Ash hadn’t completely lost his consciousness.
It was a strange experience—in fact, Ash doubted whether his "normal experiences" these days were fewer than his "wondrous experiences"—although he couldn’t move or speak and was incapable of doing anything, Ash didn’t feel uncomfortable at all.
He felt as though he was sitting in a movie theater, watching an endless film, and he naturally couldn’t interfere with the plot. Thinking about it, he felt a bit regretful, as he believed that after becoming Yayin, he should be able to use his privileges to cancel Hanna’s wanted status, by playing some time trick.
But there was no such loophole: the moment Ash became Yayin, he fully lost himself. Or rather, only when he completely surrendered himself and let Yayin take the throne could he gain the Divine Being’s privileges.
The Divine Being’s privileges had always belonged to Yayin, and he couldn’t even touch them.
He hoped Hanna and the others were alright.
It was then that Ash truly understood the biggest difference between Divine Beings and Technique Spirits, and why mortals couldn’t contain Divine Beings: Divine Beings possessed a strong sense of self-consciousness.
Actually, Technique Spirits also had self-consciousness. During their time in Shattered Lake Prison, Ash and others could induce Technique Spirits to work for free through knowledge resonance, which was, in some sense, pleasing the Technique Spirits. However, compared to Technique Spirits, Mages were simply too powerful, so powerful that they didn’t need to care about what Technique Spirits thought and could straightaway use magic power to exploit their labor.
The reason Mages couldn’t contain Divine Beings was fundamentally due to the strong personalities of both clashing and wearing each other down, unless one side completely shattered.
However, in this process, the Mage was often the egg, and the Divine Being the rock.
The way Divine Lords interacted with Divine Beings wasn’t as simple as just incorporating the Divine Being into their soul. If Technique Spirits were probiotics, and Mages lived symbiotically with these probiotics, then Divine Beings were at least of the magnitude of cats and dogs, and notably very individualistic ones at that; Divine Lords certainly couldn’t be expected to have cats and dogs clinging to them every day, could they?
After learning this information, Ash also understood why the First Gospel insisted on having "only the purest, most naive, kindest, loveliest girls"—the Gospel’s Divine Being was probably of that character, finding a soul with similar traits would make its integration much smoother, akin to wearing a tailor-made suit.
Although Ash wasn’t tailor-made and was rather ill-fitting, he was durable, so the Gospel could make do.
Thinking of this, Ash couldn’t help but respect another individual—how exactly did the future Harvey manage to subdue a Divine Being?
Even if he had become a Legendary Mage by then, a Legendary Mage definitely couldn’t contain a Divine Being, otherwise, the First Gospel would simply appoint a freshly promoted Legendary Mage.
Usually, a normal guess would be "Harvey’s compatibility with that Divine Being was extremely suitable, so they could barely manage the integration of the Divine Being’s self-consciousness, almost like two brothers sharing the same underwear."
But for Ash, whose relationship with Harvey was second only to Harvey’s relationship with Alice, he harbored a bolder speculation: was the future Harvey’s true form really human?
If Harvey had transferred his consciousness to a corpse, an urn, a zero-protocol card, or a soul stone in advance, Ash wouldn’t be surprised at all. That way, Harvey could naturally let his soul be inhabited by the Divine Being, given that he wasn’t using that place for sleeping anyway, it was purely an office.
But whether it’s about having a good relationship with the Divine Being to live together, or letting the Divine Being inhabit the place and squeezing himself in with Alice, it showed that Harvey was far ahead on the path of abnormality compared to ordinary Mages.
Ash could neither transfer his consciousness nor share pants with "the purest, most naive, kindest, loveliest girl," so he was ejected and stayed in this movie theater to spend his final moments, until he felt bored and fell asleep there.
Ash thought he would fall asleep soon, however...
In the cinema, there were others besides him.
Three more people were watching this film behind him, and they were incredibly impolite, discussing the plot and chatting as they watched; Ash couldn’t feel sleepy at all.
Though the voices sounded somewhat familiar, perhaps because he had lost the right to use his brain, Ash still couldn’t recall where he had heard them or even remember any of their conversations.
Ash could only name them based on the emotions their voices conveyed, calling them ’Indifference,’ ’Anger,’ and ’Madness.’
Anger: "If this continues, he’s really going to end up as a vessel for the Divine Being, aren’t you afraid?"
Indifference: "What good does it do to be afraid? This isn’t part of my plan anyway. Do you think I can predict everything to perfection, setting up his life with pinpoint accuracy? To seize the most valuable treasures, subdue the most loyal subordinates, bed the most beautiful and lovely women, create miracle after miracle?"
"I’m flattered, but I’m not a Drama Poet who can script such exhilarating narratives... I can’t even predict his behavior."
Madness: "What? How is that possible, how can you not predict his behavior? To you, isn’t he like the protagonist of a novel you’ve written?"
Indifference: "Let’s not mention that a novel’s protagonist can act beyond the writer’s control, and besides... when you find a notebook in the corner, one in which you wrote a single Chapter of a novel decades ago, could you, decades later, still recall your original thoughts?"