Chapter 68: 68

Looking coldly at the bloodied old man Sloan, Michelle took out a bottle from her spatial ring. She opened it and tilted it to the side, letting a single pill roll out. The fragrance of medicine filled the dark room, and as it mixed with the metallic smell of blood, it turned into a sickening stench, making one want to vomit.

But Michelle didn’t mind it at all. “Revitalization Pill of indigo grade…” she said with a cold laugh as she grabbed the man by the hair on the back of his head and lifted his head so she could stuff the pill into his mouth. “I have enough to keep you alive for years,” she added as the old man reluctantly swallowed. He was already starting to regret not telling the truth from the start.

Waiting for the pill to take effect, Michelle stepped back and started forming ice needles in the surrounding air. As she added a bit of ice fire into each needle, they gleamed softly in the dark, allowing the old man to clearly see each and every single one of them.

Seeing the ice needles all around, the old man’s blood ran cold with fear, but he didn’t dare tell the truth. So, Michelle clenched her fists, and the needles flew at him, stabbing all over his body, making him look like a bloodied hedgehog.

The old man wailed in agony, but Michelle was still far from stopping. She was just starting. Leaving the ice needles stabbed into the old man without letting them melt, Michelle summoned ice fire on her palm and threw it at the old man’s feet. When the flame touched his feet, his wails turned into anguished screams reaching the sky as he could feel his toes getting frostbite. And what was worse was that the flame was spreading.

“I’ll speak!” he cried out, his face stained with tears, mucus, and blood. “I’ll speak, so stop this!”

Hearing that, Michelle’s purple eyes narrowed into beautiful, but cold, smiling crescents. With a wave of her hand, the ice fire returned to her palm, and the ice needles melted away. “Speak!” she said placidly.

The old man gasped in relief as the fire and needles disappeared, but he was still in agony, as even though the flames disappeared, the frostbite on his legs didn’t get better. They were still there. “I… I said the truth that the second headmaster was involved, but…” he was still clearly hesitant about telling the truth.

“But what?” Michelle’s icy voice was like a cold bucket of water poured over his whole body.

“But he was probably ordered by the ancestor to do it…” old man Sloan finally said after a while.

That made Michele raise a brow. “And why would your ancestor want such power gained from sacrificing thousands of souls?” she asked coldly.

The old man clearly didn’t want to answer. “That’s… because he wants to go to the upper realms…” he said after a while.

Michelle frowned a bit. “And he can’t go there normally?” she leaned against the dusty wall behind her. “What’s stopping him?”

“To be able to get to the upper realm, he would need to be at the level of Divine Paragon, but in the last few hundred years, no one has even been able to break through the level of Divine King to become a Divine Saint, let alone become a Divine Paragon,” the old man answered truthfully.

“I see…” Michele’s eyes narrowed as she nodded. She knew that the old man was telling the truth, so she didn’t need to torture him anymore. She summoned her shifting weapon and sliced the old man’s throat. “Have a nice sleep!” she smiled as she retracted her knife and put it away, before taking hold of the old man’s hand and taking off his spatial ring. She didn’t feel any shame for stealing from the corpse of a person who disgusted her as much as the old man did.

Finally, she threw a ball of ice fire at the corpse and let it turn into a block of ice. Then, she just kicked into it, and it shattered into small specks which quickly melted away.

After a while, Michelle emerged from the annex, covered in dust and blood, her face placidly calm as she walked past the servants and went into her room. On the way, she told a maid that she wanted a bath prepared for her.

While the maids were preparing a bath for her, she took out the old man’s spatial ring and stared at it for a moment. If she wanted access to the things inside it, she needed to either drop her blood on it to form a bond with it, or she had to be able to create a wisp of her consciousness and send it into the ring. That way she would have no need to form bonds with any spatial ring, and if she met someone as repulsive as the old man and killed them, or if she just needed to steal something from someone’s spatial ring, she wouldn’t need to worry about bonds.

But there was one problem with that method. She didn’t know how to create that wisp of consciousness, so at the moment, her only choice was to form a bond with the spatial ring. It wasn’t a big deal, but she didn’t quite like the idea of carrying around an item she took from a person who repulsed her, and once she formed a bond with an item, she couldn’t just throw it away because if it got destroyed, she could get hurt.

Sighing, Michelle decided to use the time until the maids prepared her bath to think of a way to create a wisp of consciousness. As far as she knew, a wisp of consciousness wasn’t that difficult to make, but the one creating it had to have perfect comprehension of what the wisp would be doing. There were many kinds of wisps of consciousness. Ones that were supposed to just observe, those that were supposed to sense spirit energy, and even those that could physically interfere with things according to their master’s wishes.

The wisp of consciousness that Michelle needed was the physical wisp, the hardest to form. Though she had never tried it before, she was sure she could easily form the first and second types, the observation and sensing wisps, but she wasn’t sure about the physical wisp. That type had to be dense and stable for her to be able to use it without hurting herself, especially her consciousness, because if she seriously damaged her consciousness, she could end up as an autistic mental cripple.

“My Lady, your bath is prepared,” a maid spoke up, and Michelle snapped out of her thoughts.

Usually, aristocratic ladies were waited on while they bathed, but with Michelle being covered in blood, and her expression cold and calm, the maids didn’t dare touch her. Also, Michelle didn’t like being touched by others, so she shooed the maids away. Then, she finally took off her clothes and entered the bathtub.

While washing away the blood and dust from her body, Michelle still thought about how to create a physical wisp of consciousness.

After leaving the bath, Michelle laid on her bed after putting on some light clothes. She closed her eyes and tried to create an observation wisp of consciousness. She wrapped her soul energy around her brain and sensed it all around. For her brain was an organ and consciousness was something quite abstract, but to be able to create a wisp of consciousness, she needed to be able to grasp it as an item of sorts. And for that, she needed her soul energy.

For a long time, she lay motionless on her bed, with her soul energy spinning around her brain, until the moment when her eyes suddenly snapped open. She sat up and frowned. She felt like something new was in her brain, slowly growing, but she didn’t feel it pressing on anything. It was in perfect harmony with her brain, only filling up the free space, so it wouldn’t squish anything. That was her consciousness after her soul energy solidified it. But very quickly, the feeling disappeared and everything returned to normal.

Michelle frowned a bit. Never in her life had she thought that consciousness could be something solid and graspable. She always thought it was just an abstract thing, if she could call it so, that functioned in her brain. But what she achieved just moments ago completely changed what she knew. “If something like consciousness could be solidified, what else could be too?” That question rose within her heart and wouldn’t let her rest until she tried solidifying other things.

Lying back down, Michelle coated her brain in her soul energy once again, trying to achieve solidification of her consciousness again. If she did, she could finally try to create her first wisp of consciousness.

And she succeeded, though only after quite a while. The feeling of something in her brain reappeared, but she didn’t open her eyes. Instead, she used her soul energy to separate out a part of itz forming it into a small string. She pulled it out of her body and stared at the small, nearly transparent string floating in front of her. She didn’t know what kind of wisp she was able to make, but it made her happy.

As Michelle still wasn’t really proficient in making wisps of consciousness, the wisp quickly disappeared, and she realized that she was mentally spent. So even though it wasn’t even nesting evening, Michelle decided to go to sleep.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep