No expected explosion. Just more down-to-earth real work. I like it. It is easier to have a shouting match with Elaida, much harder to do the real work of uniting the different factions.

I have two thoughts after this.

First, would Egwene realize her own abuse of personal obeience oath? It has been clear that the Oath Rod is abused way more than before. Previously, the Three Oath have come to a realtive balance of pretecting the world from AS abuse. With the personal obeience oath, by so many different factions, I don't know how they are ever going to put the genie back inside the bottle.

We have seen conflicting oath before. I bet we would see a circular oath in the book very soon. So AS A has to obey AS B, and AS B has to obey AS C, but AS C must obey AS A.

With personal obeience oath, you have a Sul'dam, damane relationship without the A'dam. Have the damane bound to sul'dam, then tell the damane to function like what the A'dam would enforce, and you have a slavery relationship right there. The only reason we have not seen it is because people have not yet used the oath like. But I can't see why people are so against the Seanchan practice can allow those type of oath to exist.

Second, I don't exactly get the food rotting thing. When food rot, I think you can no longer get any nutrition out of it. But the few examples here, you can still eat it, and it still gives you nutrition, just it tastes horrible. Adding spice to wine(Rand's wine in chaper 1) and food (soup in chapter 2) would make it fine.

It is like the DO is tainting food just like tainting saidin. There is a dirty filth on the surface of the food, and you have to reach across that filth to reach the nutrition underneath.

It is like food is not rotten like the food being rotten regularly, but it is a form of food poisoning, only much slower. Food is poisoned by a form of the DO's taint, and I wonder if people (both men and women) whould go mad from this new taint if they eat enough food! That would be the reason to start TG before all people went mad from slow food poisoning!