If all else failed and she didn’t want to kill him, enslaving him was an option. Perhaps then, she could work out a method to restore his mind through various experiments. She had other ideas that might have worked too, but they were either even more ruthless than temporarily enslaving his Soul, or even more idealistic than trying to teach him a mental technique when his mind was already gone.

“Haah…” Gaia imperceptibly sighed.

She had to admit that this was a problem created by her negligence. Ever since her Soul level had reverted to its origin state because of her reincarnation, her mind had been opened to the influence of things like normality bias, which, along with other things, had caused her to become complacent.

Normality bias was a unique cognitive function that made a person ignore or even deny things that they might have seen or heard, simply because it didn’t (in that moment) make a lick of sense. For example, someone might feel a sudden sharp pain in their arm, but because there was no rhyme or reason for why that might have happened, they came up with half-hearted excuses, perhaps thinking that it was the positioning of their arm that caused the pain, even if they knew deep down that their arm did not give any prior discomfort and couldn’t suddenly just give a sharp pain. Or even ‘better’, they outright ignored it.

The pain’s gone, everything’s back to normal. No need to think about it anymore since I don’t even know what happened in the first place.

What a mistake. But what else could they do? Dig underneath their skin to find the reason for a sudden random pain in their body, each and every time it happened? No. That’s not how an intelligent species operated. There was always something more important to think about and unless it wasn’t a big problem, if they couldn’t make heads or tails about it, it tended to be ignored. Of course, this changed when a being ascended and they began to take everything and anything into account when making decisions, but that's besides the point.

In Gaia’s own case, the normality which she was biassed to was that people with strong wills were able to resist the influence of the Sins. And so, each time she might have been given a prompt to make defences against the enthrallment of the Sins, she pushed it to the back of her mind.

After all, she was extremely busy. She needed to prioritise the more pressing things, right? Something that isn’t an immediate or even an intimidating problem can definitely wait, right?

It was notions like that, coupled with other more minor things like the innate pride that coursed through her blood as not only the 1 and only Creation Dragon, but also a goddess and ex-immortal from a Law World, that caused her to ignore the threat of the Sins Enthrallment.

Now look at the situation.

But if there was 1 life lesson thing that she had learnt as an immortal that would never leave her no matter what state her Soul was in, it was that EVERYTHING was her fault.

All the good things and the bad things that happened in her life were all her fault. If she was beaten and tortured, it was her fault. She should have been strong enough to defend herself, or she shouldn’t have placed herself in a situation where someone who wanted to torment her could gain access to her. If she was robbed, it was her fault. Her security shouldn’t have been so low that it was breachable.

Likewise, if she suddenly became a goddess like she was today, it was her fault. It was her mind that had attracted the man that made her a goddess. Becoming the spiritual figure of all Dragons in the Dragon Mountain? It was naturally her own fault. It was all the scheming that she had done in the past that had allowed her to seamlessly make every Dragon on this mountain a devout or her Divinity.

Everything that happened to her was her fault. So the fact that Aeshma had been… ‘reduced’, to this state- was very much her fault. She should not have ignored the threat of the Sin’s enthrallment, no matter how insignificant it had previously seemed. She should not have allowed arrogance to pervade her mindset, no matter how big the list of her accomplishments were. And she should not have become complacent, no matter how ironically peaceful her time in this crazy World had been.

Now, she was going to have to rectify her mistakes.

She hardened her resolve and contracted her wings, causing her large body to descend. And with a few graceful flaps here and there to steer her direction, it became obvious to everyone watching that she was making her way over to the growing encased form of Aeshma.

She… had made the decision to enslave his Soul.

…

Far, far below, in a different location of the Origin Forest, 3 humanoids stood at the peak of a rather large grass hill. It was tall enough to pierce through the canopy of tree leaves, which allowed the 3 standing at its peak to gaze at the sky without any obstruction, but compared to the Dragon Mountain in the distance, it was very, very small.

The 3 standing at the top of this hill were none other than the 3 visitors from the West Continent; The 9 Flame Queen, the Phoenix King… and the Phoenix Queen. All of them peered up at the sky with difficult expressions on their faces.