A divine portfolio is the source of a god’s power; it is the organ that creates divine magic for the divine being to use. But that description itself is misleading, and it is the misleading notion that the mortals’ scholars were taught and fed to keep them ignorant. AO was an abomination, and he was never a benevolent or malevolent being. As a creature of the void, he created both good and evil, all so they could keep each other in check.

The gods were born as AO’s immune system to protect the universe that was inside his body. The same way a human’s immune system protects their body, and just as those cells know no evil or good, the gods also don’t.

The true job of a portfolio is to separate the Divine mana and Cursed mana from the regular neutral mana. Depending on the nature of the portfolio, one could be extracted more than the other, but the two are always extracted together. When a regular man walks out of his house at dawn, looks at the sun for a second, and then goes on to do his job, that mere action of acknowledging the sun’s presence, starting work as it signals by showing up, turns a portion of the man’s unused mana into Divine mana and Cursed mana, and gives it to Amaterasu.

Amaterasu uses the Divine mana for her angels and the war, while diverting the Cursed mana to hell as fuel. Every god does something similar, receiving both Divine and Cursed mana, then having to manage them.

That was the part that made the combination of Eris and Isdis scary, as when the two of them started working together and their portfolios resonated, they could fuel each other. Eris needs Divine mana to fuel the sun, while Isdis’s Control consumes Cursed mana -Peace is what uses Divine mana- so it became a positive feedback loop.

Eris consumes Divine mana and gives her Cursed mana to Isdis, who consumes the Cursed mana and gives her back even more Divine mana. The two didn’t even realise what they were doing, and their powers were growing rapidly as they both pushed each other to the limit.

The first one to notice that something was off was Merlin, who watched from afar. She could see the sparks of Divine mana flying out of Isdis’s aura and getting sucked by Eris, as well as the deadly waves of Cursed mana gushing out of Eris’s body, only for Isdis to swallow them whole.

They were getting stronger, yes. But there should be a limit to that. Both Eris and Isdis were now like two gems rubbing against each other, polishing and sharpening their edges. But soon, one of them, the most fragile, would crack first.

"They are eating each other out; soon, both of their souls would dry out, and they’ll crumble. Eris is pulling divine magic from Amaterasu, but that won’t help if Isdis runs out of Cursed mana first." After setting several barriers over the worlds inside Arad’s stomach, Merlin decided that she had enough.

Those girls are always reckless, thinking they can just push their bodies and magic beyond their limit without anything catastrophic happening, which really got on Merlin’s nerves. She understood how Eris must feel as a goddess; she almost had no limits, and so was the case for Isdis now... but... that arrogance, that crazed notion of never stopping or slowing down... it was Arad’s domain, not theirs.

She will give them an earful once this is over to make sure they understand that they aren’t built like Arad.

The titanic abomination moved slowly into outer space, and the long four arms opened wide as the entire space shook. Merlin had to reach them before they dried out, and to achieve that, she had to once more surpass her own limits and reach a realm that Arad was the only one to touch.

How ironic: to teach those brats their own limit, she has to commit the same mistake and abuse her own limits. But there was a clear difference between them and her. They are winging it and letting their ego push them beyond their limit, while she is going to calculate her own power and limits to dance on the edge to catch up to them.

Her empty eyes could see the endless threads of space extending into the dark void of Arad’s stomach, and her fingers brushed against them. The Eldritch magic that Vorvadoss used, the same one Arad learned from him. It was both simple and complicated. By picking a single thread of space that connects two points together, you can teleport from one end to another by severing that thread and causing it to pull you away like rubber.

Merlin needed to calculate the distance between her and Eris and Isdis, the nature of space between them, the interference of gravity, how the threads of space bend, and how her titanic body would react to being pulled. Unlike Arad, who picked the magic up quickly by muscle memory, Merlin had to work for it, and ten seconds had already passed, and she hadn’t finished calculating how the magic worked.

At this point, the star had grown a lot, and while neither Eris nor Isdis had noticed, they were both rapidly approaching their limit. If they were to dry out there, the sun they spent so much effort making would burn and swallow them.

Thirty seconds passed, and Isdis was starting to feel her consciousness slowly getting weaker and darker. She was slowly passing out, starving for Cursed mana to fuel her control, which she was using to both cool Eris and assist her in controlling the star. Eris was still fine, since she had far more power and was pulling divine mana from Amaterasu, but that extra energy only made her pull Isdis to death faster.

Forty seconds had passed, and this is when Merlin finally managed to cast the Eldritch teleportation spell. She grasped the thread of space with all four of her abominable arms, and she could feel it almost cutting her fingers off. The thread of space was solid, sharp, and nearly indestructible. Normally, she wouldn’t be able to cut it and finish casting the spell. Only the void dragons are able to do such a thing. But this wasn’t normal space; it was the space inside Arad’s stomach.

As she willed it, the thread snapped, acknowledging her authority over it. There was no travel time, no lag, no delays. The moment the thread snapped, Merlin’s titanic and abominable body appeared right behind Eris and Isdis, and was already getting scorched by the sun’s heat and radiation.

"You! Fools!" Hearing her roar behind them, both Eris and Isdis snapped back to reality. What was Merlin doing here, and why did she sound so angry? "Do I have to babysit you all the time!?" She opened her arms wide. "How many times should I say it... never play with magic without fully understanding how it works!"

Golden light flashed from her fingers, and the endless sea of her mana flooded out. She wasn’t here to stop those two, but to fix the deadly imbalance that emerged between them. She alone was here to stabilize two divine gods and make sure they wouldn’t consume each other to the last drop.

[Elemental Expansion: Labyrinth]