The two abilities both used marks and created connections between him and others, so he thought they would fuse. Apparently, he was wrong. But he couldn't figure out what went wrong exactly.
He couldn't figure out why the fusion failed even after dwelling on it for minutes. Not that he had something else to do at that time. He was relaxing on the ground trying to recover from the pain, so he decided to spend that time thinking about the reason for the failure.
The silver lining was that he was able to recover the lost Life Domination ability. All it took was some energy and game points from him.
It took 40 game points, which is half of what it would have taken to fuse a new ability with the Life Domination ability. This wasn't much, but he could see how expensive attempting fusion could become in the future.
"So I have 1,810 game points now. Who would have thought that I used to have 2,900 some days ago?"