Chapter 75: 75

When Cold Flame and the rest returned to the Archduchy in the evening, Michelle wasn’t in her room. They went to look at her and found her lying on the ground on the training grounds, her eyes closed and her face ghastly pale. She felt their presence and opened her eyes, staring at them.

“What happened to you, Michelle?” Marengo asked in shock.

But Michelle didn’t even feel like answering, so Nyxaroth turned into a speck of black mist and entered her body to check her condition. After a while, he came back out and looked at her with a disapproving, nearly accusing frown. “Why did you overuse your soul energy? Do you want to sleep for days again?”

Michelle finally sat up and yawned a bit. “Father was supervising me, so I wouldn’t overuse it too much…” she said lazily as she rubbed her purple eyes.

“Too much…?” Nyxaroth felt his eyebrow twitch in anger. “So he had still let you overuse it, just not ’too much’? And how much exactly would be ’too much’?” Nyxaroth wasn’t scared of the Archduke, so he didn’t fear blaming him. And since the Archduke wasn’t even present, he had no reason to restrain himself. But he still restrained himself and quickly shut up in respect to Michelle. In the end, it’s not kind to talk nasty about someone’s parents in front of them even if it is true.

Seeing Nyxaroth’s enraged expression as he tried to withhold his words, Michelle smiled a bit as she stood up. “Don’t worry, Nyx… I’m perfectly fine. I was just training to use my soul energy.”

Nyxaroth sighed, knowing he couldn’t talk sense into Michelle: “Just, be careful next time…”

“Michelle…” Snow spoke up. Since she had hatched half a year earlier, when Michelle bought her at the auction, she had grown into a beautiful young woman with only a few childish traits. Just like Cold Flame did, she would need to hibernate when she fully matured, but for her, it wouldn’t be so long ad her bloodline wasn’t as superior as Cold Flame’s. “Why did you call us back? What is it that you wanted to talk about?” she asked curiously.

That returned everyone’s attention to what Michelle said when she contacted them through the contract. She told them to come back quickly, but they didn’t need to hurry too much, as it wasn’t that urgent. It was just something she wanted to get off her mind.

“I’ll tell you soon, but now… I have to change out of these clothes…” she said as she glanced down at her clothes. After training for so long, she was soaked in her own sweat, and she couldn’t wait to take a good bath and change her clothes.

The beasts understood what she meant, so they let her go take a bath and change, waiting for her by the fountain in the garden.

After a while, Michelle came back out and saw them all in their shrunken beast forms resting by the fountain. She noticed that even though they all were already powerful enough to constantly keep their human forms, they mostly stayed in their best forms. Michelle didn’t know why they did it, but she didn’t think about it much. Maybe it was just a matter of their preference.

Michelle sat in between them on the side of the fountain and closed her eyes lazily. Snow quickly laid on her lap and snuggled into her comfortably. “Michelle, so what is it that you want to take care of?” she asked as she stared with her scarlet eyes at Michelle’s still slightly pale face.

“As I’ve already mentioned quite a few times, in the auction where I got Snow and later Mare, I also bought dozens of eggs, and since then, I’ve kept them in my spatial bracelet.” Michelle started explaining. “The eggs are all alive, and sooner or later, thyley will start hatching one by one, and I don’t know what to do with them. Back then, I only bought them so they wouldn’t end up in the hands of the nobles I knew and didn’t quite like at the auction. But I have no use for them.”

The four beasts went silent for a while until Cold Flame came up with something: “Michelle, since you have to stay here for half a year longer, and you don’t really have much to do, how about you try to study the eggs. You can try returning them to their original habitats, but they won’t probably survive since they won’t have anyone to take care of them, or you can try to practice controlling the space in the bracelet, forming a suitable environment for each hatchling.”

Hearing that, Michelle arched a brow. “Isn’t the space in the bracelet something pre-created? How could I possibly reshape it?”

“Did you drop your blood on it after you got it?” Cold Flame asked.

Michelle nodded; “At that moment, that was the only way I could access the space inside.”

Cold Flame nodded a bit. “Then think about it? How did you form contact with us? Or with the sealing book in your spatial ring?”

When his words fell, Michelle finally realized what he was trying to say. “So, you’re saying that I have a contract with the bracelet, so I can control it?”

“Well… Yes and no!” Cold Flame shook his head, making Michelle arch a brow.

“What do you mean?” she asked in confusion.

Cold Flame flapped his wings and landed on her shoulder, his favorite spot to rest on. “You do have a contract with the spatial bracelet, but you don’t have the right to manipulate the space inside it as the bracelet isn’t formed to be manipulated. To change the space inside, you need to have space around it, but the bracelet itself is blocking it and keeping it in place, so you can’t reshape the space. But if you broke the bracelet and connect it back together in a way that would turn it into something fluid-like but still half-solid, you would be able to use the combination of your soul and spirit energy to twist the space inside the bracelet according to your will.”

Carefully listening to Cold Flame, Michelle frowned a bit. “I’m not a blacksmith, and I doubt one skilled enough to achieve making a fluid out of the bracelet can be found her, in the Land of Exile. So how do I break and mend the bracelet?” she looked at Cold Flame sitting on her shoulder and rubbed him along his neck to his chest.

But Cold Flame didn’t know the answer for that and just shrugged: “Michelle, you can figure that out yourself. Even if you break the bracelet irreparably, you can buy a new one. Just make sure to take the eggs out before breaking the bracelet. We wouldn’t want the eggs to break alongside the bracelet.”

Hearing that, Nyxaroth couldn’t hold back a laugh, the black mist he was bumbling around a bit above the fountain water. “Flamie, how did you come up with that?” he asked with a sneer. “Breaking and mending a low-graded spatial bracelet like that one is easy. How come a great creature like you with the memories of all your ancestors doesn’t know it?”

When Michelle heard that, she turned to stare at Nyxaroth. “You know how to do it?” she asked quickly.

Cold Flame wanted to defend himself against Nyxaroth’s accusation of being stupid, but Nyxaroth was already explaining the break-mend process to Michelle: “Breaking it is simple. Just insertion it with enough spirit energy to blow it up. Make sure to have a shield or something around it, or you will lose the pieces. Then, rearrange the pieces into something that resembles a bracelet before coating it with your soul energy. The pieces will start to melt and if you can supply it with your soul energy for long enough, they will turn into a half-fluid, half-solid bracelet which will have a contract with you.”

Having it explained like that, Michelle lifted a brow in surprise. It definitely sounded tempting and like something she had to try. But she didn’t know what she should use to cover the bracelet when she blew it up and where to store the eggs while she was experimenting. In the end, she decided to go loom through the annex. She had already stumbled upon many strange things there, so she could find something useful if she searched for long enough.

With a decision and goal on her mind, she stood up and went to the annex. Her beast already knew her well enough to know what she was thinking, so they didn’t follow her. Except Nyxaroth, she was the only one who had the dark element, so she could see better in the dark than them, so they decided not to go with her and get in her way.

The annex was quite big, but most of the rooms were already explored by Michelle and Nyxaroth, so it only took her a few hours to find something useful. A transparent crystal half-sphere which seemed like it wouldn’t break easily. She brought it out with a lazy smile and then started thinking about where to put the eggs. She had to put them in a warm place, but not too warm, so the eggs wouldn’t die, and that was what troubled her. She didn’t know the exact temperature the eggs needed.

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