Maxine was wondering why Silky had undergone that metamorphosis so soon. The earliest cases of beastkin appearing in her past life were pets that had become essence beasts and the first one to appear wouldn''t be around for another year. Even then that only took on a partial human form. It was anomalous that Silky had become an arachne. Maxine didn''t like anomalies. Maxine had been thinking about ot the whole way home. It wasn''t until after she gotten home and eaten dinner that Maxine had come to a realization. Feeding Silky bronze essence cores could have accelerated her change into an arachne. Afterall someone''s dog or cat wouldn''t get such a luxury.


    Now that Maxine had solved that mystery, she went to her room to cultivate. However she wasn''t going to increasing her cultivation. She was going to stabilize the vortex within her core. It had become unstable since she had jumped from the copper stage to the iron stage. Since it had been like that, it had caused her pain whenever she tried to cultivate or repair her essence core. If she didn''t correct the instability of her core and continued to increase her cultivation, eventuallythe vortex within her core would unravel itself and cause tremendous strain on her essence core. That would cause the preassure within her core to build rapidly until it exploded and probably tear her in half in the process.


    Maxine pulled out a single bronze essence core to assist her in stabilizing her essence core. She didn''t need to use it to do that, but itwas easier as well as faster when she did.


    Maxine closed her eyes and entered a cultivation state.The essence from the essence core in her hands flowed towards her core andassisted her in shiftingthe essence even out the vortex within her essence core. It was a slow and delicate process. Since she had done this every night since her battle with the Terror Bear, she wasn''t that far off from fully stabilizing her core as far as she could tell. She only had to do this a few more nights before she would be able to cultivate normally. However she didn''t want to go through this problem again and made a plan not to boost hercultivation rate with essence cores for at least six months. It would give her plenty of time to find and fix any other problems with her body or her essence core. She had known it had been risky when she boosted her cultivation in the first place like that and wanted to be prepared for any other unknown side-effects. She was only grateful that the problems she encountered thus far had been easy to solve.


    After the energy within the bronze essence core had been exhuasted, Maxine opened her eyes and looked at the vaporizing essence core in her hands. That happened to every essence core once it''s essence had been depleted. She simply dropped it and it disintegrated completely with afaint poof sound.


    Maxine went to her closet and picked up the unfinished Steel Silk Vest that she had been working on for Emily. She had made it so that it would stretch some to accomodate any future growth. However it wouldn''t fit on someone significantly larger than her. Maxine walked over to her backpack and pulled out the spool of Silky''s silk. She manifested dozens of shadow tendrils to finish up the vest. She used a method of similar to knitting to tie in the fresh silk and completed the vest after almost an hour of work.


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    Maxine smiled at the finished Steel Silk Vest. Unfortunately Maxine regretted that this vest was all that she could make. She would need essence-infused ores to make herself some decent weapons and those were often hidden deep underground or in a cave occupied by a powerful essence beast. She recalled a few such ores had been present in that storage room that she had raided at the base, but their quantity, not to mention quality, had been insufficient for her purposes. She also doubted that General McKenzy would part with such materials in any case. However the strange essence beast, that she had called the Shadow Cat, had a cave lair. However because it was a copper stage essence beast, there was a very small chance that it would actually havesome essence infused ores. Still any chance for a decent blade was better than nothing. She decided to check it out as soon as she finished checking on Silky tomorrow.


    Maxine let out a sigh and she looked at the time. It wasn''t evennine o''clock. She rarely had any free time to play with her shadow essence and decided to do it now. She knew that she could make tendrils out of shadows, but wondered what else she could make. Maxine used her shadow essence to create a miniature wolf. It was only a few inches long. She had it run around her room and come back. It didn''t even have to remain in contact with any shadows to continue existing. However it didn''t drain her essence when it was in contact with a shadow. She found this little discovery interesting and noted it in her head. Maxine banished her little wolf back into the shadows.


    Maxine got an interesting idea after thinking about how she made her little wolf and smiled at it. She used her shadow essence to create a double of herself. To make it perfect down to every single cell would drain her essence far too muchso she only worried about the external shell. She made it look like her down the small impefections of her skin. As a final touch, she made it give off the same essence fluctuations as she did. Unfortunately it had roughly one tenth her strength. The biggest draw back of it was that she couldn''t control more than one of these things at a time in combat.She could use it as a distraction in the middle of a fight to perform a sneak attack or as a stand in if she became badly injured again. She feltsilly that she couldn''t think of any name for it other thanShadow Clone.


    Maxine dissolved it and recreated hershadow clone numerous times to see how quickly she could make it. She kept doing this until she ran almost out of strength. She had wanted to be able to create one in an instant, but the best that she do was form it in under a tenth of a second. For normal people that was an instant, but to an iron stage essence cultivator or beast that was far too slow. It would be obvious that it was fake. She needed it to be able to form it in almost an instant for her to be useable in combat. She would need alot more practice to make it work.


    Maxine was exhausted and turned off the lights before laying in her bed. She didn''t really need that much sleep since she became an iron stage essence cultivator, but she had formed a habit of getting a certain ammount of sleep every day. She didn''t want to change it as long as it wasn''t needed. She closed her eyes and a strange thought popped in her head.Why hasn''t the military created any countermeasures for essence beasts and cultivators yet? She considered that it may be possible that they already had some in the works, but were not combat ready. She intended tocheck into it at another date and promptly fell asleep.