So here lay the conundrum. If Dante wanted to increase his stats, he had to leave. If he left, the school would have an excuse to ban him from entering the Zero Gate legally, and you know for sure that those factions out there would pay any price for that.
They had difficulty sleeping or eating because they were racking their brains to think of how to deal with Dante. Even fifth years were warned about him, told to be very careful when encountering or dealing with him in the real Zero Gate.
In fact, none of them expected him to fail these mock exams, just like they didn't expect him to fail in the real Zero gate. Their minds hadn't even gone there, so if Dante did that, there would be a great upset.
Also, Dante was a young man. One thing he had always hated in the fiction he enjoyed while daydreaming about being special was the main characters who either inadvertently or consciously did something that brought negative public opinion or disgrace in order to further their goals, and while everyone was mocking or insulting them, they would sneer and call them shortsighted.
Now that Dante was happily enjoying his period of being 'special' like those characters, he had no plans to take their paths. Call him shallow and vain, but he did not fancy the idea of any random Tom, Dick, and Harry insulting him wherever he looked or walked.
So no, he wouldn't quit the Zero Gate and make not only the entire student body, but even those integrated factions continuously laugh and mock him, feeling that they had overestimated him greatly.
So Dante could not leave, which meant he could not increase his stats. This was because he lacked the ability to split his mind or create quantum clones, which had less to do with sub-abilities and more with superpowers.
This then led Dante to sigh and think about the idea he had earlier that he wanted to try. He hesitated a bit before taking out one of the six remaining fruits. He had eaten the Golden Fruit from the second tree, and then eaten the Space and Fire fruits from the first tree and the third tree.
Then he gave the fourth fruit from the fourth tree to the Golden Ape, which was how it got its current thunder and wind superpower. Dante now had the Darkness, Lightning, Gem or Light, Earthquake, Silence, and Time fruits left.
Right now, the one he took was the Earthquake. He wasn't aiming for the superpower within, for he knew that no matter what, his Quantum Entanglement could not let him simulate a full superpower using one of his sub-abilities.
Dante popped the fruit into his mouth and immediately sat down in a meditative posture. Rather than passively wait, he immediately entered his Soul Space which still had the giant quantum gate that allowed him to traverse two universes, the smaller quantum gate by the side that let him traverse between quantum worlds, and the third smaller gate which showed an empty void in which many items floated within in a frame of stillness.
Dante did not spend much time admiring the visual representation of his current superpower and rather felt the flow of Zero Energy that was currently feeding into him from the virtual fruit.
Dante immediately rushed behind the gate and saw the entanglement of threads that he usually comprehended when he entered the Black Land after reaching Rank D. If you wanted an idea of how these threads looked, try to picture a server room with LAN and power cables crisscrossed over each other.
Dante noticed that he had a different feeling towards them since he was meditating without using the incense from the special cabin in the Black Land. His mind was more lucid, of course, but also less focused.
When he used that pink incense, the threads were not tangled and were rather organized and loose, allowing him to see where they led and even try to move them. Right now, with how tangled and messy they were, it would require herculean effort to comprehend anything.
In fact, you were more likely to waste more time sorting things out than comprehend anything. Dante finally understood the value of the pink incense, and this was probably another reason why graduated superpower users wanted to get back into the Black Land, students be damned.
Dante had the idea of researching and replicating it for himself, but then he realized how stupid and arrogant that was. If he was going to research it, he would have to use technology he got from this very universe, and there were already hundreds of thousands of denizens with better tech and qualifications than him who craved it.
They had access to it before and probably tried to research it but failed, otherwise the alumni group wouldn't still want to bash the new students to the side and monopolize the goods for themselves.
Dante had a strange feeling that the materials and ingredients for the pink incense might come from somewhere special, maybe even be from a higher dimension.
Whatever the case, Dante now had to deal with the mess before him. But then again, not really since this was exactly why he consumed the fruit in the first place. Not only did he collect its flow of Zero Energy but a certain state of comprehension came with it that Dante needed.
He noticed this when he ate the fruits previously, but some spark of enlightenment entered his mind when he ate the three fruits, just that it was overshadowed by the torrent of Zero Energy.
Now that he was focusing on it, Dante knew he had underestimated it. He also understood what it was and where it came from.
It was not surprising, as Dante had already long realized that these fruits were crafted using the research from actual real fruits. While the Eternal Universe could not crack the entire code for the fruits, they cracked enough of it that made these fruits near real in quantum worlds.
These insights were priceless for Dante, who used them to comprehend his Quantum Entanglement further. It manifested itself in the way of strange tendrils that emerged from Dante's soul body and latched onto the tangled wires, ripped them apart from each other, and spread them out.
This went on for an unknown amount of time until the flow of Zero Energy ran out, and Dante opened his eyes. His face changed greatly as he realized that he had split the wires by only about 1%, leaving 99% still entangled.
However, his comprehension progress had shot up from 10% to the C rank to 45%!
Dante checked the time and was left flabbergasted to know that only about an hour had passed. My Brother in Christ, he spent 3 full days of 72 hours in the Black Land comprehending his superpower at full blast with the help of the pink incense and only reached 10%.
Even then he was stopped because his brain overheated and almost melted into goo due to how much he pushed himself. Yet in an hour, he wasn't even mentally tired, had no help from ambient Zero Energy or incense, and made 35% progress?
Dante sighed and simply thanked any listening deity that his Quantum Entanglement was so special. Even if he was given a list of much cooler superpowers to choose from, he would still pick this one any day.
Still, Dante thought with amusement, his Quantum Entanglement was OP. Putting aside how it allowed for this to happen through clever loopholes, there was also the fact that only 1% of sorting out the wires yielded 35% progress at the D rank heading up to the C Rank.
One should know that sorting the out threads was not the same as comprehending the threads or trying to control them. Sorting out was just laying the groundwork for the comprehension, yet it yielded more progress than actually comprehending.
Dante could think of many theories for this, but he simply thought of the saying: 'cleanliness is next to godliness'.
Dante then looked to the sky. A hint of malicious greed appeared in his eyes as he wished he could simply skip the next 30 days and enter the next virtual mock session and gather the ten fruits there too.
Luckily for him, he still had five remaining on his person, and Dante took the lightning one out without hesitation. He initially wanted to keep them for later experimentation, but he decided to only keep the time one.
The rest, even if he could acquire their abilities, did not compare to even a hint of his Quantum Entanglement and were better used to work on it. You could not change Dante's mind on that, sorry.
He threw it into his mouth and then performed the same sequence of events, entering the soul space, checking out the tangled threads, and using the next hour in which he was flowing with comprehension as well as Zero Energy to sort them out.
When next Dante opened his eyes, they were full of excitement as he had climbed to 80% comprehension towards the C Rank!
Updated from fr𝒆ewebnov𝒆l.(c)om