Chapter 154: 154

No matter how quietly the knights moved when they entered the houses, the old tavern lady sensed them and glanced out a window. Seeing the knights behind the windows, the old tavern lady turned towards the staircase to the basement. It wasn’t hard to guess that the knights must have come either because of Michelle or because of Alexander.

For a short moment, the tavern lady considered going down to inform them of the presence of the knights, but then she decided not to. The knights were clearly lying in wait, so it would be enough to tell Michelle and Alexander once they came out of the basement.

In the basement, Alexander just stared at Michelle as she lay on the ground, habitually curled up because she wasn’t on her bed.

Alexander was able to sense the sudden movement above the ground, and though he didn’t know what was going on, it was easy for him to guess that Michelle must have caused some kind of trouble before returning to the tavern. That made his smile widen. His thoughts about Michelle were just getting confirmed and strengthened. She really caused trouble wherever she went, both intentionally and accidentally.

Being below the Spirit rank, Michelle had no chance to sense the commotion above the ground, so she just continued to rest lazily. She didn’t know what time it was, but she was at least somehow able to keep track of time from the moment she had taken the iron supplement pill. Her time and space awareness was quite high, so she was guessing that evening was nearing, but she wasn’t too sure about that. It was possible that her guess was off and that it was already night.

Michelle was planning to rest for the whole night, so in the morning she could try to strengthen her connection with the sealing book. She had a gut feeling that for her to be able to use the book, she needed to have an unbreakable connection with it, far surpassing the usual connection between a contract master and a contract tool.

She didn’t know how to achieve that, but she could first try to give some more of her blood to the book. Still, for that, she would need her blood to be recovered. So she needed to rest.

If that method failed, she could think of different methods. She had no plans of thinking up anything too serious until then. She just let herself get lost in thoughts, letting the trail go as it liked, creating new ideas—some which she would never use, and some which she would just store in her memory to return to at a later date. And maybe even some which she could use right in the morning.

Though Michelle wasn’t planning to sleep, after having exhausted her soul energy and relentlessly digging holes in the basement, she was spent and, not even knowing when, she fell asleep on the cold, damp ground. The coldness made her relax and the dampness was easy to ignore, so sleep could be considered inevitable.

When Michelle woke up, she had no clue how much time had passed. The basement was always dark, so it was just as possible for a few days to have passed and she would have no way of knowing.

“Did I sleep for a long time?” Michelle asked as she sat up and glanced at Alexander.

Seeing in the dark was easy as pie for her, so she was able to see that he was still in the same place she remembered he was at before she fell asleep.

Although she didn’t know how long she had been out cold, she knew that it had to be at least a few hours, so she started to wonder what kind of person Alexander had to be for him to stay in the same place for hours. But it was also proof that not that much time had passed. If it had, Alexander would have definitely moved at least a bit.

“Just a few hours,” Alexander answered, his voice carefree. But there was something in his eyes Michelle couldn’t quite comprehend. It was somehow familiar, but at the same time completely foreign.

The inability to identify it made Michelle a bit uncomfortable. Something was telling her that it was dangerous. And if not dangerous, it would at least highly impact her in the future. Whether the impact would be positive or negative… she couldn’t tell.

Alexander could see that Michelle noticed the strangeness in his eyes, but he didn’t mind it.

“What are your plans now?” he asked, glancing at the book on the ground. Michelle hadn’t put it away before she went to sleep, so he was guessing she wanted to do more things with it.

After staring at Alexander for a while longer, Michelle slowly turned her gaze towards the sealing book.

“Do you know of a way to strengthen a connection with a contracted item?” she suddenly asked, surprising even herself.

Originally, she was planning to give it more of her blood, but when she saw the strange look in Alexander’s eyes, something brewed within her. It was the urge to ask him. He was from the heavenly realm, so he was definitely more knowledgeable than herself, so why not use that infinite well of information?

“It depends on how you want to use the tool,” Alexander said as he walked closer to Michelle. “If you want to use the book for large-scale sealing, you need to have a peak connection with it, so ordinary methods won’t work.”

Michelle understood what he was telling her.

“So no matter how much blood I give it, it won’t be enough…” she sighed a bit.

“Then, what should I do?”

“Well…” Alexander’s smile widened. “You need to directly connect your soul to it, not through a contract. A contract will never be enough for you to utilize the full potential of the book.”

“How do I go about doing that?” Michelle asked with a frown. Truthfully, she didn’t like the sound of it. So she decided to listen to the method before deciding whether to use it or not.

But Alexander didn’t have such plans.

“I don’t know! I’ve never bothered to do something like that!” he said with a grin. It was an obvious lie he didn’t even bother to hide.

Even if he had never tried it, there was no way he wouldn’t know the method to gain a direct connection between soul and a tool if he knew that it was a better connection than the one made by contracts.

The few times Michelle had gone over Rivenaar’s memories, though she hadn’t memorized anything other than what she needed at the moment, there was always something that had caught her attention. Rivenaar himself was aware that a contract was not the best and strongest connection between a master and a tool or a beast, but he was also aware of one more thing.

In the heavenly realm, not many knew that contracts didn’t grant a connection good enough to utilize the full power of contracted tools. And those who knew were only those who could create the better connection. Because once someone knew there was a better way to connect with and utilize something, they would desire to have such a connection with their contracted tools. Because who wouldn’t want to access the full potential of their artifacts?

Michelle could see that Alexander was far from a greedy person; he was more of a ruthless person, but she knew that he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to better utilize the power of things at his disposal. Unless he had no tools he had ever contracted. That could twist things up a bit.

But even if that was the case, that didn’t seem like enough of a reason for him not to learn to create a perfect connection in case he needed it in the future.

Still, Michelle was aware how stubborn Alexander was, so if he was hellbent on not telling her the way to gain the connection, she would need to figure it out herself.

Well, at least he had given her a hint, so she knew not to try to strengthen her connection with the sealing book by strengthening the contract. She had to find a different way.

“How do I go about this…?” Michelle muttered as she picked up the sealing book from the ground and fixed her gaze on it. To the naked eye, it seemed like any other ordinary book, but with eyes hosting spirit energy, one could see that it stored an immense amount of spirit energy. Michelle couldn’t know if it was the spirit energy of the creatures sealed by the book, or if it was the power that was able to seal the creatures, but she didn’t really care.

For a long time, Michelle just stared at the book, her hands trailing along its edges, before she opened it and started turning pages one by one. Except for the first page, which had a black stain with runes over it, all the other pages were blank. Still, Michelle had the feeling that the key to her problem lay within the blank pages.

Over and over again, Michelle turned the pages of the book from front to back and then from back to front, but she couldn’t find anything. That was only until she discovered that after turning the last page, the inner side of the cover had a slightly different color than the inner side of the cover on the front of the book.

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