Listening to Milmina, Gawain suddenly felt an indescribable sense of absurdity well up inside him. But after thinking it over, he realized there was not a single wrong word in what she had said, so he could only keep a straight face through a cold sweat and turn his attention to the "testing ground" carved out within the Umbral Realm.
"By the way, these experimental facilities you've built here look pretty... cool," Gawain casually remarked as he looked at the neatly arranged platforms and numerous Magical Devices running automatically. "I heard before that you were building something in Defiance Courtyard, but I didn't expect you to have made all this so quickly..."
"You could call this one of my... 'dreams' over all these years," Milmina seemed to let out a self-mocking snort. "Sounds strange, doesn't it? A god who was supposed to answer mortal wishes had a wish of her own that she had been unable to fulfill for years—a laboratory, a place to explore truth and mysteries and indulge her curiosity. It was something I had wanted to do for thousands of years but never could."
"...The driving force behind the advancement of magic and mysteries is, fundamentally, the exploration of the unknown and the mastery of natural laws. The Goddess of Magic shaped by mages may have been the god in this world with the greatest curiosity and inclination toward exploration... Yet from another perspective, the gods in mortal minds ought to be omniscient and omnipotent. As the master of mysteries, you could not have things you did not know, much less step into unknown territory..." Gawain sighed softly, shaking his head. "If you hadn't escaped in time, you might have been the god most likely to go mad and lose control."
Milmina seemed to smile. Though her