Chapter 188: 188

A pair of black eyes slowly changed color to red. And even the red started fading, revealing purple patches. The purple spread, and the whole irises were soon violet, gleaming with satisfaction.

This very pair of eyes was hidden under a veil of long silver hair, dancing in the wind as it liked.

The hair and eyes belonged to a petite figure skipping through an empty city toward a monster standing in the center. The young boy, fresh into puberty, was very out of place.

If someone else was there, they could feel the intense pressure all around the city and would think the boy wasn’t a human, since it didn’t seem to affect him.

The monster didn’t move an inch, its eyes locked on the boy. With each breath the monster took, the black gem on its forehead gleamed sharply for a split second.

It was clear. The monster was dangerous. But the boy remained calm and carefree, as if he knew the monster wouldn’t harm him—at least, not at the moment.

Disguised as Michael Grayson, Michelle skipped through the city lazily, thinking back to how she paralyzed Noctis. She had formed a needle out of her ice and stabbed it between two spinal discs in his neck, momentarily severing the connection of his spinal cord.

It was a simple method to explain, but execution was risky. If the needle moved just a millimeter off, Noctis would have ended up paralyzed for life—in the worst case, even dead.

But Michelle was trained in her past life to execute the move. The assassination organization had taught her many things she deemed pointless—until she suddenly needed them on her missions. Temporary paralyzation was one of those she used more often than the rest, but still not that much.

The skill was useful. By striking Noctis off guard, she was able to execute it perfectly, which allowed her to return to the monster.

Since the moment the fountain exploded, the part of her instincts that was telling her to run changed its stance. Now all her instincts were telling her to go to the monster.

Naturally, Michelle kept her guard up. Even if she knew the monster was the little black cat, she couldn’t risk slipping up. She had experienced what power the cat’s single hiss carried. So even a moment of recklessness—on her or the cat’s side—could result in a disaster.

“Hi, kitty!” Michelle stopped at the corner of the plaza, so she wouldn’t need to lift her head up too much to look at the cat’s face. It was really huge. The cat’s body filled up the big fountain as it lay there, partially coiled around the pillar in the middle.

Originally, water was flowing out of the holes in the pillar, but after Michelle clogged and burst the pipes, the water no longer went into it.

“You don’t mind the water?” Michelle tilted her head a bit. As far as she knew, cats hated water, but the huge cat in front of her was lying in a fountain full of water, in the middle of a plaza flooded by water. A strange scene. Well, but the cat was a monster, so it was to be expected it wouldn’t be normal.

A meow filled the air in response. It was soft coming out of the cat’s mouth, but because of the cat’s sheer size, it was loud and resonated through the whole city. Michelle even had to cover her ears. The power of a single meow was quite shocking.

It was understandable why Noctis wanted to get away from the city. He didn’t know that Michelle was on friendly terms with the cat, so it was natural to think that the cat, a huge monster, would kill them without giving them a chance to breathe.

Deciding to stop just observing everything, Nyxaroth took on his black cloud form and landed next to Michelle. After she got on, he flew her high up into the air so she could see the cat better.

Up in the sky, Michelle glanced back into the city and squinted her eyes as she stared at Noctis. “Nyx, how come that after he carried me away from the center, the pressure is no longer affecting me as much?” she asked in puzzlement.

After Noctis had picked her up, she could still feel the pressure all the same, but she no longer felt like it would crush her. A strange occurrence.

Nyxaroth gave it a thought but he had no clue—until a thought suddenly struck him. “Can’t a law from your old world explain it?” he asked.

Hearing that, Michelle slapped her forehead, feeling quite foolish. She didn’t know about a specific law explaining what happened, but it could still be easily explained.

The pressure in the city was affecting her in a similar way to how hydraulic pressure deep in the sea would affect divers.

The human body could adapt to such high pressure rather quickly, but divers had problems when coming back to the surface. They had to swim up slowly so the body could get used to the decrease in pressure.

That was for a simple reason. When things are under high pressure, they are squeezed together and shrink a bit. That happens to all gas in the human body when they sink underwater. Because all gas is squeezable to some extent.

And when squeezed—compressed—to some extent, some gases can turn liquid. In the human body, that can happen with nitrogen.

That in itself isn’t a problem.

A problem appears when the pressure starts to decrease.

The compressed nitrogen starts slowly returning to its original state, and if it’s in the blood, it starts forming bubbles.

And bubbles like that can cause problems in the bloodstream when there’s a lot of them. For example, they can enter thin veins around the human brain and cause a stroke.

To prevent that, when divers come back to the surface from great depths, they have to stop every now and then and wait for the still-liquid nitrogen to leave their body before continuing further up.

And there’s another thing that can happen. If the pressure suddenly decreases by leaps, the liquid nitrogen turns into gas much faster and in greater amounts, which can tear apart human veins. That’s an instant death. Grotesque but painless.

Well, and that was what nearly happened to Michelle when Noctis suddenly decided to take her out of the city. As a cultivator, she was protected by spirit energy.

The nitrogen in her body, which started turning back into gas, was led by her spirit energy out of her body.

That also decreased some of the pressure within her body, so when she returned to the city center, where the pressure was at its peak, she was no longer as affected.

Michelle explained all that to Nyxaroth, and he felt his head spin a bit from an overload of information. He had no clue what nitrogen was, but he understood it was something that could appear in blood.

“Why do you know something so pointless?” he suddenly asked. “Since spirit energy can protect you from it, there’s no need for you to know it.”

Michelle shrugged a bit. “I just got to know it randomly while watching a documentary.”

Having been with Michelle for a while, Nyxaroth knew what documentary films were, so he just sighed. “Your past life had so many strange methods to kill…” he muttered.

“They can be used here too after some altering!” Michelle smiled, turning her attention back to the huge black cat.

The whole time she was speaking with Nyxaroth, it was just observing them from a distance, as if listening to them. It was clearly an intelligent creature, so it probably understood them.

While Michelle was talking with Nyxaroth, Noctis finally got back on his feet and came back to the center.

He, too, got to hear the conversation, and it was quite the surprise for him. All the talk about a past life could only mean one thing. The girl he was tasked to protect had been to a different world before and knew some deadly things from there.

Michelle didn’t care who overheard her. She was already focused on something else. “Kitty, why were you down there?” she asked as Nyxaroth flew her closer to the cat. “You were with me just a while ago.”

The huge black cat stared at Michelle with its deep eyes before letting out another meow. It made Michelle wince a bit, pain dancing in her eardrums.

Seeing that Michelle didn’t understand what it was trying to say, and that she was even hurt by it, the cat let its head down in thought. Then, it came up with a way.

Black mist gathered around the cat and completely covered it. Michelle could recognize it. The cat had veiled itself in void.

A while later, the void disappeared and where the huge cat once stood was flying an eagle.

Flapping its wings, it came to rest on Michelle’s shoulder. On the exact same place where Cold Flame used to rest before he matured into an adult White Vermilion Bird.

Chirping something into Michelle’s ear, the eagle seemed quite happy with what it came up with.

Michelle still couldn’t understand what the monster wanted to say, but she was glad the chirping didn’t hurt her ears.

The eagle seemed a bit disappointed that Michelle still didn’t understand it. But that didn’t stop it from doing what it wanted.

Not even knowing how, a while later, Michelle suddenly found herself holding a black life stone, her hand bleeding all over it. And the eagle was sleeping on her lap, curled up like a cat.

So it seemed, no matter what form the monster took on, it couldn’t suppress its nature as a cat.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep