Chapter 338: 338

Hanging from the ladder by her hands, Michelle started getting lost in her thoughts.

She only snapped out of it when a pair of students approached to talk to Lucas.

“Teacher, could you watch our spar?” one of them asked.

Lucas nodded a bit.

“But you will have to spar here, because I need to watch Ana Ostrich.”

The two students looked up and saw Michelle hanging from the ladder fastened to the hooks, surprising them quite a bit.

No other teacher other than Lucas ever used the belt hooks to train his students.

“Sister, what are you training for?” the first one was more talkative.

Michelle looked at the pair of students and answered: “I need to train my joints to stay in the right places, so I don’t get hurt in the future.”

The student didn’t ask anything more.

Lucas was a body-tempering teacher, so he was in contact with quite a few students who possessed special body constitutions and needed to be trained.

Of course, if they saw Michelle move her joints backwards, they wouldn’t believe it was just a body constitution.

But since they didn’t see it, they believed the story.

So, as Michelle continued hanging from the ladder, the two young men proceeded to spar while Lucas watched them closely.

They were both in the body-tempering major, so they both possessed shocking strength.

Seeing the power in their punches, Michelle knew that force could break concrete.

But it was clear that the academy was used to the fact that Lucas sometimes used the area under the belt hooks as a training ground.

Everything in the area had been reinforced so spars of body-reinforced students couldn’t destroy it.

While the two students sparred, Michelle watched them closely, wanting to see what people who underwent body-tempering relied on when fighting.

And what she found was actually quite interesting.

On the outside, it looked like when fighting, the two students used solely physical strength to deliver hard blows.

The blows carried force that couldn’t exactly be explained with their bodies. The students weren’t especially muscular or anything like that.

So Michelle observed them closer and raised a brow when she finally saw what was going on.

When moving, spirit energy was rippling under their skin, giving their strikes more force.

And the two clearly weren’t doing it on purpose. They weren’t in control of it.

That meant that the body-tempering method they underwent made it so whenever they moved their muscles with effort over a certain threshold, spirit energy would move there on its own for support.

That was quite a sophisticated technique and gained Michelle’s interest.

She wanted to study it further.

And, if possible, she wanted to learn it.

She wasn’t exactly a person who relied on brute force, but sometimes, being able to bring it out would be excellent.

Sinking into her thoughts, Michelle let go of the ladder with one hand, hanging only on the other.

Noticing it from afar, Lucas raised a brow.

As far as he knew, Ana Ostrich, Michelle, wasn’t specially trained since she was born with weak spirit veins, so she shouldn’t have the strength to hang so freely from the ladder.

It was already surprising how she was able to climb the rope repetitively, but that could be explained by the ability. It could have been bringing out strength she didn’t know she possessed.

But, at the moment, she was hanging consciously.

So she shouldn’t be able to use traits of the ability.

So she was either trained in physical strength at least a bit to be able to at least partially protect herself, or the ability was activated within her again, though she wasn’t doing anything that should bring it out.

After hanging on one hand for a while, Michelle switched her hands.

It was a fact that after waking up as Michelle Grace, she never really put too much effort into physical strength.

Most of her attention was on agility and effectiveness of her strikes, so she couldn’t keep hanging for too long.

Seeing Michelle switch hands, some of Lucas’ suspicion dissipated, but only a bit.

But he didn’t really have time to watch Michelle closely at the moment. He promised the two students to watch their spar and then tell them what they were doing wrong.

So he turned his attention there.

When the two guys finished sparring, Lucas gave them a moment to catch their breath before voicing out what he noticed.

“Mike, when striking, your body is rigid, not letting you use your full potential. You should train to relax.”

“And Jake, your problem is the exact opposite. When blocking, you only tighten your hands. So though you don’t get hit, you are forced to step back, giving your opponent an advantage.”

The two guys thanked Lucas and were about to leave when he suggested a way to train for them.

“Since your problems are the exact opposite, you can train together. Mike, you will basically use Jake as your dummy. And Jake, you will have to work hard to put your whole body into blocking so you don’t end up flying away as Mike improves.”

After Mike and Jake left, Lucas moved his attention to Michelle.

“You are surprisingly strong to stay up there the whole fight,” he commented.

Michelle switched her hand again.

“Maybe by switching my hands, I’m cheating a bit because I’m always resting one,” she admitted.

But Lucas shook his head.

“The point of this isn’t to strengthen your muscles. If you want your body to learn the human posture, stretching your joints for as long as possible is the best option.”

“Also, if you got down, it would set your joints back to how they were before, so when hanging up again, your progress would partially reset. By staying up there longer, you are being kind to yourself.”

Listening to Lucas, Michelle frowned a bit.

If she remembered correctly, she never told him she wanted to learn human posture.

She just told him she didn’t want to lose control of her body due to the increasing flexibility of her joints and tendons.

So how did he know exactly what she wanted?

Did he notice something more that even she didn’t know?

That could as well be possible considering all the little details that Lucas had noticed in the little time he had seen Michelle.

It couldn’t really be told whether Lucas didn’t notice Michelle’s frown, noticed it and thought she was lost in thought again, or noticed it and decided to ignore it, but he didn’t explain how he understood what Michelle wanted to train.

Instead, he continued to explain to Michelle how her future training would go.

“After you can no longer hang up there, it would most probably be beneficial for you to dip in one of the temper fluids. It should be beneficial to you, and even if it isn’t, it won’t harm you. You will just suffer a bit while in it.”

“Then, after you get out and check the effect the tempering fluid had on you, you will once again hang from here, but it would do you good if you did it upside down. Somehow.”

Michelle nodded.

“I’ll probably stay up here for a while longer!”

Lucas was expecting that since he could see that she didn’t yet seem to be struggling with the hanging.

“I’ll go prepare the fluid for you, so stay here. Just make sure you don’t fall and hurt yourself since you are quite high up.”

When Michelle nodded, Lucas left.

He wasn’t even out of Michelle’s line of sight when a figure appeared up on the ladder, standing above her.

“Will this training even help you?” Alexander asked, his voice low, clearly amused.

Michelle lifted her head to look at him.

“I never did any training for my new physique, so even if it’s not perfect, it’s definitely better than nothing.”

Alexander sat down on the ladder, staring at Michelle beneath him.

“You know, if you wanted to, I could have someone from my shadow guards come up with a training for you. There are spiders amongst them.”

Michelle shook her head.

“No, thanks!”

“Why?” Alexander raised a brow.

“It would be much more effective than this.”

Michelle just smiled, not answering.

She didn’t yet feel like getting involved with more people from the Dark Palace.

Alexander frowned a bit.

“Sometimes, I really want to be able to read your mind,” he suddenly said.

To that, Michelle had the perfect answer: “Noctis and Unlucien are monsters. They can teach you the memory manipulation skill of all monsters.”

Alexander raised a brow.

“You think a human can learn that? It’s a monster skill for a reason.”

That made Michelle chuckle.

“I learned it long ago. And back then I was just a human.”

Alexander went silent.

He had completely forgotten about that.

Michelle continued: “The only reason humans don’t know the skills is because monsters keep it closely to themselves. And they don’t even have to teach it to each other since it’s an inborn skill. That makes it a completely hidden skill. Most studied humans don’t even know of its existence.”

Alexander couldn’t retort against that.

Those were facts.

But that also meant he could learn it from a monster.

And as the Dark Lord, monsters were his subordinates.

He could have any of them teach it to him.

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