After returning home, Thio went to his library and stared at his impressive collection with vacant, unfocused eyes.

‘How did I miss it?’ He thought, feeling depressed at his own incompetence.

Four years of researching.

Four.

Years.

And it hadn’t occurred to him to look at religious text even once.

He’d been thinking the entire time this sealing was magical based, not divine based. He’d thought it was some kind of magical curse. Thus, he’d been hyper-focused on magical types information alterations or suppressions. Naturally, seals being divine, he couldn’t find anything.

Looking at his library, he could see four years worth of book collecting in the wrong direction.

That’s right, with some exceptions, his entire library had been the result of hunting down curses, cures, and studies on the Information spells and Abilities. All in an attempt to figure out what was going on with Caroline.

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But he’d failed.

All because of something as stupid as basing his entire research off the wrong assumption.

Even though his face was totally devoid of emotion, he was withering on the inside from a mixture of shame, embarrassment, and self-loathing. He’d never felt like a bigger idiot than he did right then.

After several minutes of this he let out a long, emotion filled sigh.

Though it was humiliating, mistakes of this magnitude needed to be learned from not obsessed over. He would be careful and more thorough about his base-line assumptions in the future. He repeated this line of thinking several times, until he felt his emotions settle down into a low burn.

While there was nothing wrong with emotions, he’d always treated them like explosives. Useful, but highly dangerous. Other than his feelings for Caroline, which he had no control over at all, he was always strict with his feelings. His mind would always be the master, his feelings the servants.

Being calm and rational was his goal, but not perfection. There was no such thing as being right all the time. A rational person understood that. It was much more important to admit mistakes and learn from them. Certainly it was the wiser approach.

And, after all, what good was pride to a Researcher? Being inflexible in research simply meant missing out on new discoveries.

Or at least that’s what he kept telling himself.