fixated on