CHAPTER 268: 268

Alexander stared at Michelle’s unconscious form for a while before turning his gaze to the two black clouds above her. She succeeded. At least partly.

The question was whether the clouds would stay around until she woke up.

Alexander retracted the Inner Shadow and waited for Michelle to wake up.

She remained asleep for a long time, over five hours, but the whole time, the two clouds stayed around.

When Michelle woke up, she stared at the two clouds, narrowing her eyes. "So, how does this relate to creating the Liquid Shadow?" she asked, directing her gaze at Alexander.

"Well..." Alexander started. "This is already the first stage of the skill. You are able to reshape it just like the Liquid Shadow, but this will always remain more of a gas than a liquid. No one ever bothered to name it since it’s basically useless, but when talking about it, people refer to it as Gas Shadow."

Michelle raised a brow. "And how do I make Liquid Shadow out of it?"

"That’s a bit more complicated." When Alexander said that, Michelle understood that he wouldn’t step-by-step explain to her how to do it. He would just tell her the basic theory, and she would have to come up with the rest herself.

And she was right.

Alexander told her that she needed to maintain control over the two clouds while making them invisible.

That in itself contradicted the existence of foreign shadow essence under control. By theory, that was always visible once it came under control.

Then, Michelle was to spread it to the shadows around and mix it in with the shadow essence there.

Finally, if she had mixed it correctly, if she pulled on the shadow essence she sent there, the shadows would move along with it, stretching over the ground.

And if she lifted them, they would become liquid, tearing away from the original shadows.

So Michelle got to work. First, she had to make the two clouds invisible while keeping control over them.

That was probably why Alexander wanted her to be able to keep them around even while unconscious. If she could, maybe she could even keep control over them while they seemed like they weren’t under control.

Basically, she had to fool the foreign shadow essence.

At first, Michelle tried to do it by pulling her own shadow essence even deeper into her body, so the foreign shadow essence wouldn’t be affected by it in any way. But it didn’t work.

The foreign shadow essence remained visible even when Michelle’s control over it slipped because she was focusing on her shadow essence.

She had to use a different method.

Looking at the two clouds, Michelle had them spread around like a mist, to see whether they would become less visible.

But the result was quite the opposite.

While spreading around, the foreign shadow essence under Michelle’s control influenced the other foreign shadow essence, so it, too, slipped under Michelle’s control.

That wasn’t the right way. She just ended up with a huge black cloud around her.

But at least Michelle found an easy way to spread her control.

Still, Michelle knew that having a bigger cloud would just make things harder for her, so she let go of the new shadow essence by pulling back the one that had spread around.

The huge black cloud quickly disappeared. Michelle was once again in control of only two clouds.

"What now...?" Michelle mumbled. She refused to fail. She had to find a way.

Closing her eyes, she started thinking about all she knew about shadow essence.

Nothing much came to mind from the theory.

But still, an idea swirled up from the mayhem of thoughts.

Usually, foreign shadow essence would become visible when it was under the control of a person’s shadow essence. But the two clouds weren’t. It could be said they just remembered that they used to be under the control of a person’s shadow essence.

So what if Michelle once again changed the state of what was controlling them?

She thought about it like binary code. It only consisted of zeros and ones, lined up one after another. A zero could only be changed into a one, and a one could only be changed into a zero.

What if she fooled the clouds?

For them, being under control of her shadow essence could be considered a one in the binary code, and not being under control would be a zero. When in the state of a one, they were visible; when in the state of a zero, they were invisible.

But Michelle had fooled them. At the moment, they weren’t under the control of her shadow essence, but they were still in the state of a one. So, theoretically, if she added in her shadow essence, the clouds’ state could change to a zero.

But, of course, it was only a theory. If Michelle did it, she could find out that it didn’t work.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to try. So without thinking about it any further, she slowly pushed a small amount of her shadow essence into one of the clouds.

Seeing that, Alexander nodded ever so slightly. It was hardly noticeable, but he could still see the cloud getting more transparent. The black particles in it turned dark gray.

Michelle couldn’t exactly tell whether anything happened. If something did happen, the change was too small for her to be sure. She just couldn’t put her finger on it.

So, to be sure, she continued adding shadow essence into the cloud to see what would happen.

And after a while, she could see the changes clearly. The cloud was getting transparent.

Michelle started pumping in more of her shadow essence to speed up the process. When the cloud was invisible, she started doing the same with the second one.

With the clouds invisible, Michelle couldn’t tell where they were, but since her shadow essence was within them, she could somehow feel it.

So, just like Alexander said before, she sent the two clouds to the nearest shadow — a shadow under a tree.

There, she needed to mix it in with other foreign shadow essence.

But how?

A frown formed on Michelle’s face. She had no clue.

She could retract her shadow essence from there, and the two groups of foreign shadow essence would naturally mix together. But then, there would be a high probability that Michelle would lose her control over it.

And it would be bothersome to do everything again until she got back to that point.

So Michelle would only do that if she couldn’t come up with any other method.

First, she just started swirling her shadow essence around the shadow. But she highly doubted that would do anything.

No surprise it didn’t.

Then, another method she tried was spreading the foreign shadow essence she controlled, just like she had it spread around when she first tried to make it invisible.

With her own shadow essence, she could feel the two clouds merging into one while taking in other shadow essence. After a while, the whole shadow was swallowed by an invisible cloud of shadow essence.

Michelle pulled the cloud toward her, but the shadow beneath it didn’t move in the least.

So Michelle pushed it back.

"Is there no other way...?" she mumbled with a frown. She didn’t really want to risk having to do everything again.

Still, since she didn’t have any more ideas at the moment, Michelle decided to try it.

Pulling her shadow essence away from the cloud, Michelle narrowed her eyes, watching carefully what would happen.

When she pulled back most of it, she had a frown on her face.

She had guessed it would happen, but the cloud was once again visible.

Still, she didn’t stop and pulled out even the rest of her shadow essence.

But she didn’t pull it back into her body.

Before she could lose control over the cloud, she had her shadow essence spread around it, surrounding it. She formed a barrier to keep it within the shadow under it.

For a moment, the cloud turned pitch black, just like when Michelle didn’t have her shadow essence in the two smaller clouds, but a moment later, it disappeared. Michelle could no longer see it.

But she could feel it within the enclosure of her shadow energy. It had nowhere to hide from her control, even if it wasn’t directly under her control.

Finally, Michelle tried whether the shadow would move with the cloud.

She pushed with her shadow essence on the cloud, and since it was surrounded, it moved like she wanted.

And the shadow moved along with it.

Michelle was quite satisfied with achieving that, but she knew she still hadn’t mastered the skill.

The cloud was too big, and it didn’t become one with the shadow. For the skill to work, she needed to be able to directly control the shadow.

A way to do that...

Michelle couldn’t think of anything.

But she didn’t give up.

If she wanted to, she could ask Alexander for a hint, but she refused to do so. She wanted to master the skill without any more of his interference.