Chapter 150: 150

Though Michelle was able to keep her emotions in check, so her eyes remained purple, she was already very close to letting them turn blood-red from anger. One of the many things she hated was being touched, and it didn’t matter by who, so Alexander’s hand on her neck was making her emotions swirl darkly within her.

Also, the position of Alexander’s hand irritated Michelle even more. As a former assassin, she knew that her neck was her weak spot, so her aversion to having it touched was even bigger than compared to other parts of her body.

Knowing that she wouldn’t be able to suppress her rage for much longer if Alexander didn’t pull his hand back, Michelle frowned a bit. “Let’s go to the basement,” she said as she jumped off her chair, successfully getting away from Alexander’s claws.

“As you wish!” With a chuckle, Alexander followed Michelle behind the counter and to the staircase leading into the basement.

Once there, Michelle didn’t even have to specifically sense around for humidity as she instantly felt her clothes getting damp. It was much better compared to when she had first entered the basement, but it was still much worse than when she had left to go to the desert-like valley. That just showed how intense the evaporation from the underground lake was.

Normally, Michelle would have once again erected an ice pillar to get rid of the humidity first before going to investigate the lake, but since she couldn’t use her spirit energy at the moment, she cast the thought aside.

Still, she had the itch to use her spirit energy out of habit since she was already accustomed to using it.

So she glanced at Alexander. “Do you have something like spirit energy suppressant?” she asked with a sigh. She really didn’t want his help, but he was the only one she could turn to. In the end, the only one around was him.

“No!” Alexander shook his head with his signature playful smile. “I’ve never needed something like that,” he added.

“I see…” Michelle didn’t know whether to be pissed off or disappointed, so she decided to pay Alexander no more attention and walked into the basement. The ice pillar she had first created had already melted away long ago, leaving behind only a small puddle. And most of it had already seeped into the ground.

Seeing that, Michelle crouched next to the half-gone puddle and ran her finger over the area around it. The ground was still wet, with the mud sticking to her skin. Though the ground was wet everywhere because of the thick vapor, the place around the puddle was like a soaked sponge, reminding Michelle of swamps.

It was strange considering that it had already been quite a while since the ice pillar had melted. If the ground was normal, the water should have seeped through the mud and fallen into the underground lake. But at the moment, it started to seem like the ground was one-way when it came to water. The water could easily pass through it when it was coming up from the lake, but it couldn’t go down, into the lake. As if something was blocking it.

Michelle found that interesting, but she didn’t find that to be related to the intensity of the evaporation. She couldn’t imagine how that could be affected by the mud type.

Or, she couldn’t imagine it in her past life, in her old world. But at the moment, she decided to give it some thought. Because, what if it was an important clue and she overlooked it just because of the natural phenomenon she was used to in her past life?

Reaching into her spatial ring, Michelle took out some tools which clearly surprised even Alexander. “Are you planning to dig a hole here?” he asked with a laugh, unable to suppress his amusement. Not like he had ever tried to do so.

“Yes!” Michelle answered placidly as she picked up the small shovel she took out, stabbing it as deep into the mud as possible. At first, it went in easily, but when the shovel was only halfway in, as if Michelle had stabbed something hard, it got stopped. Pulling it out was easy, but stabbing back had the same result no matter how many times she tried.

“What are you trying to achieve…?” Alexander could barely suppress the urge to burst out laughing when he saw Michelle stabbing the shovel into the ground over and over again, like a child playing in the mud. Just her expression was far too serious for anyone to think she was playing around.

“Something is blocking me!” Michelle said as she started digging up some dirt, forming a hole, deep barely five centimeters. Then, she couldn’t dig any deeper even though the state of the dirt was exactly the same there.

“Alexander, could this be affecting the evaporation speed?” she asked as she beckoned backwards for Alexander to come take a look at the hole she dug.

When Alexander walked over and leaned over to take a look, she stabbed the shovel a few more times to show him that she couldn’t do anything more. “What do you think about this?” she asked with a tilt of her head. “Strange, right?”

“Not really!” Alexander shook his head and a small black thread formed between his fingers. Then, he shot it towards Michelle’s shovel and the thread instantly wrapped around the handle like a snake. “Try again now!” he said with a smile.

Michelle lifted a brow in confusion, but knowing that Alexander was far more powerful, knowledgeable, resourceful, and competent than she was at the moment, she didn’t say anything more and just lifted the shovel up again to stab it into the dirt again. And to her surprise, she was able to stab deeper again.

“Damn…” she muttered. “How did you do this?!” she quickly asked, turning her head to stare at Alexander’s sickeningly handsome face with her purple eyes.

“If I’m not wrong, you are up against a Shadow Master,” Alexander said with his smile slowly disappearing. He didn’t like the situation. Not because he was worried about Michelle. He knew very well that she would be able to take care of herself. But he didn’t want her to already know who Shadow Masters were. And he definitely didn’t want her to find out because of a situation like that.

“Can’t you just find a different place where you would free the souls in the Soul Seeking Pendants?” Alexander asked, his sly smile returning to his lips.

“No!” Michelle straight out rejected the idea. Since she had already started, she wouldn’t give up in the middle.

“You can’t even use your soul and spirit energy. What are you planning to do?” Alexander crouched down next to Michelle and leaned on her, making her nearly fall over as she wasn’t expecting that.

“For now, I’ll just dig around this place,” Michelle said with a slight smile as she took up another shovel.

Then, a very strange occurrence took place. Half-lying, half-sitting on the ground, Michelle would always use one shovel to dig a few centimeters, and when she would get stuck, she would use the shovel with the thread of Alexander’s power to dig until she got stuck again. Then, she would move on to a different place.

After a while, the whole basement was filled with holes, some deeper and some more shallow. And it was very systematic. The area near the walls had very deep holes, reaching somewhere around thirty centimeters, but in the middle of the room, just above the lake, the holes were at most five centimeters. And that was after Michelle used the shovel with Alexander’s thread of power.

Watching Michelle, Alexander could no longer suppress his laughter and had a laughing fit which could be heard even by the guests of the tavern, happily drinking since they didn’t have to see the horrifying, smiling duo of Michelle and Alexander.

“When will you stop this?” Alexander finally asked after calming down.

“I’m done now!” Michelle said as she let go of the two shovels, letting them fall by her side.

“Oh-?” Alexander’s smile widened even further. “Did you make a major breakthrough or something?” he asked.

“Not really, but I got some nice information out of this!” Michelle said as she stood up, wiping her face a bit. But that just caused her to smear more dirt over her face. Though she didn’t mind.

Alexander glanced around at all the holes and nodded a bit. He did find the situation funny, but that didn’t mean he didn’t notice the depth of them. When Michelle dug with the ordinary shovel, she would always be stopped at the depth of five centimeters, but when she dug with the shovel with his power, the depth was different based on her distance from the lake.

That made Alexander consider the fact that the Shadow Master who set up the basement used two spells, if he could call it that. One affected the layer of mud just beneath the five centimeters depth, blocking ordinary tools and any other things from going deeper, and another spell, which was concentrated mainly around the lake, to stop tools with Alexander’s kind of power from digging towards it.

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