Chapter 147: 147

Sitting in the valley, Michelle felt the exhaustion hitting her, but she knew she couldn’t fall asleep. If she did fall asleep, she could end up sleeping for maybe even a month or more. And although she could afford it time-wise, before that, she had to at least explain to everyone what had happened in the cave, or they would just pointlessly panic if they couldn’t wake her up.

As the darkness in the valley slowly retreated as the sun rose behind the horizon, Michelle could hear movements around the campfire. She wasn’t looking that way, but she could guess that the one who woke up was Ivona. She was a light element Spirit Master, so with the concentration of light element spirit energy increasing with the dawn, she sensed it and woke up.

But Michelle was sure that Ivona wasn’t the first to wake up. Nyxaroth must have already woken up a while ago since he possessed dark element spirit energy, but as he was most of the time in the form of black mist, Michelle had no way of hearing him when he moved. And as her other senses were dulled from exhaustion, she couldn’t even feel his presence behind her.

“Michelle?!” Ivona was pleasantly surprised to see Michelle sitting close by. “When did you get here?” she asked and quickly looked around, seeing Mare sleeping next to Cold Flame.

Turning to look at Ivona, Michelle smiled a bit. “I’ll explain when everyone gets up,” she said lazily, a long yawn leaving her mouth. She really felt like sleeping, but she had to wait for a while longer.

Instantly noticing the paleness on Michelle’s face, even though it was already better compared to when she had just left the cave, Ivona understood that something must have happened, so she quickly got up, and, one by one, she started shaking everyone awake.

After a while, everyone was sitting in a circle around Michelle, staring at her suspiciously.

“Michelle, how did you get so pale?!” Snow asked with a frown before Michelle could even open her mouth. “Don’t tell me you did something reckless in the cave!”

Hearing that, Michelle felt her eyebrow twitch a bit. Did she really seem like a reckless person in Snow’s eyes? Why was it that no one else seemed to think that way?

But Michelle’s thoughts couldn’t be heard by Snow, so she just continued scolding and nagging Michelle, until Michelle could no longer bear with it. With the contract mark of a snake around the thorny rose appearing on her forehead for a split of a second, Snow disappeared from the place where she was sitting. Michelle got so annoyed that she pulled her into the contract space.

Seeing Snow disappear just like that, no one questioned anything. Everyone knew of Michelle’s contract with Snow and her other contracted beasts, Mare, Cold Flame, and Nyxaroth, so they weren’t surprised that she could suddenly make Snow disappear. The presence of contract spaces was known even in the Land of Exile, so they knew about it and could easily guess that was where Snow disappeared to.

“I’ll explain what happened now…” Michelle said after a long yawn. While speaking, she made sure that Snow in the contracted space could hear her every word so she wouldn’t just nag her even more after Michelle summoned her back.

Michelle summarized what happened in the cave into a few sentences, but from how pale her face was and how tired she looked, everyone could tell that what happened in the cave must have taken a great toll on her soul energy.

“You should go to sleep now,” Anastasia said, some worry evident in her voice. She herself was able to use soul energy after Michelle had trained her, so she knew how terrible it felt to have halfway spent one’s soul energy. And she couldn’t even imagine how it would feel to completely deplete it and even strain and push oneself over the limit to use more, to use what basically wasn’t there.

With a nod, Michelle just curled up on the ground and closed her eyes lazily, feeling sleep scratching on her mind. Before falling asleep, she summoned Snow back from the contracted space so she wouldn’t get too aggrieved.

“This valley is so strange…” she mumbled as her consciousness faded into deep slumber.

Michelle had no idea how long her consciousness drifted through the darkness. She could only remember seeing images from her past life, both good and bad ones. The bad ones were about the training she had undergone in the organization for a long time, and about the first few times she had killed someone.

Even under the organization’s cruel conditioning for a long time, to kill a person for the first time was nearly impossible for Michelle. She was very young back then, and hid in the shadows of the room of her target for a long time even after he had entered, fighting the idea to just drop everything and run away.

But in the end, the knowledge that she would be tortured if she ran away forced her to finish the mission. She killed the old man with a single slash of her knife and then fought her way through the bodyguards to the highest floor, where she jumped out of a window, making it seem like a suicide, when in reality, she just dropped down a dummy, grabbed a rope prepared by the window, and climbed to the rooftop. Then she escaped through the emergency stairs.

After the next few missions, Michelle was plagued by nightmares for a long time, seeing the faces of her dead targets and the bodyguards she had killed every time she closed her eyes, but she had to steel her heart and continue with the missions.

Just like that, her heart slowly grew cold and she started to lose her humanity bit by bit.

Until, while working as a doctor when not on missions, she had a strange patient. A very cheerful, young tattoo artist. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer. The doctors said radiotherapy wouldn’t help, so the girl had to undergo a surgery.

Michelle wasn’t a surgeon, so she didn’t really know what the surgery entailed, but she wasn’t even that curious. When she had met the girl, her humanity had already nearly crumbled and she was just putting up an act when she wasn’t on a mission, so a random patient was none of her concern.

But this random patient was able to see through her act. She saw the apathy hiding in Michelle’s eyes.

Michelle didn’t know when the girl noticed. All she knew was that as she worked at the hospital where the girl was hospitalized, Michelle sometimes passed by the girl in the hallways, but they never said a word to each other.

Still, Michelle did notice the girl after a while, after a few months, because the girl was in the hospital for way too long for someone who was originally hospitalized in the surgical department. But even then, Michelle paid no mind to the girl.

It was only after the girl was moved to the Intensive Care Unit where Michelle worked, that Michelle and the girl started interacting.

The girl was the first one to say something not related to work, if one could say. She was the first one to mention Michelle’s act.

Realizing that she had been seen through, Michelle considered silencing the girl, but she shooed the thought away after talking with the girl for a while. Maybe it was because of her apathy, but she couldn’t exactly remember any of their conversations. Still, she could remember that for the first time in years, she was happy and laughing.

Michelle withheld from the organization that someone had seen through her act. She had two reasons to do so. The first was that she knew that if she told the organization, they would kill the girl. She didn’t want to see that. And the second was that she didn’t consider the girl a threat. She didn’t know enough. She had just seen that Michelle was actually an apathetic person even though she portrayed herself to be normal. Anyone could do that, not just an assassin.

So, even after the girl was discharged from the hospital, Michelle kept in contact with her, slowly feeling some humanity returning to her. The girl returned to work as a tattoo artist and Michelle even asked her for a tattoo. The girl readily agreed, and after that, Michelle carried a tattoo on her back.

She let the girl choose it and didn’t even look at it. She knew she would once be forced to have the tattoo removed because of her work. But she wanted to keep it for a while.

Who would have thought that before she could even get to look at it, she would fall off a rooftop while saving a boy and die, only to wake up in the body of Michelle Grace. So until the end, she had no clue that the tattoo she got in her past life was exactly the same as the contract mark she had with her beasts.

A snake, coiled around a rose, with the rose’s throns stabbing it all over.

But Michelle wasn’t really sad. And she didn’t really miss the girl. It could sound cruel, but from the start, she knew there would come a time when she would have to cut her ties with the girl so the organization wouldn’t kill her. From the start, though she valued the time with the girl and was happy that she felt her humanity slowly returning, she never let herself get caught up in any feelings. Not even friendship. She just enjoyed talking with the girl.

And after becoming Michelle Grace, she didn’t even have the time to remember her. One reason was that she was basically always doing something, and the second reason was that after waking up in her new life, she had gained many, well, from her perspective, many people whom she could genuinely call friends as she was no longer controlled by the organization.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep