Immortal Ice Empress: Path to Vengeance

After almost an entire day, Mira and Maria made their way back to their cave, and surprisingly, Maria was only slightly bloody with a few scratches and gashes but nothing too bad.

However, Maria looked dead tired like she used every ounce of energy contained within her body. Yet, none of these things could contain the large smile plastered on her face.

Celaine noticed this and her respect towards Maria started to drop as she thought that Mira might've knocked a few screws loose with how often she gets beaten up. Anyone who can come back smiling after getting beat must be a little insane.

Nevertheless, she pushed these thoughts away and decided to greet them.

"Did something good happen, Maria? It looks like you just got beat up like usual." Celaine commented.

"Yeah! I was actually able to get a few good hits in on Mira! Well, she was suppressing her strength to equal mine, but to be able to get a few good hits in is already enough for me… at least for now!" Maria exclaimed while doing a victory pose, even though she's the one that got beat up.

Celaine was surprised to hear that, but it wasn't anything too shocking. These two probably know everything there is to know about each other when it comes to sparring. Rather, it would be more surprising if Maria was never able to do anything to Mira even after all of this time and training.

Mira didn't say anything and just looked like her usual indifferent and aloof self, but inside she was rather happy. Being able to get a few good strikes in on her is huge progress.

Mira went through almost a millennia worth of life-and-death experiences which led to her current battle sense, while Maria has only been with her for around a decade and has already reached the point where she can cause a few marks on her body.

Either Maria's talent for battle is above average or she is just a great teacher!

Jokes aside, Mira knew that it was neither. This is just the accumulation of quite a few life-or-death experiences, and sparring close to every day for the last decade. Maria also got herself a master to help with her swordplay, which has drastically improved her combat prowess.

"That's amazing! Let's continue working hard so that one day we'll be able to take Mira down!" Celaine raised her fist at Maria, to which the latter responded with a fist bump.

"Yeah! Watch out Mira, this is only the beginning! Hehe." Maria chuckled playfully, then sat down and immediately fell asleep.

At this point, Mira decided to speak to Celaine.

"Whether you reach the point of being able to spar with me as equals is up to you, but your talent with the saber is surely high enough for you to reach that point with a bit of hard work. As you can see, even an idiot like Maria can reach this point, but it was only through blood, sweat, and… well, maybe not so many tears but definitely lots of blood and sweat. Haste makes waste, remember that." Mira chose to give a couple of words of encouragement to Celaine due to her being in a good mood before walking away, leaving the baffled Celaine to herself. Mira was also looking forward to that day as her scythe-arts might be able to make a qualitative leap with such a talented saber user to spar with.

After a while, she finally came back to her senses and her mind finally processed what just happened. She looked up in the sky to make sure it wasn't falling or the universe wasn't imploding.

'Did Mira just encourage me to work hard?! Why? Why do I feel like the world is about to end after hearing such a thing? Is she telling me I need to work harder? No! If that was the case, she'd just drag me out of this cave and fight me until I'm half-dead! Furthermore, her last words… Haste makes waste… I don't know if that's her motto, but I guess I can kind of see it. Even though she does fill up almost every second of every day efficiently, she never really rushes anything and only relies on the tidbits of accumulation that build up every day.' Celaine let out a huge sigh before going back to her cultivation.

Meanwhile, on Mira's side, she decided to go back and finish consolidating her foundation with the beast core.

It shouldn't take much longer as her body doesn't need to get used to its current cultivation since her physical body is still stronger.

Like that, 2 weeks went by and Mira felt satisfied. The only reason it took even this long was Mira would take some time to spar with Maria and occasionally Celaine.

Now that Mira has gotten all of these things out of the way, it's time for her to dive into trying to and gain the ability to control Yin Fire. At the very least, she wanted to gain some insight into it before Elenei came back.

She sat down and immediately began analyzing her Yin Magma flowing through her body. Her Yin Magma looked like if magma suddenly gained the color of ice except a few dark-golden brown spots were flowing through it as well, which happened to be the earth element that makes up magma. With the earth element being something of a neutral element that can take on both properties of Yin or Yang depending on the circumstances, the properties of this element hadn't changed much, with the major change happening on the fire element side.

Mira didn't pay attention to the earth element located in her Yin Magma and instead focused on the part fire part of her Yin Magma.

She had no idea where to start as she didn't even know a whole lot about her Yin Magma! Her comprehension of this element was rather limited and her control is solely based on its link to her Physique. That's not even mentioning that this isn't even fire, it's magma!

She decided to stop thinking about these things and just jump right in. Mira tried the first thing that came to mind, which was attempting to separate the earth's properties in her magma, leaving on the fire properties.

But she quickly realized that such a task was borderline impossible. She could control the magma as a whole but was unable to control specific parts of it. This is mainly because her comprehension of fire and earth is incredibly limited, almost non-existent.

Seeing how doing this would be a huge waste of time, she tried going about this another way.

She summoned her Yin Magma outside of her body and began observing it. She moved it around her, used on her surroundings, tried prying into what actually makes up her Yin Magma, used it with her ice and lightning, and even brought Maria out to test its effects in battle, but she felt like she was barely making any progress.

There were a few problems that she did take note of, that may have been overlooked before which was her understanding of her Physique and just Physiques in general. She knew what the original Extreme Yine Physique does, but that was only basic information that she heard in passing.

Mira's never had a physique before and never made it a priority in learning about them since there were other things that took priority.

So, not only does Mira lack basic knowledge about Physiques in general, she knows even less about such a heavily mutated and borderline overpowered one that she currently has.

Not only that, but most of Mira's knowledge comes from worlds that have nothing to do with cultivation. In those worlds, fire means something different than it does in a cultivation world. In those worlds, people aren't able to summon fire out of their fingertips and are only able to utilize it by utilizing things that happen to be flammable or finding some external way to manipulate heat.

In the cultivation world, fire isn't as simple as just oxygen, heat, and fuel. One can gain understanding and comprehension of an element, increasing its effects and usability.

Fire is also actually considered to be an element instead of just a byproduct of one.

The same thing goes for the other elements as well, which is something that Mira finds herself forgetting.

Water, Earth, Fire, Air, and other elements are what make up the world in the cultivation world rather than atoms that contain differing amounts of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

The fundamental laws of these worlds are different which is something that Mira has some trouble getting used to.

It's like if one were to study physics and then all of a sudden get transported to another universe where the physics in that world are completely different.

It's not easy coming from a world where 2+2=4 and then transported to a world where that isn't the case. That's the kind of situation that Mira is in.

This is one of the major problems that Mira has concluded is obstructing her progress, her own mentality.

She needs to separate to be able to somehow separate these previous world's laws from the world that she's currently in. Only then will she be able to move forward in this endeavor. Until then, she'll most likely be stuck unless she finds another way to go about it, which is what Elenei is for.

In conclusion, she needs to fix her mentality and understanding about this world's building blocks and learn more about not only her Physique but Physiques in general.

Even though Mira was dissatisfied with not making any progress, she wasn't upset at all but rather thankful that this happened as knowing this will greatly affect her future.

Knowing what needs to be done, Mira came up with a schedule.

11 hours per day for cultivating.

11 hours per day for analyzing and studying her Physique and its abilities/limitations.

2 hours per day for testing/sparring to confirm her understanding and theories.

Naturally, Maria and Celaine spared no effort during this time to cultivate, especially Celaine. Her goal was to try and reach the Xiantian Stage during this time period, which might be possible due to the density of the Qi here and her abnormally strong foundation and physical body.

Like this, a little over 2 months went by since Elenei had left and she had finally returned.