Immortal Ice Empress: Path to Vengeance Chapter 402 New Abilities Part 3

Chapter 402 New Abilities Part 3

The following tail Mira decided to test out was her white tail. Based on the physical characteristics alone, this tail is the weakest. The fur, although tough, can't be used to attack, and its strength is weaker than Mira's other limbs, but Mira's instincts told her that the ability provided by this tail is actually quite useful.
So, without waiting any further, Mira channeled the energy stored in her white tail, and immediately after, a blizzard-like domain began to expand around Mira.
The domain kept growing until it reached around 15 meters in diameter, but that wasn't all. After the domain formed, Mira could instinctively understand what this blizzard domain does and how she could use it.
The blizzard around Mira can block off the enemy's perception, dim her presence, boosts her senses inside the domain, and she can even meld her body in the domain and essentially teleport anywhere inside it on command. Of course, this uses up energy, but it's still an incredible ability.
However, that's not the only thing! This domain actually requires very little energy to keep active. If she were to keep it in its current state, Mira could probably keep it active for over an hour!
Mira then tried melding with the domain and teleporting to find out how much energy that consumes.
Inside the blizzard, Mira's form flickered before it looked like she merged with the surrounding snow and ice, then she immediately appeared on the other side of the domain. However, that one teleport used up 60% of the energy stored in her tails!
That may sound like a lot, but Mira wasn't the least bit disappointed. It's a trump card that can save her life! The blizzard domain is already quite good, and its utility is superior to Mira's gold tail.
Mira wanted to find an enemy to test out this domain on, but she managed to calm herself down as she still has 7 other tails to test out.
The next tail she decided to test out was her silvery-white tail. The physical characteristics of this tail are slightly above her other limbs, but only by about 5% or so. The fur on this tail is also quite coarse, but for good reason!
This tail has two abilities:
1. Mira can channel the energy in this tail to shoot out her hair like a porcupine. However, unlike a porcupine, Mira can control each individual hair should she want to. She can also use the energy contained within the tail to regenerate her fur.
2. She can merge other elements with each individual hair to increase their lethality.
Mira found these abilities to be quite interesting. At first glance, they don't seem all that useful. Mira can easily create a bunch of ice needles that can essentially do the same thing, but there are a few things she can't do.
For one, she can't create ice that's hard enough nor sharp enough with only the size of a single strand of hair. Sure, she can create needles made of ice with a high amount of piercing power, but if the enemy is paying attention, they'll be able to dodge, deflect, or block those without much trouble.
Also, her ice needles are mainly only used as a distraction. However, the hairs on her tail are different! Not only are they tiny and sharp, but as long as her enemy doesn't know she can release her hairs, they can also be deadly!
There's also the fact that, just like a porcupine, if Mira suddenly gets ambushed from behind, she can just shoot out the strands of hair on her tail like a shotgun, catching the enemy off guard! If the enemy isn't too strong or isn't prepared for such an attack, she might even be able to kill them or at least severely injure them with that as well!
Worst of all, little barbs form at the ends of her fur when they shoot out, making them a pain in the ass to remove.
After coming to these conclusions, Mira decided to finally try it out! She walked up to a nearby tree, extended her silvery-white tail, so it's only about a meter away from it, then channeled the energy within the tail!
Without any delay, all the hairs on her tail exploded out and struck the tree!
Mira took a look at the tree and was surprised by what she saw. Her fur actually managed to penetrate the tree and even went all the way through it! Each hole was barely noticeable, and Mira probably wouldn't have noticed it if so many strands of hair didn't go through the tree.
'It seems like I got another trump card. Hehehe~' Mira chuckled in her mind, and a smile also crept up on her face.
She was extremely happy right now, especially seeing how powerful this tail was. Of course, going all the way through a tree isn't the benchmark for how powerful an ability is, but it does prove its potential and lethality.
Normally, strands of hair aren't supposed to be capable of such feats. Forget about going through a tree, they shouldn't even be able to scratch a tree!
Sure, Mira can punch the tree or slice it up with her scythe with little effort, but that's not the point of this ability.
The point of this ability is to catch enemies who are trying to ambush her by surprise or to protect herself in times of danger. It's not supposed to be a killing move! It can be if she got lucky and faced someone with poor defenses or who wasn't ready for such an attack, but Mira would never bank on it actually killing someone.
After partially confirming this tail's base power, Mira moved on to regenerating her fur, infusing the strands of hair with other elements, and controlling each individual strand as well.
Mira channeled the remaining energy in her silvery-white tail, and within a couple of seconds, all the fur that was gone was replaced with new fur! The only problem is this actually took a significant amount of energy! Suppose she wanted to do a full-powered blast like what she just did. In that case, she'll have to wait a bit for more energy to replenish, or she can substitute it with the energy located in her Core, but Mira could already tell that doing such a thing is highly inefficient.
The energy located in her tails is there for a specific purpose: to use their abilities. Although the energy in her tails isn't totally independent of her meridians and Core, and the two can be interchanged if needed, they aren't exactly the same either.
Mira would have to 'process' the energy before transferring it to any of her tails, which not only takes time but is incredibly wasteful. It's not exactly a 1:1 ratio, and Mira would have to spend over twice as much energy just to get the amount that would be naturally recovered in her tails.
This is simply because the energy in her tails contains different properties. For example, the energy in her white tail can only be used to create the blizzard domain. If she wanted to channel her Yin Fire with this energy… its effects would be worthless. She could probably do it, but why would she do that when she can create perfectly fine Yin Fire without her tail's energy?
That being the case, the energy stored in her tails isn't actually that much compared to the Qi contained within her Core. If she wanted to replenish her Core's Qi from empty all the way to full, she'd probably have to use all of the energy stored within her 9 tails to accomplish that.
So, using her tails as extra batteries wouldn't be very effective considering how powerful and useful her tails are.
Nevertheless, Mira stopped thinking about this and moved on to testing out the rest of the effects of her silvery-white tail.
She infused the strands of hair with ice and plucked out a strand of hair to control. Surprisingly, controlling a single strand of hair is quite easy, especially with her improved mental faculties after breaking through.
Mira then continued plucking out more strands of hair until there was nothing left on her tail. Flying around Mira were countless thin strands of hair layered in ice.
Mira found it quite easy to control all of them, almost like it was the most natural thing in the world.
After playing around with them for a few minutes, Mira targeted a nearby tree and sent all the strands of hair to attack it.
Instantly, the strands of hair carved their way through the tree while also filling the holes with ice. The hairs all made their way through the tree, but it wasn't nearly as fast as when she shotgunned them out of her tail.
This gave Mira a pretty good understanding of the tail's purpose and the limits of her ability.
'It seems like it's pretty much a life-saving ability. Each strand of hair, although strong, isn't comparable to an ice needle. At least not when I try and control them. Maybe if I had better control over them and could make them fly faster, then they'd have more attack power, but I doubt they'd be better than any of my normal medium-ranged attacks. Though maybe controlling just a few strands could be quite useful…'
Ideas kept churning in Mira's brain as she grasped the limitations of this ability. However, all these ideas will have to wait until she can find a suitable enemy to test them on. For now, she still has six other tails to test out.