Chapter 76: 76

For a long while, Michelle thought about where she could put the eggs so she could go break-mend the spatial bracelet, but she couldn’t think of anything. Feeling helpless, though she didn’t always want to depend on him, she went to the Archduke for help.

First, he asked her if she wanted the eggs to hatch quickly, or if she just wanted to store them away without harming them. When she said she just wanted to store them away, he gave her a strange box which could barely fit one of the eggs. But when she opened it, she saw endless space.

The Archduke explained to her that the box was a spatial artifact which could stretch and change in accordance with how many living things were inside. Originally, it was his spatial bracelet, but by break-mending it, he got the box. The best thing about its being a box was that, if he allowed it, others could access it too, so he could let Michelle borrow it without any problems.

Michelle thanked him and put the eggs into the box. When the Archduke saw how much of them she had, he was surprised, but didn’t ask anything since he could see that she was in a hurry to do something.

After putting away the eggs, Michelle left the box with the Archduke and went back to the fountain.

Seeing her beasts still lounging lazily on the side of the fountain, and Cold Flame resting on top of it, she smiled a bit. “Nyx, will you watch me as I break-mend the bracelet so I don’t mess up?” she asked as she sat next to Nyxaroth, who was in the shape of a black mist.

Nyxaroth turned into his human shape and watched Michelle as she took the spatial bracelet off her hand and put it on the ground. She then took the crystal half-sphere, placed it over the bracelet, and put her hand on the crystal. Slowly, she started enveloping the half-sphere with her spirit energy and then let it seep through the crystal towards the bracelet. There, she condensed a small speck of spirit energy, and a small explosion occurred, hitting the bracelet. The explosion was so small that it didn’t even hit the crystal half-sphere. But the bracelet had a small scratch on it.

So Michelle condensed a few more specks of spirit energy and let them explode, forming a small crack on the bracelet.

After about half an hour, instead of a bracelet, a few broken pieces lay on the ground, as Michelle put away the half-sphere. Michelle picked up the pieces and randomly aligned them into a circle before glancing at Nyxaroth. “Can it be like this?” she asked as he leaned over to look at what she had done.

He nodded a bit and spoke: “That’s good. Now, just wrap it in your spirit energy and mend it together using your ice fire.”

Hearing that, Michelle smiled and coated her hands in her spirit energy. She put her hands over the bracelet and let the spirit energy spread to it. When the bracelet was fully covered, she activated her ice element in the spirit energy, and it caught white fire, ice fire.

Michelle smiled a bit as she watched the pieces melt and freeze, melt and freeze, all over repetitively, until they turned into a white frozen bracelet with light blue streaks in the shape of small flames. And on top of it was the mark of a snake coiled around a rose, with the rose’s thorns piercing its flesh.

“Is it done now?” Michelle looked at Nyxaroth with excited eyes as she picked up the bracelet. Anyone else would find it too cold to touch, but with her cold body, it was just right for her.

Nyxaroth nodded: “Put it on and check if you can access the space inside. If not, you have to form the contract with it again.”

Michelle put the bracelet on her wrist and closed her eyes. Soon, she felt a connection with the bracelet, but she couldn’t sense any difference in the space from before she break-mend it. “Nyx, how come there’s no difference from before?” she asked as she opened her eyes and looked at Nyxaroth.

“Oh… That’s because you used ice fire. For you to be able to bend the space inside, the bracelet must be half-liquid, but your fire froze it, so you have to wait for it to melt before you can do anything with it. But for now, you can return the eggs there.” Nyxaroth explained lazily as he turned back into black mist and retreated into Michelle’s body.

Hearing that, Michelle was a bit relieved and smiled.

Cold Flame was observing the whole process from the side and didn’t know if he should be happy or annoyed. In the memories of his ancestors, he had never seen anyone who had succeeded on the first try at break-mending a spatial artifact. And Nyxaroth didn’t even explain it to her in detail, but she was still able to think of a way to execute it.

For example, he didn’t tell her that she should break the bracelet slowly, with small specks of spirit energy, but she did it like that because she didn’t want to break the crystal sphere. It was something rational to do, but usually, people who tried it would be in a rush and wouldn’t think about something like that, so the one who taught them had to explain even that.

Michelle stared at the bracelet on her wrist, unaware of Cold Flame’s thoughts. “Nyx… And will it melt? Usually, things frozen by my ice fire never melt…” she said, concerned.

For a while, Nyxaroth didn’t answer, but then Michelle felt something bubble in her body, and his voice appeared in her mind: “It will melt just fine, because the bracelet is a spatial object. Spatial objects resist being restrained, so they move the space inside them in a way that would get rid of the restriction. In your case, the space will most probably heat up and melt away the ice, so don’t worry. Just don’t have it on your wrist.”

Michelle nodded a bit and took off the bracelet, putting it beside the fountain and watching it. For a long while, nothing happened, but then, she saw small droplets of water running down its side. After some more time, the ice melted away and the half-liquid, slime-like bracelet lay in front of Michelle, but she didn’t reach out to touch it just yet as she could feel the heat coming from it.

Not wanting to wait for the bracelet to cool down, she formed a small ice spear in her hand and used it to push the bracelet into the fountain. She heard a sizzling sound for a moment before she reached into the water and took out the bracelet. Touching it with her cold hand, she found it a bit warm, but it was fine, so she put it on her wrist and closed her eyes again.

Looking into the bracelet’s space, it still looked similar, but somehow different. For example, the wall that was keeping it in place before was nonexistent, replaced by a misty something, keeping out her probing gaze. That was probably space she didn’t have access to yet, but she would gain it if she did something. But she didn’t know what that was.

So she asked Nyxaroth and he explained to her that she needed to use a combination of her soul energy and spirit energy to reshape and sort out the whole accessible space before she could gain access to more space. But reshaping and sorting out spaces was hard, so he expected her to take a while to do it.

Hearing that, Michelle decided to give it a try. She knew that she probably wouldn’t succeed, but at least she wanted to know what she was getting herself into.

Closing her eyes again, she concentrated on the space inside the bracelet, sending a wisp of her consciousness inside. It was twisted up and unusable. So she coated the wisp of consciousness with both her soul and spirit energy and turned it into an interfering wisp. She pushed against the space and tried to straighten it, but the space just twisted up even more and pushed Michelle’s wisp of consciousness back. She frowned and tried again, but the result was the same, so she decided to use a different approach.

She increased the amount of soul and spirit energy on the wisp by folds, and then just crashed it against one of the twists, but to no avail. Her wisp got rudely pushed out of the bracelet, and she was forced to open her eyes.

She frowned and sent her wisp of consciousness into the bracelet again. She slowly approached a twist and rested her wisp on it. Then, she coated it in both soul and spirit energy again and tried to pull on the twist to straighten it. The two energies worked like a vacuum, which kept her wisp stuck to the twist, but she could barely move it, even as beads of sweat formed on her forehead.

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