"Hm?"
Haetar looked at the old woman with some confusion.
"What I mean is… compared to an experimental subject, if we could use a Wizard who is likewise cursed as a test subject, the results would surely be better, wouldn't they?" The old woman's face was cold as a block of ice.
"Theoretically, that is correct, and if it were a formal Wizard, even better…" Haetar murmured unconsciously, then went utterly shocked. "You mean to use Manla?"
Haetar could not help but be shocked. The old woman's family, though its lineage stretched back ages, did not possess many formal Wizards — no more than five, in fact. This move alone would mean sacrificing one-fifth of their strength!
"If this is what fate has ordained!" A sacred light bloomed on the old woman's face as she gazed at Jenna, slumbering within the ice coffin. "She is our generation's 'Indicator.' She absolutely cannot come to harm!"
"Indicator? No wonder!" Haetar murmured. He had heard certain rumors about this family's strange predictive abilities.
"Kill him! The betrayer of fate!" At that moment, Jenna's eyes suddenly snapped open within the ice coffin, revealing nothing but whites, and she spoke expressionlessly.
"Those who offend the Indicator of Fate will have their souls cast into the bottomless hell of black fire, to suffer endless torment… heh heh heh…" Suddenly, the expression on Jenna's face shifted into a hideous grin.
Then the whites vanished from Jenna's eyes, and a look of anguish spread across her face, tears nearly spilling forth, as she turned toward the old woman. "Grandmother…"
That expression vanished quickly. Her face flickered through several changes in rapid succession, and faint phantom afterimages appeared one after another, morphing into different visages.
"Hssss…" As though stimulated by this, the black serpentine rune carved on her pale neck began to spread and twist ever further.
Thread after thread of dark, near-black veins crawled across Jenna's face in an instant.
"Not good!" Haetar immediately stepped forward and poured a vial of blue solution into Jenna's mouth.
Crack! Crack! Countless blue ice shards abruptly surfaced across Jenna's body, freezing her entire form in place.
"Sleep," Haetar said slowly, his gaze dreamy, carrying a faint yet piercing gleam.
From his fingertips, thin blue filaments kept emerging, threading deep into Jenna's body.
A long while passed before Jenna finally drifted back into slumber, and the serpentine curse reverted to its original state — though it appeared to have grown noticeably larger than before.
"Soul splitting? No… soul merging? How pitiful…"
After finishing his work, Haetar's gaze as he regarded Jenna took on a trace of pity.
As a healing Wizard who maintained some ties with this family, he too had heard of their clan's prophetic gift.
This extraordinary predictive talent had originally stemmed from an incomplete high-level Meditation Method.
Any Wizard who cultivated this Meditation Method would automatically gain a certain degree of premonition about the future, and as their practice deepened, they could even perceive fragmented visions of things yet to come.
Unfortunately, this incomplete high-level Meditation Method carried strict qualifications for who could learn it — only the female members of Jenna's family were permitted to cultivate it.
Furthermore, in each generation, only one member of the clan could ultimately succeed in cultivating it and gain the power of foresight.
And such a person was called a "Guide"!
If that were all there was to it, it would have been manageable, but as the Meditation Method was passed down through the generations, a far more terrifying phenomenon emerged.
The souls of every Guide from generations past would eerily persist, attaching themselves to the current Guide.
As a result, the more accumulated souls there were, the more unstable the Guide's mental state became — almost as though they suffered from schizophrenia.
Hayter had even once taken on a commission to prepare medications for these Guides to stabilize their minds and souls.
Although Jenna appeared to be a single person now, in truth, the souls of all her Guide ancestors resided within her body.
And the more souls there were, the weaker her mental faculties and rationality became. Sometimes she would not even know what she was doing, and the souls of the ancestor-Guides would periodically take control of her body.
That was why she behaved in ways that others found utterly inconceivable.
Hayter knew all too well that the family Jenna belonged to had, ever since acquiring this power, become increasingly neurotic — no one knew exactly when it started.
Not only did they reach far beyond their boundaries, appointing themselves as some sort of guardians of peace, unable to tolerate the slightest criticism from outsiders, but they also had a persistent habit of spouting nonsense about the arrangements of fate.
These repeated incidents had already caused several previously friendly factions to distance themselves.
After all, Wizards were rational and free-spirited people. No one wanted some newcomer suddenly appearing and telling them what to do.
And so, this once-prominent great family had inevitably fallen into decline. Now, when seeking outside help, all they had was a single, solitary healing Wizard — himself.
"How is she?" The old woman approached with a look of concern, completely ignoring Mola standing to one side.
Hayter sighed inwardly, feeling a sudden pang of sympathy.
"I have managed to temporarily suppress the curse's eruption from just now, but given Miss Jenna's unstable mental state, it could recur at any moment!"
Hayter fixed the old woman with a deep look. "Moreover, with that burst just now, the final eruption of the curse on Miss Jenna has been unavoidably accelerated…"