CHAPTER 278: 278

Michelle didn’t think much about the plan. She had Tenether fly directly above the Syrithis Lion. Then, under her command, Tenether suddenly started to shapeshift. That caused his body to lose its solidity.

Michelle fell through Tenether’s body, right towards the lion.

Reaching into her spirit domain, she took out her sickle and swung it down.

Shadow essence slipped off the blade and flew at the lion. It didn’t even get the time to react before a black, weightless blade sliced through it.

The body was without a sign of harm, but the lion’s Life Stone couldn’t resist it. It scattered into dust.

But Michelle was in a bit of a pickle. She was free falling.

"Tene!" Michelle didn’t have to raise her voice for Tenether to hear her.

He had just transformed back into a falcon.

Taking on a hunter pose, he flew straight down toward Michelle, like she was prey to be hunted.

Within a split second, Michelle was grabbed around her chest by Tenether’s claws and lifted up so she wouldn’t hit the ground. Tenether then normally spread his wings and flew low to set Michelle down.

Stretching her arms, Michelle glanced over at Kieran and the rest. "How do you feel?" Her gaze landed on Ivona and Anastasia. They were clearly weakened.

It turned out that after cultivating in seclusion for a while, the group decided to enhance their fighting as a team, so they went out. Up until a while earlier, everything was going well. Until the moment the Syrithis Lion took a whiff of their scent.

Anastasia got a small wound on her hand, and the smell of her blood must have attracted its attention. Syrithis Lions had an extremely sharp sense of smell.

After that, things turned quite tricky. Without even knowing why, the two girls got extremely weak, and Kieran had to protect them. And he was quite tired from all the fighting from the previous days.

If Michelle hadn’t come, they would have been in trouble. They wouldn’t have died, but they also wouldn’t have escaped unscathed. The wounds would have been quite severe.

Listening to that, Michelle’s eyes wandered to the lion’s corpse. For a moment, she regretted killing it by shattering the Life Stone. She should have done it in a different way. She had a use for the Life Stone.

It went back to the Heavenly Law.

Since she had decided to become the monster it thought she was, she could start with small things right away.

And there was one thing only monsters ever did. Michelle knew it because of how many times she had gone through the memories passed onto her by Rivenaar.

When monsters fought, the one who won would take the Life Stone of the other and merge it into their own.

Michelle didn’t have her own Life Stone, so she couldn’t merge another into it, but she wanted to try what she could do with it.

And she didn’t want to do it with the two big Life Stones she had stored away.

One belonged to Rivenaar, and the other was placed by Mavreth in the annex in the Archduchy in the Land of Exile. And with the power they contained, Michelle wasn’t foolish enough to dare experiment with them.

She was of the opinion that it was only safe to experiment with the Life Stones of monsters she could defeat. Michelle stood no chance against Rivenaar.

Ivona was the first one to notice how absent-minded Michelle was. And that wasn’t the only thing. The aura around Michelle had changed significantly. The question was why?

The three didn’t know it was because Michelle had cultivated shadow essence, or that she mastered some high-ranking skills.

Michelle quickly snapped out of her thoughts. Since the lion’s Life Stone was gone, there was no real reason to think about it any further. "What will we do now?" she turned her attention to her friends.

Ivona and Anastasia were already getting their strength back since the lion’s pheromones were gone.

Anastasia stretched her body while Ivona got to her feet. "You could tell us about what you did this time. You were gone for quite a while."

Michelle shrugged. "It’s not all that complex," she started. "In exchange for letting the information guild from the lower realm cultivate in the sect, I became Mavreth’s disciple. This past time, he had been teaching me poison making."

"I doubt it can be called teaching if your presence changed so much!" Kieran said after listening. "He made you take the poison, didn’t he?" He was nearly sure of his assumption.

Michelle didn’t think much about it. "I knew it would go like that even before I agreed to be his disciple."

"You know you aren’t normal, right?" Kieran shook his head a bit.

Michelle nodded. "I’m not an ignorant idiot."

"Ignorance is bliss!" Ivona said from the side.

Michelle frowned. "Ignorance kills."

Ivona couldn’t disagree. She herself didn’t exactly believe that ignorance was bliss. It was only true to some extent.

At some point, it would bring along more danger than bliss.

She knew it very well.

As for why she told Michelle that ignorance is bliss, she just felt like it. She guessed that Michelle would react to it. And she wanted to see that.

Maybe that’s what they were friends for... to push each other’s buttons and retain each other’s sanity.

If Michelle had been alone from the Land of Exile, she could have gone crazy from it. Even as someone used to solo operations, complete isolation wasn’t beneficial to her. She needed to meet people every now and then.

That was also probably why she sought to become friends with them in the first place.

Of course, there were reasons like her plans and the fact that they thought similarly, but deep in her subconsciousness, there was also the desire to retain her sanity. It was very subtle, but affected her a lot.

In her past life, Michelle was like a solitary animal. She only interacted with people when it was absolutely necessary.

And she lost herself in it. She became only a killing machine of the organization. It was like she didn’t have a mind of her own.

Well, she had it, but she could only use it to improvise during missions.

Since she had experienced that in her past life, once she woke up in the body of Michelle Grace, her subconsciousness started seeking some kind of relationship.

She no longer had the organization to give her orders. That made her mind clear up.

Maybe that was also the reason she was able to accept Philip Grace as her real father, not just an acting figure. She became his real daughter.

Also, to prevent Michelle from losing herself, her subconsciousness activated a mechanism. Michelle was aware of it. She called it once is enough. It was basically that if her subconscious actions had led her to some kind of long-term mistake, once she got out of it, her subconscious mind would learn to not only avoid it, but even prevent it.

That subconscious part would always wake up when Michelle started talking with her friends strictly about business. Friends weren’t her coworkers or business partners. But if she started treating them as such, their relationship would quickly twist up.

And that was what the subconscious part of her mind started preventing after waking up as Michelle Grace. It awoke the part of her that had a knack for careless banter and didn’t care about consequences.

That was still Michelle. She wouldn’t become a different person. Just her actions would be a bit tweaked. But she would still be aware of her surroundings and on guard against threats.

Michelle and Ivona ended up in an argument about ignorance and oblivion. And the funniest thing about it was that they were basically in agreement. But they were speaking slightly differently, so the argument went on.

Maybe they were arguing just for the sake of arguing. Maybe it was because they didn’t see each other in a long time. Or because they were both mentally and physically spent.

Ivona from trying to fight the Syrithis Lion while weakened by its pheromones—it left some traces on her—and Michelle from the poison making in Mavreth’s sect.

Just in the morning, she had finished making a poison she had been brewing for three days.

Kieran and Anastasia didn’t join the argument. They were just laughing on the side. They knew Michelle and Ivona weren’t angry at each other, even though the argument was quite heated. If someone didn’t know what was going on, they would think the two beautiful women were about to have a big fall-out.

But in reality, they just didn’t see each other for a while.

At some point, Ivona got bored of the argument and backed out. They finally sat down on the ground with Kieran and Anastasia.

"Did you both relieve your boredom?" Kieran asked lazily.

Ivona just laughed and Michelle shrugged. At some things, they were extremely similar, like twins, but the way they expressed it could be so different.