Chapter 332: 332

Looking away from her shadow, Michelle looked around.

She still had the nasty feeling of being watched, but it was somehow milder.

It didn’t feel as piercing as before.

So that was what the challenge was about.

To get rid of the feeling of being watched and then proceed forward.

It pushed the person in the forest to perfect their concealment more and more if they wanted to get in deep.

Realizing that, Michelle started wondering just how deep into the forest Antony could go.

She had never really seen him use concealment, but since he could be a teacher of one of the top academies and was also named the Master of Concealment, he had to be especially skilled.

Or the skills he used or invented were just groundbreaking.

Feeling the gazes on her, Michelle couldn’t exactly concentrate.

She was extremely uncomfortable.

So she decided to push her concealment further.

Looking through the forest, she looked at the shadows and summoned her dark element spirit energy.

Creating a thin, barely noticeable layer of dark mist around her, she slipped into the shadows of the trees.

Nearly instantly, the feeling of being watched started dispersing until it was nearly gone.

With that, Michelle was no longer uncomfortable.

So, once again activating her Shadow Spirit Steps, she started moving through the shadows deeper into the forest.

But with every step she took, she had to push more dark element spirit energy out of her body to get rid of the gazes.

After a while, no matter how much spirit energy Michelle pushed out of her body, it no longer helped against the gazes.

She kept going deeper into the forest where the gazes were stronger and could pinpoint her easier.

Still, at first it was only a light feeling, so, deactivating her Shadow Spirit Steps, she started walking through the shadows, deeper and deeper into the forest.

Her progress was much slower so she could feel the intensity of the gazes progressively change.

She expected that to be a bit easier than to suddenly feel the changes when she rushed through the forest.

But reality proved the exact opposite to be right.

Sometimes, suddenness which took a person off guard made things easier than being prepared for things beforehand.

Because ignorance is sweet and knowledge painful.

Being beforehand aware of what awaited would not only bring up guard, but cause hesitation.

And hesitation is from expectations.

And most of the time, expectations are wrong.

Even if a little bit, they are off target.

So, if someone was walking through something discomforting, their expectations at first could boost them.

But over time, their body would notice the difference between expectations and reality, causing it to feel negative things stronger.

And each time the expectations are defied, the sensitivity to negativeness rises.

Realizing that, Michelle wondered whether she should once again use Shadow Spirit Steps or continue walking.

Which would get her further.

After a moment of thinking, Michelle decided to continue walking.

Outside the forest, Antony was setting up an array to view how far into the forest his disciples had ventured.

When he was done and activated it, he wasn’t surprised to see the results of his original five disciples.

They had some improvements compared to where they got the last time he brought them there, but they were within expectations.

Then, he moved his eyes to the dot that represented Michelle.

Considering that she was only using intuitive techniques and exploiting the Heavenly Law, she got far.

A lot further than Antony had expected.

But she was still quite far behind Josephine Fredig.

Still, thinking back to where his other disciples got when he first brought them to the forest, Michelle had performed a logic-defying feat.

Antony was sure she wasn’t specially trained in concealment, at least not in an effective way, so she should have been at the same level as his other disciples when he accepted them.

And Antony was right about Michelle’s training.

She used to be trained in concealment back in her past life.

But that was a life where spirit energy didn’t exist and people were much more limited.

Mostly, she was taught to conceal herself from surveillance and exploit its blind spots.

Not to hide away from energies.

Michelle wasn’t a Master of Concealment.

But she had the potential to become one.

Staring at the array, Antony wanted to see just how much further Michelle would be able to go.

Seeing her slowing progress, he knew she couldn’t conceal herself any further.

So all that was left to see was her endurance.

It could seem like something irrelevant to concealment, and partially, that was right.

Endurance had nothing to do with concealment itself.

But to train concealment, one had to have extremely high endurance.

Not to pain.

The training didn’t involve pain.

The endurance needed was towards discomforting and even repulsive things that went against one’s very nature.

Also, the endurance could determine how far and how fast in the training one could progress.

Nearly in all places where Masters tested their disciples to see their endurance potential, they had a distance scale to determine where the disciples were.

Of course, since different places had different conditions, the scales were different.

But their form was the same.

Until a certain point, or depth if the place went down, it could be fairly certainly said that disciples that stopped before that would progress slow, and wouldn’t reach much proficiency.

Those that reached the next point at most would progress fast, but too wouldn’t reach all that far.

Then, those who got over that point and walked further would progress slowly but steadily, and with no set limit where their proficiency would reach its threshold.

Of course, that scale didn’t mean that the first two groups didn’t have talent for concealment.

The test didn’t take into account those who completely didn’t have talent for concealment.

In the first place, to places like that, the people who were taken to tests were already chosen by Masters of Concealment.

In other words, their talent had already been tested.

And when the scale said that they wouldn’t get far in their proficiency, that only meant they would have some threshold after which training would be hard for them.

And rarely anyone could reach that threshold.

Even those with fast progress.

So, the forest did place the disciples on scales, but Masters put their disciples on such scales only to know what they were working with.

And Antony was very much curious where Michelle would end up.

She had been working steadily for a while and didn’t show signs of slowing down.

In the forest, Michelle was stumbling through the forest, a frown on her face.

The feeling of the gazes on her was so bad she felt her skin wasn’t her own. That it was a foreign object pressing on her from all sides.

Still, she didn’t let that stop her and continued forward.

But over time, Michelle started feeling like she would soon vomit.

The disgust from the gazes was too much to bear.

To prevent that, Michelle formed a ball of ice on her hand and forced it into her mouth, somewhat like a gag.

The coldness of the ice started soothing her a bit.

Michelle stayed in the forest for about two days, walking forward like a mummy with no sense of purpose.

When she stopped, she squatted on the ground, pulling on her shirt.

The gazes were so nasty, she felt like her very own body was someone else’s.

She knew she couldn’t move forward anymore.

But she wanted to try something.

The whole time, she had her presence retracted, and all concealment skills activated.

So what would happen if she deactivated them?

Well, and since Michelle was the kind of person who would do anything once she thought about it, she summoned her shadow essence and took hold of the layer of dark element spirit energy around her.

And standing up the last time, she moved out of the shadows, letting the sun fall on her.

Then, all at once, she retracted her spirit energy and pushed her shadow essence into her shadow, making it quiver.

The results were, well…

Not good.

Outside the forest, staring at the array, Antony was frowning.

He could tell that Michelle was already at a point where, if she took just a single step forward, the forest would send her out, knowing she couldn’t bear it anymore.

But she stopped just a step in front of it.

That meant she knew herself well enough to know she wouldn’t be able to bear the next step.

But then, with her brains, she could guess that the forest would send her back, so why did she stop?

What was that brat planning?

Antony didn’t even have the time to think about it when he saw the dot that represented Michelle’s position in the forest suddenly rapidly flying towards the forest’s exit.

Before Antony could lift his head, he felt a gust of wind pass him, caused by a person flying by.

Turning around, he hoped he wouldn’t see Michelle crushed into a tree.

Instead, he was shocked to see the Dark Lord himself holding Michelle.

Michelle was pale and looking like she had lost her mind.

And Alexander didn’t really look any better.

But his condition wasn’t caused by the forest.

With his power, he could just completely bypass the forest’s mechanisms.

He was from the Heavenly realm, so even suppressed, he could mess with tests in the upper realm.

The reason for his paleness was the poison Michelle had given him.

It had already been over a week, and though the effects were subsiding, it was so slow he felt that it would take months for the poison to wear off.

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