Chapter 155: 155

With a slight smile, Alexander watched Michelle. She was already on the right track, close to achieving her goal, so he knew that just as he had guessed, he wouldn’t have a reason to step in.

From her spatial ring, Michelle pulled out a random dagger she had there and closed the sealing book. Though the color difference she found was on the inside of the book, she wanted to approach it from the outside. She had a gut feeling it would be better to do it that way.

So, while humming a song from her past life, she stabbed the edge of the knife into the side of the cover, peeling off the top layer. The cover was made of a few layers. From the inside, they were thin paper, wood, then two layers of thick paper, and finally a layer of monster leather. The leather was the layer that Michelle tore off.

But she didn’t see anything special there.

Still, she wanted to compare it to the front of the book, so she peeled the leather on the front too. And just as she had guessed, there was no difference between the papers.

Then, she peeled off the first and second layers of the paper, but still nothing. There, she was already met with the thin wood. It was so thin that it was partly bendable. But when it was combined with three layers of thick paper and a layer of thick monster leather, the book had a hard cover.

Michelle stabbed the knife between the paper and the wood and slowly pried them apart.

At first, everything seemed normal, but just when Michelle was about to tear the two apart completely, she felt a gush of power from the book.

That didn’t stop her. Quite the opposite. She grabbed the two materials and forcefully tugged at them, tearing one from the other.

In an instant, Michelle felt something wail within her soul, so she quickly closed her eyes and checked her contract with the sealing book. It was severely weakened and damaged.

Seeing Michelle completely destroy the cover of the sealing book, Alexander’s black eyes glinted with something sly. He certainly didn’t expect her to do that. From the start, he knew that for her to gain a perfect connection with the book, she would need to destroy the cover, but he thought it would take her a while to reach that point. Not that she would straight away go for the kill.

When Michelle felt that the contract she had with the sealing book was slowly falling apart, a small smile tugged at her lips. The situation was completely different from when her contract with Amre weakened. Back then, it just shook greatly once and lost its power. But at the moment, the contract she had with the sealing book was crumbling down like a house of cards, never meant to last for long.

Feeling that, Michelle quickly opened her eyes and once again turned to the first page of the book.

Just as she had guessed, the ancient runes painted over the black stains were dimming and some had already disappeared.

That could only mean one thing. The sealing book’s soul was dying.

Everything that could be contracted had some kind of soul. Spatial rings and bracelets had some too. Even if the souls were so small and weak that they didn’t have any consciousness, they were still souls or contracts wouldn’t have been possible.

By getting into a contract with a creature, these souls would become vulnerable to their master, which allowed their master to destroy them quite easily if they could reach the place where the contract connected to the tool. And to do that, the contract master just needed to shatter the soul’s shell. With the sealing book, it was the space between the layer of paper and wood.

A normal person would never be able to separate the two, but for the contract master, that was as easy as pie. No one had ever really done that. Because why would someone want to ruin their contracted tool? Well, Michelle.

Souls weren’t meant to be without their shell, so if the master destroyed the shell, the soul would scatter. Along with the death of the soul, the contractable artifact would turn into an ordinary tool, and the contract the artifact had with the master would break.

Knowing what was about to happen with the soul, Michelle quickly activated her memory manipulation skill. But she altered it a bit. There was one problem. She needed her spirit energy to activate the skill. But she promised not to use it until she was able to conceal her Spirit Soul Blood.

So she just soaked her wisp of consciousness in her soul and then used her soul energy instead of her spirit energy to guide the skill to the soul of the sealing book.

As quite some time had passed since she came back to the tavern, she could already once again use her soul energy, so activating the skill was easy.

Because Michelle used her soul energy instead of her spirit energy, the skill she activated was far from the memory manipulation skill she usually used, but she didn’t want it for the memory part of the skill. She wanted it for the part that could enter and manipulate other souls. Partly control them.

When the skill entered the soul that was about to scatter, Michelle was able to locate it. So she quickly wrapped her soul energy around it and started pulling it into her body.

After a while, she felt a small soul entering her body along with her soul energy, and then, it entered her soul. That made Michelle smile a bit. She had achieved what she wanted.

For a long while, she forcibly kept the little soul within her soul as she reached for the sealing book once again.

She suddenly realized there was one thing she hadn’t thought through properly. For her to be able to finish the whole process, she needed to repair the book. In her spatial ring, she had nothing like glue or a sewing set because she could always use her spirit energy for that. But at the moment, she couldn’t use her spirit energy; she was in a blind spot.

So, though it was quite against her liking, she turned to Alexander. “Can you fix it for me?” she waved the book in front of him as she asked.

Alexander’s smile widened. He had never thought he would be asked to do something trivial and easy. So he just lifted his finger and a thin black thread left him, flying at the book. There, it spread around the cover and forced the layers back together. For a while, the whole cover was black before Alexander twisted his finger once again and the blackness turned into a thin thread again and returned to him. The cover was like it had never been touched before.

“Thanks!” Michelle nodded her head at him before closing her eyes again.

Within her soul, the small soul had already calmed down and gotten bound to her. Being within a bigger and more powerful soul, even though it didn’t have any intelligence or consciousness, it surrendered to the bigger soul, letting Michelle form a powerful connection with it, more powerful than that of any contract. And what was most important was that the nature and characteristics of the small soul didn’t change.

Once again activating the memory manipulation skill with her soul energy, Michelle led the small soul back into the sealing book. When it was back in a familiar environment, it spread all around the book and took control of it again. The sealing book was back to its original state. With only two changes.

The first change was that it had an intense connection with Michelle’s soul.

And the second change was that the first page was once again blank. The sealing book was no longer sealing Nyxaroth within its pages. That was because the soul of the sealing book had nearly died. Though nearly dying wasn’t enough for the contract it had with Michelle to disappear, it was enough for the runes sealing Nyxaroth to weaken and for Nyxaroth to break free.

But Nyxaroth still had a contract with Michelle. The only change the breakage of the contract brought to him was that his powers wouldn’t be restricted if he went to the higher realms.

If he went there while still sealed, his powers would be suppressed and he would never be able to show his true power, but after breaking it, he was able to do it. Unfortunately, he was still in the lower realm with Michelle where he was suppressed by the Heavenly Law, so he still couldn’t show his true power.

Staring at the sealing book in her hands, Michelle suddenly remembered something she had long forgotten, and it involved contracts too. The first time she had tried to form a wisp of consciousness and slept for a month after exhausting her soul energy was because she wanted to find a way to use a spatial ring without forming a contract with it. For that, she needed to be able to use wisps of consciousness.

She was already able to do that, but she had completely forgotten about the spatial ring.

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