Experience Potion Free All-You-Can-Drink Event

By the time all the Cardinal Bishops had taken their seats, the sky outside was already beginning to brighten.

At first, Iver felt rather excited. But after a few hours, he began to feel faintly bored.

Fortunately, he had brought Isabel with him. With nothing else to do, he grabbed her hand and toyed with it while quietly discussing Avalon's recent developments and tormenting the absent Sherlock a little.

That was how friends were—whoever was absent became the topic of conversation.

The other Cardinal Bishops, however, showed no reaction.

After all, with the long lifespans of the long-lived races, they had to learn how to waste time so their lives would not sink into emptiness and weariness. And one of the required lessons was waiting in silence.

The only problem was that there was no water here. If they got thirsty, they could only drink wine.

That was because being too clear-headed was not necessarily a good thing when communicating with the gods.

Clarity meant rationality, which extended into reason, analysis, and disenchantment. That was also a form of disrespect.

For that reason, in all the oldest ritual classics, banquets always included wine or other ritual aids with similar functions, allowing ritualists to quickly enter a hallucinatory state detached from reality.

This was also because the existence of "wine" itself was sacred—it required large amounts of precious grain to brew. In an age when food was scarce and not everyone could eat their fill, wine was an extravagant and wasteful nonessential.

...For that very reason, in Ritual Studies, it was also regarded as a resource that was "easy to obtain yet extremely precious," symbolizing "the essence that allows people to survive."

Just as a larger bait could hook a larger fish, and a more expensive lottery ticket made people feel