Chapter 114: 114

When Michelle woke up in the morning, one of the maids told her that Anastasia had woken up sometime during the night, but they didn’t want to disturb her at midnight. After both girls ate breakfast, Michelle took Anastasia back to the training grounds for further training.

The moment that Michelle summoned her chains, Anastasia put most of her focus into coating herself with her soul energy and rushed at Michelle before she could strike for the first time. Quickly, Michelle blocked with the chains, forming a net barrier in front of her and jumped to the side. Quickly, she got behind Anastasia and whipped a black chain at her.

But after recovering her soul energy, Anastasia was more proficient with it than before she fell asleep, so she didn’t have much trouble blocking the chain by throwing a few feathers at it. Though her aim was quite bad, she threw out more than one feather, and she could guide all of them, so she was able to stab the chain into the ground.

Still, she didn’t let her guard down as she knew Michelle, and one attack at a time wasn’t something Michelle would do. And indeed, she was right.

A split second after Anastasia stabbed the chain into the ground with her feathers, she realized that the chain net behind her was moving. And that was impossible to block. Well, dodging wasn’t really an option as the net was too big. The only way Anastasia could succeed in dodging would be if she were able to put all her soul energy into her legs to boost her speed, but she didn’t have enough proficiency with it yet.

Still, she wouldn’t just give up and forced her soul energy to surge through her legs as she ran to the side. To her surprise, her speed was a bit higher, but still not enough, so the chain net quickly caught up to her and pinned her to the ground, covering her like a blanket. But a heavy and cold one.

With a wave of her hand, Michelle let the chain net disappear, and Anastasia jumped back to her feet. The few moments she was on the ground let her think about what she did. She realized that when her soul energy seeped a bit out of her skin when she moved, she moved a bit faster, so, without letting Michelle attack her again, she coated her legs with a thin layer of soul energy and tried to run. And, as she guessed, she was way faster than before. It was still too slow to outrun Michelle’s chains, but it was a huge improvement.

For the whole day and two more days, Anastasia kept training with Michelle, sometimes just running around, sometimes trying to form a sphere around herself as a shield, sometimes attacking Michelle to increase her strength, so she could have at least some grasp over the basic possibilities with soul energy.

On the morning of the fourth day after Anastasia woke up, Michelle decided that Anastasia was prepared to come with her to the Heavenly Law barrier’s mountains, whose name Michelle didn’t even bother to remember, and when Anastasia agreed, Michelle told the Archduke about it, took her beasts, and had Snow take them there.

Landing at the last field before the mountains, Michelle sent Snow into her contract space and looked at the jungle spreading in front of her eyes. She could feel the power of monsters inside the mountains, so she agreed with Anastasia that they would proceed slowly, so they wouldn’t meet the strongest monsters right away and Anastasia could train some more with the weaker monsters.

After entering the jungle, they stayed in the outer parts for three days and constantly searched for the strongest monsters there, and after Anastasia could defeat them without Michelle’s help, which was quite quickly, they proceeded a bit deeper. There, they stayed for a while again before going deeper. Just like that, in about two weeks, they reached the cave where Ivona and Michelle stayed for one night, but Ivona then attracted the group of monsters. Also, from there, Michelle knew the exact path to the barrier between realms.

After checking the area around the cave, Michelle realized that after she and Ivona killed the group of monsters that created the array there, it was recreated, making her smile. She told Anastasia about it and told her that she would let her fight with a few of the monsters, since the present barrier showed that there were more members of the groups, and if they attracted them, Michelle could separate a few for Anastasia to fight.

When Anastasia agreed to it, Michelle formed a ladder with her ice spears on one tree and there formed an ice bridge in the air for Anastasia to wait on.

Coming back down, she melted the ice ladder and stopped in front of the cave. There, she gathered her dark element spirit energy and shot it up in a dark beam before quickly jumping up to one of the tree crowns, using the tree branches.

Soon, she saw the group of ugly monsters coming together in front of the cave from all directions. Some had scars in their fur, showing they were the few ones from the group Michelle and Ivona nearly annihilated before, but a few escaped.

Since that was the case, Michelle would make sure they died in Anastasia’s hands.

Secretly getting down, she used an ice spear to attract a few to come at her; from those, she knocked out most of them and left only one conscious, one that was scarred. As it ran at her in rage, Michelle ran deeper into the forest, making sure to shoot her ice spirit energy up into the tree crowns to create an ice bridge for Anastasia to follow them.

When she got the monster far enough from the cave, she formed an ice slide for Anastasia, and Anastasia quickly got down to fight the monster.

For a few days, Michelle kept leading the ugly monsters to Anastasia. The first few times, she only brought one monster, but then she brought two, then three, and in the end, she just took Anastasia to the cave and let her fight with the remaining monsters there, which were about to scatter around because they realized that most of them were missing.

In Michelle’s eyes, it was quite funny to watch the monsters; although they were able to create arrays, they were quite stupid, so they stayed by the cave even when many of them went missing. Only when seven of them remained did they realize that something was wrong. But by then, it was already too late. Michelle guided Anastasia back to the cave, and after Anastasia killed off the seven monsters, the two girls proceeded deeper into the jungle, going towards the place where Michelle felt her contract with Cold Flame, who was with Ivona.

Five days later, they found Ivona and all three of them started looking for monsters to fight together. During the time Michelle and Anastasia hadn’t seen Ivona, she had improved quite a lot. She also found a way to use her light element to light a fire, so she could cook meat for herself. Even though she had enough food with her, it was all just dried food, and after eating only that for a few days, she got sick of it and started looking for ways she could get food in the jungle.

At first, she thought about fruits and berries, but she only knew about a few edible fruits and berries, so that wasn’t really an option. Then, once when she was fighting a monster, she shot a thin but intense streak of her light element spirit energy at it, but she missed and hit a dead and dry tree. And to her surprise, the tree caught fire. But the fire quickly died because it was too small.

That time wasn’t the first time she had missed a monster; as the deeper she went into the jungle, the more agile the monsters were, but that was the first time she had hit something dry, as that was quite rare in the jungle. After that, she started collecting dry leaves and branches and storing them in her spatial ring, so she could bake some meat when she felt like it.

Ivona didn’t quite understand why she was able to light a fire with her spirit energy when she possessed the light element, but since it spared her from eating dried food for days, she was satisfied and happily used it.

But when she told Michelle and Anastasia about it, Michelle understood how it worked as she used to live in the 21st century, where things like convex and concave lenses existed, otherwise known as converging and diverging lenses, which were used basically everywhere.

Convex lenses were thicker in the middle and thinner on the edges, and they bent the light so that the light met at a focal point.

And the concave lenses did the exact opposite. They were thinner in the middle and thicker on the edges, and they bent the light so the rays spread out.

Ivona didn’t use anything like lenses, but she used a phenomenon that could happen with the convex lens. If an intense light was shining through a convex lens onto paper or something easily ignited, the light connected to one spot, and the spot would slowly get hotter until it caught fire.

What happened with Ivona’s light ray was that she used a very dense ray of light on a small, dry spot, which heated it up, and it easily started burning as it had enough oxygen and heat to do so. A simple but very useful physical process.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep