Chapter Ninety-Seven: Vienne (IV)

Katherine stared blankly at Venn until she was certain the girl had truly fainted. Only then did she let out a breath of relief and collapse heavily onto the floor. The tone Venn had used just now had sounded like some ancient witch muttering a garbled oracle, and it made one feel deeply uneasy from the bottom of the heart.

As an ordinary person, she had already witnessed far too many strange and astonishing things. Was it really good for her to know all this? Could she end up drawn into some unknown whirlpool and have her tiny life swallowed whole?

Once she had taught Xia Ya the martial arts and the girl had been reborn with a new leg, she would bid farewell to her master. This life was truly frightening.

But if she left her master, would she really be safe?

Katherine thought silently about it, then gave a wry, self-mocking smile. It was far too early to be worrying about such things. In any case, until she reached the rank of advanced martial master, her master would certainly never let her leave. What was the use of thinking so much? It would be better to consider how to control the organs within her body. But after eating and drinking her fill, she simply had no energy to cultivate at all. Forget it. She would stop thinking about this for now and wake Venn first. If her master returned and saw this, and mistakenly thought she had knocked the other girl unconscious, that would be hard to explain.

Even in unconsciousness, Venn’s brows remained tightly knit, and the expression on her face was faintly fierce, clearly showing she was not having a pleasant dream. Katherine called out to her several times, but there was no response. In the end, she stood up, walked over to Venn, and reached out to shake her awake.

The moment her hand touched the skin of Venn’s arm, a ring of blinding azure light suddenly blossomed over Venn’s body. A band of ice-blue energy instantly swept across Katherine’s body. With no chance at all to resist, she was frozen into a statue of ice. Only her eyeballs could still move with difficulty, and her body temperature plunged with terrifying violence.

At the instant she was frozen, Katherine felt a boundless spiritual force explode from Venn’s body. It was a hundred, a thousand times more powerful than her own spiritual power as an advanced mage. With almost no casting time at all, it roused an amount of ice magic that was inconceivably vast. She immediately understood that she had triggered Venn’s self-protection mechanism. So what the little brat had said was true: whenever she encountered danger, her sister Vis would emerge!

If she died like this, it would be a truly unjust death.

Just as Katherine began to channel the Fire of Antun within her body, intending to melt the ice with it, the piercing cold suddenly ebbed away like a tide. The frost on her body melted rapidly, and the instant control returned to her limbs, Katherine sprang backward to widen the distance, looking warily toward Venn.

To her astonishment, when she looked up, she saw a faint, ice-blue female shadow beginning to take shape above the unconscious Venn’s head.

The apparition was somewhat ethereal. She had a head of long, pale green hair, and her figure was exactly the same as Venn’s. The moment she appeared, she immediately faced Katherine and bowed, apologizing frantically.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Were you hurt? I didn’t mean it. What just happened was only a natural backlash of spiritual power. I truly did not actively cast any magic!”

Katherine instantly realized who the apparition was. With such immense spiritual power, and with a soul capable of leaving the body and manifesting in the real world without dispersing, she could only be the other soul inhabiting this body: Viss, the Water Sage.

Katherine was a little nervous as she stammered, “M-Miss Viss, I’m fine. My body’s pretty sturdy. I wasn’t hurt much. Please don’t worry!”

“Nonsense!” Viss, still in her spectral form, frowned slightly. “Your arm is already showing signs of severe frostbite, and you still insist you’re fine. Hold out your hand. I’ll use some water-element healing magic on you. It may not compare to a priest’s sacred incantations, but it should still work rather well.”

“No, n-no need!” Being cared for by Viss immediately made Katherine feel warm all over, almost as though she were a little drunk. She didn’t want to trouble her idol and hurriedly tried to persuade her otherwise. “Please, Miss Viss, you should go back into your body quickly. I’ve heard that soul separation places a heavy burden on spiritual power. You don’t need to waste so much effort on me! I’ll be fine after eating something!”

As she spoke, she hurriedly took some roasted crab meat from her spatial bag and stuffed it straight into her mouth. Her body also began to repair the injured areas. In the few seconds she had been speaking, the frostbite that had looked so severe had already become much less alarming.

Viss found this rather amusing. Her soul’s shadow waved a hand and said, “Miss Katherine, don’t let your practice in martial cultivation brainwash you. Magic is far more powerful than you imagine. For a mage saint like me, a soul separation this close is nothing at all. Come, get closer and let me take a look at your injuries.”

Hearing Viss speak so gently, and being able to stand so near to her idol, Katherine had already lost track of where she was. She stepped forward one pace at a time, presenting her right hand and arm, the parts most badly frozen, for Viss to inspect. Viss lowered her head slightly and examined them carefully for a while before praising her.

“Incredible! This really is astonishing regenerative power. Even a priest’s ‘Praise of Life’ probably couldn’t match such terrifying speed of recovery. Still, although the external wounds are healing quite impressively, what about the deeper injuries? Have the muscles and bone layers beneath the skin recovered as well? I can’t see very clearly. Could you come a little closer?”

“Y-yes!” Katherine nodded frantically. The other woman was a mage saint, after all, and yet she was showing such meticulous concern for a nobody like her. She quickly took two more steps forward and brought her arm close to the other woman’s face. As the azure shadow reached out to grasp her arm, it murmured softly, “Where is it? Let me have a careful look…”

As she moved, the pale green hair that had been draped over the apparition’s face swayed aside for an instant. The bliss on Katherine’s face froze at once. She saw, with unbearable clarity, that the faint blue shadow before her had no face at all.

Beneath that green hair was a smooth, featureless surface, like a mirror, without eyes, nose, or mouth. Beneath that mirrored surface, something seemed to flicker from time to time. The structure instantly brought to Katherine’s mind something she had seen not long ago.

The Sin Crystal Spider.

Before she could even react to what that meant, the ice-blue hand had already rested on Katherine’s arm. Once again, piercing cold erupted from every corner of her body. Yet this time the cold went even deeper, having completely bypassed the flesh and gone straight to the soul.

She felt as though even her soul had been frozen, as if something were slowly crawling onto her through the apparition’s hand.

Just as Katherine was sinking into the abyss, she suddenly heard Ling Mo’s faint voice by her ear.

“That is enough.”