Chapter 331: 331

In the upcoming four days, though Michelle couldn’t complete her task, she was able to use the detection skill much faster.

That was somewhat of an achievement.

So, when the seventh day of being in the ravine was coming to an end, Marcus opened a rift for Michelle and sent her back to his courtyard.

From there, Michelle went to her dorm room and lay down, sinking into thought.

How would she avoid the new students?

She didn’t want to get into pointless arguments.

But she couldn’t really come up with a solution, so she just closed her eyes and went to sleep.

She would deal with the problems when they came to her.

The next day in the morning, Michelle found her way to Antony’s courtyard.

He was already waiting for her.

“Master!” she bowed her head a bit.

Antony beckoned Michelle to come closer as he started speaking.

“Soon, your Senior Brothers and Sisters will arrive. Before that, I have a few things to explain to you.”

“So, your concealment is based solely on erasing your presence. That is probably the best concealment method in existence and the hardest to learn, but if you don’t support it with other methods, your enemies will be able to spot you once they put their mind to it.”

Michelle nodded.

She knew about that.

“So you will teach me other concealment methods, Master?” she asked.

Antony shook his head.

“First, I’ll test you. I doubt you don’t know other methods. It just seems that you don’t use them since you have a better one now.”

Michelle nodded.

“For a long time, I used to conceal myself by blending in with the shadows. Another method was getting to places where people’s eyes wouldn’t wander. And the last one, but that only worked on singular targets, is exploiting blind spots.”

“Naturally, all that was combined with concealing my presence, but before messing with the Heavenly Law, it was never that perfect.”

Listening to that, Antony was quite satisfied.

“I always teach partial presence concealment to my students first, followed by exploiting darkness and shadows. When your fellow disciples come, you all will have to do a challenge. With that, I will be able to see on what level you are.”

Michelle nodded. She would be quite happy to prove herself.

She was only hoping that the environment where the challenge would be wouldn’t be too hot.

Her Everfrost Mantle was still unusable, though she was already thinking about how to fix it.

After some time, five people came to the courtyard. Two girls and three boys.

“Master, you called?” they stopped in front of Antony, but their gazes wandered to Michelle.

She wasn’t concealing herself at the moment.

In other words, she was making the effort to constantly have some shadow essence shimmering in her shadow, to subtly draw attention to herself.

Antony nodded at his disciples.

“I called you to introduce your new Junior Sister to you. She’s Ana Ostrich, and the Heavenly Law denies her very existence, so if she doesn’t put effort into it, others don’t notice her.”

The disciples looked at Michelle as she stood up to greet them.

“Josephine Fredig. I’m the last disciple Master accepted before you.” One of the girls extended her hand toward Michelle.

Michelle shook her hand.

“Nice to meet you, Senior Sister.”

When taking Josephine’s hand, Michelle’s eyes narrowed unnoticeably.

Before she took the hand, she didn’t even notice it, but her Senior Sister was testing her.

Before extending her hand, Josephine retracted the presence of her hand, to see whether Michelle would still be able to shake it.

Concealing a single body part wasn’t all that difficult, even for beginners.

But when taking Josephine’s hand, Michelle didn’t even notice that concealment.

Whether it was in her past life as an assassin or in the current one, she always kept some guard up and noticed nearly everything.

So, even though the presence of Josephine’s hand was gone, just from catching it from the corner of her eyes, Michelle knew exactly where it was and shook it.

As long as something was within the range of her peripheral vision, at least for a moment, she would know about it.

Most of the time, she wouldn’t even realize it wasn’t meant to be noticed. That it was apparently concealed.

Michelle and the disciples introduced themselves.

Jasmine Fredig was the younger sister of Asher Fredig.

The second girl was Elise Alaris, the non-identical twin of Eleanor Alaris.

Then the three boys: Andrew Ostrich, Pete Austin, and Jeff Ethel.

