Pardon me if I am misunderstanding your question, but I think this seems to be what you are looking for. "Reparent" the hash based on the existance of a 'process' key one level deep; or, if the key 'process' exists in the hash, treat that key as the root.

use warnings;
use strict;

my %hash;
$hash{three}{levels}{deep} = 7500;
$hash{process}{three}{levels}{deep} = 9000;

for my $process(qw/ process no_process /){
    my $hashbase;

    if (exists $hash{$process}){
        $hashbase = $hash{$process};
    } else {
        $hashbase = \%hash;
    }

    print "$process - ",$hashbase->{three}{levels}{deep},"\n";
}
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