Chapter 143: 143

Alexander’s smile widened as he observed Michelle. He didn’t even know why, but he really loved seeing her angry face. Maybe it was because when she was angry, she never looked like it.

“What I want…?” he dragged his tone teasingly, his black eyes narrowing slyly. “I don’t think you can give me anything I want, so I guess I can’t help you. I’m sorry!” he said after a while, deciding to anger Michelle even more.

Michelle stared at Alexander, her already red eyes turning an even richer shade of red—nearly blood-red. She was angry, but she still put on a lazy smile as her mask.

“Didn’t you say you want to repay me for saving your life? How about doing so now?” she asked with a cold hint in her lazy voice.

“But weren’t you the one who said that you didn’t actually save my life and that you just pulled the void out of me and used it to strengthen yourself?” Alexander’s amusement grew.

Hearing Alexander’s response, Michelle’s rage only grew. If she had the power, she would have most probably killed him on the spot. But she didn’t have the power. And she also needed his help with correcting the contract she had with Mare and healing Mare’s soul, so even if she had the power or means, she would still have held back. No matter how much she despised seeing that annoyingly handsome face, smiling while angering her to death.

Fighting off her anger, Michelle took a deep breath to calm down, the red in her eyes subsiding a bit. But it was still very clear.

“Since you don’t want to help me, just get lost…” she said with a sigh, as she walked over to Mare, coiled around the boulder, thoughts raging in her mind.

Slowly, her emotions calmed down and her eyes were once again purple.

Alexander didn’t listen to Michelle and didn’t leave. He stayed behind, observing her every move. He was fairly surprised when Michelle suddenly told him to get lost. He thought she would try to bicker with him, to make him help her.

But instead, it seemed like she was thinking of finding a way herself. So he decided to sit back and watch her until the moment she wouldn’t be able to do anything and would ask him to step in.

From the start, he was planning to help Michelle, but since she had decided to think about a solution on her own, he would let her. Because, what could he know? She could as well end up finding or developing one.

For a long while, Michelle just remained motionless, staring at the stone and snake in front of her. No one could guess what she was thinking. Not a single muscle on her face moved. She was considering many things, and all the thoughts were swirling around one subject.

She couldn’t touch the stone. It was made of Void Obsidian. As Alexander had told her before, if she touched it, the soul energy within it would become hers, its characteristics changing to assimilate with the soul energy she already owned. And thus, she would be unable to use it to fix the damage the soul energy had already caused to Mare’s soul.

Which meant she had to start from Mare and her soul. Or with something belonging to Mare. For example, a part of her shed skin. Michelle had already used it to create the antidote for Mare’s poison, and she had a gut feeling—or maybe hope—that the shed skin was essential even in this case.

Being a spirit beast, Mare shed her skin quite often, around once every two months, except during winter, so Michelle had quite a few stored in her space ring, because Mare always insisted she took it.

Michelle took out some shed skin, which looked like an ordinary thick cloth with scaly patterns, and stared at it for a while.

“You don’t want to help me, but at least answer a question of mine…” Michelle said as she summoned her ice-element spirit energy, creating small needles and thin threads.

“Oh?” Alexander raised a brow with a smile. “And what do you wish to know?” he asked, tilting his head ever so slightly.

“If I touch the Void Obsidian through gloves, will I still absorb the soul energy within it?” she asked as she put the end of the thread through the hole in the needle.

Alexander glanced at the shed skin in Michelle’s hands and his gaze deepened.

“If they are made of that…” he pointed with his chin at the shed skin, “… it should be fine.”

“Good!” Michelle smiled and plopped her butt on the ground, lazily using the needle and thread to sew a single glove out of the snake skin. It took her quite a while, but when she was done, she was satisfied. Though it was sloppy because she did it haphazardly, it was enough to serve its purpose.

Putting the glove on her right hand, Michelle walked over to Mare, who was still hissing aggressively, and put it on the boulder. At the same time, she put her bare left hand on the side of Mare’s body.

The moment Michelle’s skin touched Mare’s scales, Mare’s hissing stopped, her gaze returning to normal for a moment. She turned her head to look at Michelle, but the moment their eyes locked, her gaze once again turned cold and wary. Still, there was some improvement, because she didn’t start hissing again.

With a sigh, Michelle closed her eyes and focused on the feeling of Void Obsidian under her hand through the shed snake skin. The snake skin was half-, or semipermeable, which allowed Michelle to let her black soul energy—basically void—seep through the snake skin and sink into the boulder of Void Obsidian. At the same time, she seeped a bit of her soul energy into Mare’s body.

Just like that, she formed a channel of soul energy between the Void Obsidian and Mare without absorbing the soul energy in the Void Obsidian.

But she was worried that if she tried to pull the soul energy from the boulder, through her body into Mare’s body, it would end up synchronizing and blending with her own soul energy, ruining her efforts and most probably even destroying the chances of getting Mare back to normal.

Thus, she decided to only pull through her body a bit of the soul energy from the boulder, so even if it failed, it wouldn’t destroy all hopes.

Still, that wasn’t as easy as it sounded. In the first place, the soul energy within the boulder didn’t belong to her, so she had no control over it. If she wanted to control it, she had to somehow make it her own without affecting its characteristics, or somehow forcefully control it. But she had no clue how to execute either of the ideas.

Watching from the distance, Alexander’s smile widened as he opened his mouth to speak:

“Fill the Void Obsidian with your soul energy to the brim and trap its soul energy in there!”

Hearing that, Michelle arched a brow. Filling the Void Obsidian with her soul energy wasn’t a problem, but trapping the boulder’s soul energy proved to be a problem. Her and the boulder’s soul energies had different properties, so the boulder’s soul energy was able to seep out no matter how much she tried, making her frown a bit.

Alexander saw all that from the sideline, but he didn’t plan to interfere anymore. Michelle was already on the right track, and he wanted her to take care of everything else herself. She had already come so far, so he wanted to see how much further she could go.

Feeling the boulder’s soul energy slipping out, Michelle frowned. She could push some more of her soul energy into the Void Obsidian, but she was worried that if too much of her void-like soul energy was present, it would take over the original soul energy, shattering her plans to get Mare back to normal.

So, instead, she decided to reshape the soul energy. Closing her eyes even tighter, she started controlling her soul energy to create a cage within the boulder, just beneath the surface. Then, she started circulating the rest of her soul energy between the cage bars, creating something like glass.

Very quickly, the flow of the soul energy getting out lessened, but it didn’t completely disappear, so Michelle wasn’t completely satisfied yet.

And then, a thought struck her.

She summoned more of her soul energy and let it spread out around the Void Obsidian and Mare, forming a solid cage between the boulder and snake. Once again, she chained spare soul energy between the bars, blocking out all the soul energy that got through the first cage.

“What if I squeeze the soul energy in the Void Obsidian?” Michelle asked as she slowly opened her eyes, fixing her gaze on her hand on the side of Mare’s scaled body.

“You will most probably crush it into void, but that shouldn’t affect your plans. Just…” Alexander’s brows twitched a bit as he spoke.

“Just what?” Michelle asked.

“If you pull the void through Mare, you will infect her with Void Plague,” Alexander said with a slight frown.

“That’s that thing I saved you from?” Michelle closed her eyes again in thought, not moving her hands away from Mare and the Void Obsidian.

“Yes!”

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