The Spider Queen

Dragon's Breath!

Sophie was undeterred by her apparent failure and simply took another deep breath to try again for a second time.

She exhaled slowly while doing her best to mimic Katarina's movements from the earlier demonstration but there was still no poison mist generated.

What was baffling was the fact that Sophie could feel the poison entering her mouth just a few moments ago but it seemed to have vanished into thin air.

She carefully circulated some qi around her body to detect any abnormalities but could not seem to find anything wrong.

It was like she had never taken the poison in the first place!

Squeak! Squeak!

Moon wasn't sure what his mommy was doing but was just happy to be a little cheerleader as he waved his furry wings in the air.

"Um Katarina…. I'm not sure what just happened," Sophie spoke in a puzzled tone.

Katarina was none the wiser to the situation as she had never seen something like this before.

Generally, the most common mistakes when learning the Dragon's Breath was scattering poison into your own body during the nourishing process in the dantian.

Sophie had clearly guided all the poison into her mouth and only had to perform the simple act of blowing outwards.

There should not have been any problem.

"Let me take a look," Katarina moved closer and stretched the corners of Sophie's mouth to look inside.

Poison Sensory Art!

The tips of Katarina's fingers turned a purplish colour as she moved them in a sideways motion along the edges of Sophie's lips.

She could tell that the poison had not left Sophie's body and yet there were no visible indicators to show where it had gone.

"I can sense that the poison has pooled somewhere in your mouth but for some reason I can't see where exactly," Katarina explained as she stepped back.

Squeak! Squeak!

Moon thought that the strange two-legged creature had just attacked his mommy and the temperature around him started to plummet rapidly.

I'll save you mom!

"Calm down baby," Sophie stroked his head gently and the frosty temperature disappeared just as quickly as it arrived.

Sophie quite enjoyed petting her fluffy pet as it would only be a few more months until Moon matured enough to begin training.

Until then, she would spoil him rotten!

"Should I try this technique again?" Sophie asked.

"No…I need to figure out what went wrong last time so why don't we take a ten-minute break?" Katarina suggested.

Sophie had no problem with taking a short rest and just flopped on the ground lazily. The ceiling of the training room could simulate the conditions of different environments.

Right now, the artificial sun was shining brightly overhead, and it appeared to be midday.

Sophie sent a message to one of her maids waiting on the side to bring lunch and it was not long before Petra arrived with over ten plates of food in a serving cart.

The servants were all accustomed to their young miss's great appetite!

Sophie made sure to feed Moon first so her hungry companion would not stare anxiously at her food as she ate.

For some reason, this frostwing bat turned out to be a glutton just like his master.

Sophie casually picked up one of sandwiches and her fangs extended outwards as she took a deep bite.

Sizzle! Sizzle!

Sophie hurriedly flung the sandwich away as the unexpected noise when she bit into it made her startled.

The sandwich rolled around a few times before stopping abruptly as it appeared to melt into the floor of the training room.

Small holes in the floor had appeared at the areas where it had bounced.

"Milady what's wrong?!" Katarina rushed to her side and quickly moved Sophie away from the food.

"Did you just try to poison the young miss?" she glared menacingly at the maidservant as poison swirls started to form around her palms.

"No... I swear I didn't!" Petra knelt and shakily replied.

Who would be mad enough to attempt an assassination in front of the duke's greatest interrogator?

If she ended up in the hands of the 'poison witch' then her fate would be worse than death.

Katarina activated her poison sensory technique to check the state of Sophie's body and found no foreign liquids inside.

"What just happened?" Katarina had still not ruled out the possibility of foul play, so she asked Sophie about the sequence of events that led to throwing away the sandwich.

"I don't know…I just bit down on the sandwich normally and I heard a sizzling noise," Sophie explained.

She was genuinely confused as well.

Katarina was no idiot and the gears slowly begun to turn in her head as a strange theory flashed across her mind.

She recalled that during the bio-scan, it showed that Sophie's fangs were hollow and had channels that were connected to special glands in her mouth.

What if the poison from the technique flowed into the mouth glands instead and then subsequently into her fangs?

"Milady, I want you to bite one of my arms so I can check out something," Katarina decided to test out the theory as soon as possible.

"Err…okay," Sophie also had a vague idea in her mind, and it seemed that Katarina wanted to see if the poison was trapped in her fangs.

Katarina stretched out her right arm and Sophie took a few steps closer to get into range.

Hungry…. fresh prey….

Sophie did not even notice that her golden eyes had gradually shifted colour into a reddish tint as her fangs extended and she firmly chomped down on Katarina's right arm.

After a brief moment of contact, she moved away with an almost disappointed expression on her face that went unnoticed.

This was just a theory that Katarina had in the spur of the moment, but she was confident that a poison cultivator like herself would not be in any danger.

Besides if Sophie's alien heritage were affecting how the poison techniques were expressed as she performed them, then she would need to adjust the training plan and speak to the duke.

"Um…Katarina," Sophie hesitantly spoke as she saw that her mentor was still contemplating silently.

"Is your arm supposed to look like that?"

"What?" came the confused reply.

Katarina glanced down at her arm and almost froze in shock.

The flesh on her right arm had turned completely black and started to rot with dark blue veins protruding eerily through the skin.

She found that all sensations in her arm had gone numb and Katarina had to consciously send qi to the meridians in her arm in order to prevent the poison from spreading through the rest of her body.

This made no sense!

Katarina took another look at the state of her arm and was in quiet disbelief. The poison given to Sophie to practice with was from a common grassland snake.

And yet, it took consuming her only grade seven detoxification pill to reverse the effects of Sophie's bite.

No matter how many times the poison was nourished, it should be nothing more than a mild to severe irritant.

How could it possibly burn the floor of the training room or affect her?

Katarina could also tell that the poison entering her body from Sophie's fangs had components of the irritant she had ingested earlier.

But it seemed to have been greatly mutated or modified as it was able to even affect a cultivator in the qi tide stage.