The Ancient One did not answer him directly. She looked at Brad as though he were a child who had not come home in years.
Brad calmly met her gaze, and silence settled between them.
"If I needed a book to tell me whether someone was trustworthy, that would be rather pathetic."
After a long silence, The Ancient One suddenly closed the Book of God. She gently placed it on the metal table beside her, and her body grew indistinct, like a bubble, before vanishing from the alloy-built chamber.
Brad stepped forward, his gaze turning dangerous as he looked at the Book of God.
An inanimate object could not have nearly manipulated one of the world's greatest Sorcerers Supreme into attacking him. The Book of God had no soul or sense of self. Brad had established that during the many years it had been in his custody.
Fortunately, The Ancient One of the Home Universe trusted him enough.
Brad reached for the Book of God, secretly raising his guard. Yet even when he held it in his hand, the book gave no response.
"An inanimate object can't beguile anyone. Someone else must be manipulating it from behind the scenes."
Brad really had no good way to deal with the stubbornly impervious Book of God. He had only managed to take it out of this universe because the splintered reality and the Home Universe shared the same origin. When he began using the third virus to sever those earlier parallel universes, the book had somehow slipped back into Earth-9527's reality without anyone noticing.
After examining it repeatedly for a long time without finding anything, Brad could only set the Book of God down again.
Although he could now use magic, which would allow him to use the Book of God, Brad