Vanessa looked Dorothea up and down as she spoke.
She had barely noticed when she first came in, but a closer look revealed that Dorothea's body had already begun to mutate.
Her exposed face was lovely, her makeup exquisite.
But in the shadows, beneath her black dress, black feathers were gradually sprouting from the patches of skin dimly visible there.
They looked like crow feathers.
It was not ugly. There was even a touch of morbid beauty to it, which, paired with Dorothea's slightly gothic makeup, made Vanessa's heart beat a little faster.
"Is she... losing control?"
Flora nodded, a trace of worry appearing on her face. She sighed and began to explain.
Dorothea, too, had initially thought this Ascension task would not be difficult.
Her Rationality Mode was quite rigid, with plenty of loopholes to exploit.
It would disengage if she was frightened, if its logic reached a dead end, or even if it could not solve a problem.
In theory, any of those ways of disengaging should have helped her complete the Ascension Ritual.
Unfortunately, that was not the case.
The Ascension requirement to "let go of herself completely and allow Rationality to take full control" did not seem so easy to trigger.
The Rationality she normally used was merely a kind of tool that helped her concentrate, the opposite of emotion.
It was like the Folding Knife in Allen's hand. If it grew dull, he would sharpen it, or simply replace it with a new one. He regarded it as nothing more than a tool.
Yet Allen's Path of Sharpness gave him an edge of his own, one he honed at every moment, regardless of when he might need to draw it.
A Path pursued for a lifetime was naturally different from a tool discarded after use.