The three-self personality was something Shen Cong had never really grasped. It always struck him as too abstract. So when he thought about breaking the bonds of the ego, he thought about breaking them physically. He wanted to find the biological magnetic field that those bonds stood for — or, to put it another way, a particular shackle built out of Activity waves.

Buried deep underground, he had no way of telling night from day.

That gave Shen Cong quiet room to think.

And with his brain cut off from his body, he could see more clearly than ever how the brain-cloud gradation was actually happening.

"The gradation of the rough form of a Superbrain — the waxy material rising into cloud. It was spread very wide. The whole center of that trunk was rough Superbrain."

"The big evolved beasts all have enormous brains, but their intelligence doesn't seem to rise much along with them."

"The Laiyuan giant wolves are smart enough, but their bodies are nothing special."

"The spirit-monkeys are smart too, and they're nowhere near the size of the Violent Ape I killed. They're a lot smaller."

"The ratmen are stranger still. The Rat King isn't big. The rat officers are small. Only the rat-beasts get truly huge."

"Sort it all out carefully and there's a relationship between body and intelligence after all. It looks like an inverse one."

"So what causes that? Yellow Great-Immortal is one of the stronger things at nuclear-grade, and its mind is still a child's, eleven or twelve or thirteen. Nowhere near what the Rat King had back then."

Intelligence was not spread out in proportion to Talent.

A huge evolved beast was not necessarily smarter than a small one. In fact, every evolved beast found so far with the potential for higher intelligence was on the small side. The Laiyuan giant wolves, the spirit-monkeys, the ratmen — none of them were large.

"Humans are the strangest of all. Their bodies have hardly changed."

"Is the reason really the grip of the three-self personality?"

Shen Cong was not satisfied with that kind of…