Chapter 124
Holding one of the eyeballs in her hand, with the ice glove still on, Michelle narrowed her eyes. She formed a speck of her ice fire between her fingers and let it envelop the eyeball. She wanted to figure out why the boxes and eyeballs weren’t harmed when she let her ice flame engulf them all at once, so she thought about burning the eyeballs and boxes separately. Because what if either the eyeballs or the boxes were the reason why the other thing couldn’t burn?
And to her pleasant surprise, when the ice fire touched the eyeball, it froze within a matter of seconds. The liquid on the surface of the eyeball was a bit different from the liquid within, so their thermal expansion coefficients were slightly different. The liquid on the surface ended up being smaller when frozen compared to the liquid within, so cracks started appearing all over the eyeball. Small, jagged lines spread outward like a fractured mirror, distorting the once-smooth sphere until it looked ready to shatter completely.
Seeing that, Michelle lifted a brow. Since her fire could destroy the eyeballs, the boxes were most likely the reason she failed to do so before. So she emptied one and picked it up, enveloping it in her flames. But just as she had guessed, the box remained untouched. Not a single scorch mark appeared, and even the faint etchings on its surface stayed completely intact.
Michelle started carefully examining the box, sending wisps of her consciousness into it to check even its inside, but she didn’t find anything for a long time. With how small the box was, it was surprising that finding a clue was so difficult, but it was also understandable—there were numerous ways to investigate the box, and trying them all out was time-consuming. Her fingers traced every groove, every subtle indentation, yet nothing gave away its secrets.
She tried to damage it with her spirit and soul energy, both alone and combined. She tried sending the energies into it to probe it. She even tried brute force. But nothing brought results—she was merely ruling out possibilities. In the end, she was only left with physically examining the whole box once again, but no matter how she turned it over and how much she grazed her fingers over it, she didn’t find anything strange.
When Michelle couldn’t discover anything for quite some time, she felt her contract with Cold Flame stir. Then, she received a message from him, asking if she was okay, because she had been in the pathway for a long time, and Ivona, Anastasia, and Kieran were getting worried.
Hearing that, Michelle stored the boxes with eyeballs in her spatial ring to study later and started walking toward the exit. The cat no longer stopped her, so it probably didn’t know about any more hidden places in the pathway. But it still followed Michelle. From the first time it caught a whiff of her scent, it had instantly taken a liking to her. In the cat’s simple mind, someone with such a nice scent had to be a good person—not like the smelly, bad people who had locked it up behind the wall when it had done nothing wrong. Its tail flicked contentedly as it padded behind her, staying close enough that its fur occasionally brushed against her leg.
Michelle summoned her dark element spirit energy to form a black mist around her head again, so she wouldn’t have to look at all the jars of organs as she walked to the exit. There, she used her Shadow Spirit Steps to jump out of the holes, letting the black mist disappear as she landed next to Cold Flame and the rest. The rush of fresh air hit her at once, carrying with it the lingering scent of smoke and damp stone from the ruined mansion around them.
"What did you find there...?" Ivona asked, sitting on the ground among the ruins of the Ostrich family’s mansion, recalling what she had seen when she wanted to follow Michelle into the pathway. Then, as she shifted her gaze to Michelle, she noticed that her eyes were completely black. "You absorbed more void?" she asked in surprise.