Chapter 85: 85

Walking through the forest, Michelle pulled her shifting weapon from her spatial ring, and with it being in the shape of a dagger, she used it to cut her way through the vines and branches blocking her path. After a good half an hour, she found a cave entrance, but it wasn’t the one she and Ivona stayed in overnight. So Michelle just marked it with the string she made using her dark element spirit energy and proceeded with searching through the jungle. From the start of her searching, she didn’t move more than a few hundred meters from the crack in the cave, as the path between the crack and the cave entrance wasn’t that long.

Ivona remained in the cave the whole time, and, with her boredom, she walked to the cave entrance and started playing with her light element spirit energy. But after a while, she got tired of that and sent a beam of her spirit energy out into the sky.

Seeing the beam of light in the distance, Michelle frowned and started quickly cutting through the greenery to get there. She could guess that Ivona was the one who caused the beam of light, so she knew that danger would soon come to the cave.

After sending out the beam of light, Ivona realized what a mistake she had made and instantly started climbing one of the trees around the cave, using the vines as a ladder of sorts. And soon, just as she got there, a bunch of nasty monsters came crawling into the cave. The smallest of them were the size of a small dog, and the biggest ones were the size of an adult lion. The area around the cave and lower in the mountains was densely filled with plants, so the ugly, lion-sized monsters could easily walk around.

Ivona frowned a bit, seeing the monsters. Though her cultivation was at a temporary peak, she had never fought monsters, except when with the rats in the cave, that were able to poison her. And that was why she didn’t have enough skills to fight against such monsters just yet. But it actually made sense. Even if she was neglected by her family, she grew up in the Capital City, sheltered from any monsters or serious threats, so it was quite natural that she had no real fighting skills. And she was aware of it.

Quickly, Michelle reached the cave, but didn’t go near it, so the monsters wouldn’t notice her. Instead, she climbed a tree. There, she used her ice element to form a small bridge between the trees so she could easily walk over to the tree where Ivona was. “Why did you light the beam?” she asked. “Did something happen?”

Ivona was surprised to hear Michelle behind her so suddenly, but she quickly calmed down. “Nothing happened,” she shook her head a bit.

“Then why did you light it?” Michelle continued asking.

But Ivona’s answer was strange: “I was just bored.”

This made Michelle frown ever so slightly. “Can you show me your hand for a moment?” she requested.

Ivona didn’t quite understand why Michelle was staring, but she still extended her hand. Michelle then quickly took her pulse and frowned a bit. “What did you do when you came out of the cave?” Michelle inquired curiously.

“I was bored inside the cave, so I came outside to try to increase my proficiency in using my spirit energy,” she said.

Hearing that, Michelle frowned a bit, noticing that Ivona’s voice was strangely sluggish and her eyes weren’t as focused as usual. She was someone who had especially clear eyes, always focused on everything she could see. But at the moment, her eyes were somehow hazy and focused on a single spot, like she was drugged.

Turning her head to stare at the cave entrance, Michelle narrowed her eyes in thought. She knew that the cave itself was safe, but the entrance seemed suspicious.

“Ivona, you stay here for now. I’ll investigate the entrance,” she decided, and instantly jumped off the tree, leaving Ivona behind, without giving her a chance to react.

Ivona wanted to jump after her, but since Michelle acted so strangely and rashly, she understood that something was going on.

After jumping off the tree, Michelle coated herself in her dark element’s spirit energy to hide her presence in the shadows of the huge jungle trees, so the monsters that entered the cave wouldn’t notice her.

Moving through the shadows to the cave entrance, Michelle noticed something she hadn’t noticed when she entered the cave in the evening. She had a strange tightness in her chest and felt the spirit energy mixed in her blood swirl around her body chaotically. At the moment, the spirit energy in her body was acting similarly to the spirit energy in the cave where she found Rivenaar and the sealing book where Nyxaroth was locked away.

Instantly retreating a few steps, Michelle frowned and placed her hand over her chest. Her heart was rapidly beating, giving her a sickening feeling. Maybe it was because she had Spirit Soul Blood, her body started instinctively rejecting the strange something affecting her spirit energy; the tightness in her chest and the increase in her heart rate were warnings from her body.

If she were still in her past life, she would have taken a pill of magnesium to calm her heart, because magnesium has calming effects on muscles, and the heart is a muscle too, but she didn’t find anything like magnesium in the world. She didn’t even know if the periodic table from her old world worked in the world she was in at the moment. She was guessing that it worked, but with some additional elements that didn’t exist in her old world.

But there was something she was extremely curious about. How was it with the radioactive elements in the world she was in? Did the existence of spirit energy make them stable, or were they still dangerous and mutable? And, did they even exist in a world of cultivation?

Anyways, she didn’t have the time to think about it at the moment, as she needed to find out what was affecting Ivona and making her act that way.

After waiting for her heart to calm down a bit, she walked back to the cave entrance and started looking around, searching for something out of place. But she couldn’t find anything, and her heartbeat was once again getting sickeningly irregular and quick; so she retreated again and leaned against a tree.

Since looking for anything out of place didn’t help, she remembered the cave she found near the crack in the roof of the pathway. She decided to try and find some structural differences between the two cave entrances. Though the cave near the crack was clearly in the Hinterlands, and the cave in front of her wasn’t, the distance between the caves wasn’t that great, so they were very similar.

But no matter how good one’s memory is, they can’t remember the whole layout of a place if they didn’t want to remember it perfectly when they were there. So… Michelle decided to go there again. But first, she went to tell Ivona her plans, so she climbed the tree again.

After talking with Ivona, she used the ice bridge she had made between the trees, and even created bridges between more trees, until she was above the cave close to the crack.

There, she jumped down and looked around, her eyes scanning the cave entrance and its surroundings carefully. For over an hour, she remained by the cave, scanning every centimeter with her hawk-like gaze.

Then, she climbed up the trees again and used her ice bridges to go back to the cave where Ivona was. There, she got back down and stared at the cave’s surroundings.

And finally, she found a few different things. But it was expected that most of the differences were because of the distance, though small, but still present. In the end, one of the caves was inside the Hinterlands and one outside.

The first few differences were in the type of greenery that grew around the caves. The trees in front of the cave where Michelle was standing were shorter and had darker wood but lighter leaves. The flowers Michelle could see were brighter and bigger at the moment. And the vines were shorter, reaching about a meter above the ground, while the vines by the other cave were easily touching the ground, and some even had their lower parts tangled on the ground.

The second difference was in the shape of the cave entrances. The cave in front of Michelle had the entrance a bit lower, slightly below the level of the ground elsewhere, while the cave by the crack had the entrance at the level of the ground.

The third difference was the placement of the stones and branches around the cave. The cave by the crack had the stones and branches pushed to the side, which showed that water flowed through there in the past and pushed the stones and branches away. The cave in front of Michelle had stones and branches scattered everywhere around. But if one looked closer, some of the stones were flatter, and those stones were aligned in a circular shape.

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