Chapter 30: 30
Michel looked at the two piles of books she made and then at the first two books she pulled out. She had a feeling that the two books were tier breakers, and since just reading them wouldn't harm her, she leaned against the bookshelf behind her and started reading. The books were thin, but complicated, so it took her until evening to read them, but when she was done, a smile creeped to her face.
She finally understood why she could only pull in one droplet of spirit energy at once. And she might have also found a solution. It wasn't perfect, but would definitely speed up her cultivation by folds.
The sky was already darkening outside as Michelle glanced out of the window. In a split of a moment, she decided to stay in the library overnight. She walked over to a small table with the two books and took the blank notebook on the table. She sat down and started taking notes in the notebook as she read the two books again. She was planning to try and write into the notebook a cultivation method suitable only for herself.
As the sun shone into the library, Michelle stood up from the table and yawned lazily as she stretched her stiff body. She didn't know if it would work, but the cultivation method was finished. She wanted to try it, but she knew that if there was a flaw in the method she created, she would get seriously hurt, so she decided to get the Archduke to review it.
Taking the notebook and the two books, she walked out of the library building and entered the mansion, heading straight towards the Archduke's office. "Father... Do you have a moment?" she asked as she knocked on the door.
"Come in!" the Archduke's voice carried through the door, so Michelle opened it and entered.
"Father, I know you advised me not to, but I felt like combining these two books even though they were contradictory to each other," she spoke as she put the two books on the Archduke's desk. "Can you check what I came up with?" She placed the notebook next to the two books.
The Archduke lifted a brow in surprise. From what he knew about Michelle since she took over his daughter's body, she wasn't someone rush or reckless, so the fact that she went against his advice meant that something was really pulling her towards the combination of the two books. Maybe it was because her soul was from a different world...
"I'll review it for you..." he nodded a bit. "But it will take a while," he added. Reviewing a cultivation method for flaws was hard, especially since it was a merger of two contradictory methods. One single flaw or mistake could lead to the death of the person cultivating by the method.
Michelle smiled a bit. "Take your time, father. I'm not rushing. I'll be going back to the library. Thank you for helping me." Leaving the books behind, Michelle bid her farewell to the Archduke and went to the library again. She decided to merge two non-contradictory methods, so that even if the one she brought to the Archduke had flaws, she would have a backup plan.
She holed herself up in the library, eleventh floor, for more than a day and merged two books. She liked the result, but she didn't feel the pull she felt towards the merger of the two contradictory methods she gave to the Archduke for review.
Since this time, she didn't go against the Archduke's advice, she didn't need him to review the method for her, so she sat cross-legged on the floor and tried to cultivate.
After a while, she realized that she could indeed cultivate with that method, but she felt like something was missing. Unlike before, she wasn't pulling the spirit energy into her body, but she let a bit of her own spirit energy burst out and attract the surrounding spirit energy to her. Then, her spirit veins would naturally suck the spirit energy into her dantian.
The reason why she couldn't pull the spirit energy into her body by herself was because her spirit veins weren't suitable for it. Her spirit veins had big suction force, but they didn't have the first spark of energy to start pulling, so whenever she tried to pull in some spirit energy, her spirit veins would only be able to pull in a droplet before having to rest.
But at the moment, by bursting a bit of her own spirit energy out, the surrounding spirit energy seeped into her body by itself, and then, the suction of her spirit veins pulled them through her body into her dantian.
It was a strange feeling suddenly having spirit energy entering her dantian. Just a few days prior, the spirit energy entering her dantian was like small droplets, but compared to that, at the moment, the flow was like a tiny stream, slowly turning the puddle in her dantian into a small pool.
After cultivating for a long while, Michelle opened her eyes and stood up. She heard the library door open, her guess being that the Archduke came to find her.
She closed the cultivation book and put it in her sleeve before starting to put all the booms back into their place. As she did so, someone got to the Eleventh floor where she was. She turned around, and to her surprise, it wasn't the Archduke, but a person whose appearance made her blood boil.
"What do you want here?" she asked coldly, a frown on her face. The only thing she desired at the moment was to beat him up, but knowing his power, she knew she was completely helpless against him. And being a lazy person who didn't like pointlessly wasting her energy, she decided not to attack him. She already knew how to cultivate, so she had no doubt she would once beat him.
Seeing the rage in Michelle's eyes, Alexander Terce smirked. For some reason, her enraged gaze always amused him. He didn't even know why. "I met Philip Grace a while ago, and he had a merger of contradictory cultivation methods on his table. He said he tried to merge them out of curiosity, but that wasn't his handwriting." Alexander spoke with a sneer. "Did you write it?"
Michelle narrowed her eyes. She didn't want that to be known by someone so soon, because when she saw the Archduke's expression when she brought him the merger, she realized that if she had really succeeded, she had achieved something major, which might make her life quite troublesome.
"What two contradictory books?" That trail of thoughts in Michelle's head happened so quickly, that for Alexander, it really looked like Michelle was confused and didn't know what he was talking about.
But Alexander wasn't a person easy to fool. Michelle's acting only made him smile as he reached into his sleeve and pulled out the notebook Michelle gave to the Archduke. Michelle had to control herself not to show shock. "What's that?" she raised a brow.
Seeing the confusion in Michelle's eyes, Alexander felt a tingle of doubt, but it was only a tingle. He opened the notebook and placed it on the table. Then, he took the notebook in which Michelle merged the two non-contradictory methods and opened it. "The writing is the same..." he glanced at Michelle with a slight smile as he spoke. "And you were just cultivating with this one..." He lifted the merger of the non-contradictory methods.
Michelle knew that she was cornered, but she refused to admit it. "I found that between the other books," she spoke calmly, but her mind was a whirlwind of thoughts.
"Oh...?" Alexander raised a brow, a sneer on his lips. "Is that so...?" He chuckled. "Then why is the ink so fresh?" He ran his finger over a page. "The only one who entered this library the past few days was you. And this ink is not that old. At most a day since it was written down."
"And how can you know when it was written? The ink is already long dry." Michelle frowned. She didn't believe that Alexander could know anything from the ink, but at the same time, she was worried since she was in a different world from the one she knew, so even the ink might have been special.
Seeing Michelle's gaze, Alexander somehow understood what she was thinking and sneered. "The ink has lingering spirit energy on it. Because, since you have spirit energy in your body, it seeps out if you don't control it properly and mixes with the ink you write with." Alexander smiled. "And just so you know, the spirit energy on the ink is yours. A perfect proof that you are the one who wrote it."
Michelle frowned. She had nothing to refute that. If she had more information about the world, she might have been able to refute, but about spirit energy, she had big loopholes in her knowledge. She had to patch them up the best she could with new information, so she didn't end up in a situation like that again. "I did write it, but why does it concern you?" she asked with a frown. "It's not like you would die without knowing that I was the one who wrote it."