Odyssey of the Blind God

Nial didn't even try to fight the self-destruction trait of the elder woman after he realized that Dominion didn't work.

This was contrary to his expectations, which was why he engulfed the older woman's body with dark energy while he used the Grasp of Eclipse movement technique to emerge from within the darkness dome. He could easily walk through shadows and darkness using the Grasp of Eclipse Movement technique, which allowed him to be in the midst of the baffled men and women who realized that their leader had sacrificed herself.

The older woman's body, which was overflowing with churning mana, exploded, and the force was absorbed by the cocoon of darkness that had engulfed her. In the end, the force was too much for the cocoon of darkness to handle and it burst open, releasing everything upon the darkness dome that remained unscathed even after the explosion of the Keltia-ranked woman impacted on it with tremendous force.

Under normal circumstances, the explosion would have created a crater the size of Halheim's shelter. Fortunately, Nial could prevent the destruction from spreading that far since it was a hassle to fill a huge crater.

"Don't trigger any of your abilities!" Nial commanded at this moment, using his Power of Chaos once again to generate the strongest effect for Dominion..

The men and women around Nial flinched and their heads turned in his direction with terror-struck eyes.

"Sit down, with your hands where I can see them!" He issued another command with Dominion. The men and women didn't have much of a choice but to follow his orders as he began to use some of his massive amount of accumulated dark energy, reinforced by the crimson moonlight to start questioning them.

Many questions were on his mind, but the most important was the reason for someone to be willing to bind a self-destruction ability to their mana core. It didn't make sense that the older woman made use of her self-destruction ability on him like that. He might have provoked them but Nial was pretty sure that his words or command was intense enough to force someone to kill themselves.

"Let's start with the interrogation then…" Nial said before he began to bombard the men and women around him with a bunch of questions.

"Is everyone here in the possession of a self-destruction ability? If so, why?"

"Why are you looking for the poachers who had been after the Phoenix Fire Lions and their cubs only now?"

"Why did this older woman sacrifice herself all of a sudden? I can tell that she saw me as a threat but mass slaughter is not exactly the way most would handle this situation, not under normal circumstances at least!"

"..."

Nial had many more questions but he figured that he had to ask only a few of them at a time, otherwise, he wouldn't receive the desired answer. Meanwhile, the men and women sitting on the ground were too baffled about what had just occurred. None of them opened their mouths to answer his questions.

They avoided his gaze and began to sweat profusely. This annoyed him even more and he had the mad urge to smack them back to their senses and start talking.

His mind was rattling wildly and he could only come to one conclusion that may or may not be far-fetched.

"You guys bound the self-destruction ability to your Mana Core because someone forced you to do that. Looks like each one of you is under a Soul Contract and that you guys will be forced to turn into living bombs if you dare disobey your master's commands…am I right?" Nial concluded and asked just to receive a stunned silence once again.

However, this time, no answer was more of an answer than Nial needed to know what was going on.

'Well, this is getting a little bit difficult,' He thought before he began to curse himself a little, 'Why is fighting so much easier than the interrogation part?'

Nial ended up spending several hours testing the waters with his Dominion ability fully unleashed. He was trying to figure out the contents of the Soul Contract and what he had to alter in the mindset of the men and women around him to make sure that they could speak up without breaking into a sweat as they couldn't use their self-destruction ability.

It was quite a hassle but Nial didn't like surprises which was why he ended up spending so much time interrogating the human slaves, to begin with.

He figured that they were enslaved by some sort of Demon race that would breed humans before forcing them into signing a Soul Contract and binding a self-destruction ability to their Mana Core shortly after they awoke their Origin.

This was quite annoying, but even more so was that the Demon race could clearly sense when one of their Slaves died. That was also why the human poachers' death had been noticed and a new batch of slaves had been sent out to take a look at what happened.

Nial got to know that the Demon race used their slaves as poachers, meatshields in war, and various other occupations which the Demons didn't want to pursue, making them do their dirty work.

The slaves were similar to the monsters Nial forcefully subdued to conquer dungeons, just that he treated the subdued monsters much better than the Demon race treated their slaves.

Nial required quite a while to play around with Dominion and tweak its effect in order to permanently alter their mind. This was to make sure that they would never be forced to use the self-destruction ability anymore. In fact, he went a step ahead and ensured that they would not even know that such an ability was bound to their Mana Core. Whenever they saw the stigma of their first ability, they would think of it as an accessory of their Mana Sea!

Other than that, Nial made sure that the men and women would expose the content of their Soul Contract to him, which he made use of to exploit the enslaved men and women as well.

"I don't care if you guys survive, but if you want to stay alive and make use of the small opportunity to gain freedom for the first time in your life, it will be necessary for you to play double agents. There is no other way since I'm not nice enough to obliterate the entire race that enslaved you guys singlehandedly." Nial said in a calm and composed manner.

It was almost as if he was talking about the weather but the men and women around him could only frown. They didn't expect Nial to do anything for them, yet he gave them a trace of hope, something they had never felt in their entire life.

It was a shame that their leader had been forced to kill herself but it was not rare to lose one, two or even hundreds of their fellow comrade-slaves in a day. Thus, the opportunity they were granted was much more important than anything else to the men and women whose minds felt much clearer than ever before.

"I altered your mind enough to play around as double agents. Here are a bunch of messenger crystals. Use them sparingly and only if it's truly important, remember!" Nial warned while retrieving a bunch of blue crystals from his spatial ring.

"Now go, and do whatever is necessary, except doing things that affect me…then you guys are dead!"