Inside a labyrinth that was just made by Merlin, both Eris and Isdis rested in a large pool of liquid holy water to recover and refill their reserves quickly. A god’s body is made from their divine magic, so their physical state can vary depending on their divine reserve. It was like a mage abandoning their HP and only having a single MP bar that they would die if it ran out.

Merlin still didn’t chew them on what they did, so the only thing they could do was rest and wait for her. She was now setting the pigeons in the Arctic so that Lucy could handle them on her own, and she would then come here to rip their ears off.

Eris wasn’t scared, but Isdis was already getting worried. Merlin rarely gets angry, but when she does, she is probably one of the most horrifying women they knew. It wasn’t because she screams or causes a scene; it was because she always stays calm, and her anger usually takes the form of slow, calculated suffering.

Eris leaned back on the edge of the pool and relaxed, letting her chest float on the holy water. She could feel the divine magic seeping through her skin and into her flesh and bones. It was a strange feeling, as this would’ve killed any mortal that wasn’t Arad. This pool was made from Kali’s divine magic, as Merlin seems to have asked one of Kali’s archons to fill it. That archon named Gabriella was the one who filled it, and she had left just moments before Eris and Isdis arrived.

Eris could tell that this archon wasn’t as powerful as Diana or Mathilde, but she was still a horrifying monster. The divine magic belonged to destruction, and its aspect was Vibration. It shook things so hard that they turned to dust.

"This divine magic is strange." Isdis filled her hands and looked at them. The water was clean, but still foggy and looked like diluted milk. Upon closer inspection with her divine eyes, she could see thousands of tiny ripples dancing on the surface, and they were what distorted the light.

"Turn the absorption off?" Isdis lifted an eyebrow, then closed her eyes to focus on her divine magic. She was still learning, so it took her a while to do what Eris told her. And when she did, she regretted it immediately. Without her body erasing the aspect, she felt the vibrations immediately and screamed. Her legs, groin, chest, back, everywhere that touched the water, all were hit at once.

"RRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" She screamed, immediately jumping out of the water in panic. It felt painful, weird, and most likely as if she were drowning in a liquid vibration, one that could disintegrate steel.

Even though Isdis got out of the water, the vibration never stopped as she was still wet, and she quickly fell to her knees, crying. "It’s not stopping! I can’t..." She could even focus long enough to turn her divine powers back on. Eris laughed at her for a few seconds, but then quickly fell silent as Merlin walked into the pool.

Merlin saw Isdis crying on the Marble floor and gave her a sharp glare. "You two never learn." She approached her and, instead of helping, stepped on her head. "This time, you two almost caused a massive disaster while trying to help with something that didn’t even warrant your intervention."

Isdis listened, even though she couldn’t focus with Gabriella’s divine magic burning her entire body. She could feel Merlin’s bare foot on her head, and she knew she probably wasn’t going to get help for a while.

After rubbing her foot on her for a few seconds, Merlin squatted beside her face and gave her a look. "Now, take this." She pulled a pill and a scroll. She put the scroll in Isdis’s hand and shoved the pill down her throat.

The moment Isdis swallowed the pill, her pain quadrupled, and she couldn’t hold herself anymore as she pissed herself, feeling like her entire body was getting shaved like a lemon. Merlin grabbed her by the hair and dragged her with her toward the pool. It was then that Isdis noticed. She had fully lost control of her body. That scroll, it must’ve had some strange spell on it.

Eris backed away a bit as she saw Merlin approaching her. "What... did you do to her?" She growled, and Merlin didn’t reply; she just walked toward her, drowning Isdis behind her in the pool.

"You might be a goddess, but your actions can hurt regular people. If you can’t understand that, and fully think about your actions before committing them, then it might be safer to keep you locked." Merlin squatted down to look the sitting Eris in the eyes. "If you weren’t one of Arad’s wives, he would’ve ripped your asshole open with his bare hands and decorated the world with your guts for putting hundreds of thousands of people who live inside his world in danger."

She pulled a second pill just like the one she fed Isdis and shoved it inside Eris’s mouth. "Now, swallow this." She pushed so hard that her entire wrist was forced down Eris’s throat, and when she made sure she swallowed the pill, she pulled her hand. "Is it your divine body, or did Arad train your throat well?" She smiled, and then handed her the scroll. "Touch this."

"What is this scroll?" Eris asked, and Merlin just stared at her with burning eyes. "You won’t answer me?" Eris smiled, and Merlin still didn’t reply, so she hesitantly touched the scroll. It was better to get this over with quickly.

The moment Eris’s fingers touched the scroll, she knew what it was. A temporary slave contract without a timer, so it would last as long as Merlin wanted. And what made it worse was that it was written in cryptic language that was specifically designed to set terms that bypass a god’s control. The magic worked in a similar way to the chains of hell, but on regular neutral mana rather than Cursed mana.

That made it extremely powerful, since a god can’t just erase it with divine magic. But that wasn’t the scary part about this scroll. Even though Eris couldn’t read the terms, she could understand that they had to be insanely convoluted, and the only reason Merlin was able to comply with them was due to the convoluted nature of the language she wrote them in.

For example, two beings of the universe cannot be bound by this contract, so it only worked since Merlin was technically an abomination now. And to fuel the contract, she had to get enough power to make both Eris and Isdis submit, so she needed a similar feat of power.

"How... did you get enough power over us?" Eris growled, and Merlin pushed her head down into the water as she disabled her erasure and made her feel the vibration just as badly as Isdis was.

Merlin relaxed on the water as the two drowned and struggled under the water. "I had to get power over each of you, and then approval from the universe that I was stronger than both of you. The rest is just complicated magic."

She crackled her neck. "For you, Eris. It was simple. I asked Amaterasu to grant me the right over your soul, since you are a part of her pantheon, and that worked. She sent me the deed right away without even asking for a price."

Since Eris looked to be enduring the pain better than Isdis, Merlin activated the pill to make her feel even more agony. "It wasn’t just because you belong to her. Amaterasu basically owns all the gods; she just doesn’t abuse that power." She smiled, "For Isdis, it was much easier. She is still weak enough that I managed to get Doma to create a binding with her hair and divine essence."

She then sighed with a tired face. "The last part, the universe’s approval of my power. I’m clearly far weaker than both of you, so there should be no way for me to get that stamp of approval. Unless..." She opened one of the scrolls. "Here, it states that I’m strong enough to humiliate the primordial divine of destruction." She looked away. "I called Kali to my labyrinth and asked her to come in her full demonic form and be ready for anything, so she did. When she arrived, even I was nervous about how it would end. But to my luck, Kali either understood what I was doing, or just wanted to play along."

"If I can get her to dance on my palm, then this contract is fulfilled. Wrong, when I got her to kiss my feet without a reason or explanation. The contract demanded I get that done with a second primordial to prove the first one wasn’t a fluke, so I got Isabelle to do the same. And it was done." She rolled the scroll. "Simply, it was a game of lifting the restriction that Yog and the universe imposed on magic one by one."