Seeing her five fellow disciples, Michelle lifted a brow as she looked at the two girls.

Why did all Marcus’ disciples have a sibling amongst Antony’s disciples?

Was there a special reason for it?

Curious, she asked about it.

And the answer she got was somewhat strange, but it also strangely made sense.

“To master detection or concealment, the talent needed is basically the same: sensitivity to energies. Among siblings, their talents are usually similar. But the academy has a rule that one teacher can’t take in siblings as disciples. So, to make sure their talent doesn’t go to waste, one of the siblings becomes my disciple and the other is taught by Marcus.”

Michelle raised a brow, quite interested in the system.

Surely, Marcus and Antony weren’t the only teachers who did that.

Other teachers who had similar requirements for disciples most probably applied the same method when finding a pair of talented siblings.

Antony didn’t want to lose time.

Without giving his disciples much time to chat, he opened a rift and led them through.

Unlike Marcus, who needed arrays to open rifts, Antony could open a rift with his own power, cutting through space with his arm like butter.

After walking through the rift, Michelle looked around to see where she was.

The place was outside the sect, in front of an area where no one really dared to roam alone.

The area still belonged to the academy, so outsiders couldn’t get there.

The teachers left the place alone so it would remain untouched for students.

And the students dreaded and avoided it like the plague.

Antony stepped before his disciples.

“Your task is to stay in as long as possible,” he spoke as if his words didn’t mean anything big, but everyone except Michelle tensed up.

Seeing that, Michelle got quite curious about the place.

She didn’t know much about the Ostrich Academy and its surroundings, so she didn’t know anything about the place in front of her.

All she knew was what she could see, and that wasn’t exactly much.

All she could see was a part of the forest with strangely pale trees.

But who knew, maybe they were just some kind of trees she didn’t know about.

Antony didn’t explain anything more to his disciples and sent them into the forest.

He just told them not to stay together.

Also, before leaving, he gave each of them a spirit stone that would record how far into the forest they went.

Seeing the stone, Michelle understood that the deeper she went into the forest, the more challenging it would be.

And that greatly intrigued her.

The six disciples split apart, each going a slightly different way.

So, after a few minutes, Michelle was completely alone and couldn’t even hear the crunching of leaves and snapping of branches that would indicate that someone was nearby.

For a moment, she stopped and looked around.

She couldn’t feel anything special, so she didn’t understand why the whole challenge was about staying in the forest for as long as possible.

But, well, maybe things would change if she went in deeper.

And since Michelle was quite the radical person, she summoned her spirit energy and activated Shadow Spirit Steps.

The next moment, she was rushing through the branches at ridiculous speed.

That was until she abruptly stopped after some time.

Suddenly, she felt hundreds of thousands of gazes, all locked onto her.

But looking around, she couldn’t spot a soul.

It was like every branch and leaf was looking at her.

It made her skin crawl.

Michelle, as a former assassin who worked from the shadows, was used to such a number of gazes on her.

She could stand in front of crowds, she was trained to; she could even guide and lead groups.

It was never something she enjoyed doing, but she could bear it.

But the situation at hand was completely different.

The gazes she could feel on her were piercing and observing, like they could see into her very core.

It made her tense up and frown.

In that state, even a gentle gust of wind made her look around in suspicion.

Standing like that, Michelle partially understood what the challenge was about.

If a Master of Concealment failed and got discovered, they would be exposed to such gazes.

The forest was a training ground for such situations.

But there was also another thing Michelle started considering.

What if Antony wanted them to activate their concealment skill to avoid the gazes?

And with that concealment, go in deeper to see where the concealment fails them.

And even then, push in deeper, to see just how much they can take on.

To test that theory, Michelle looked down at her shadow.

With enough concentration, one could see that it was gently shivering even though Michelle wasn’t moving a muscle.

Closing her eyes for a moment, Michelle retracted her shadow essence.

When she opened them again and looked at her shadow, it was normal—unmoving.

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