When Maxine heard the chime of an incoming text from her phone, Maxine was forcing herself to eat dinner with Silky as she still hadn't gotten over killing those bandits just yet and probably wouldn't for a couple days. That text had been the third one she had gotten today. However because she had been visiting her mother at the hospital, she didn't bother reading them and had almost forgotten about it.
Maxine quickly pulled out her phone to look at the first text. Patrick had sent it. When she saw the words 'want to hang out' as the subject, Maxine was excited for all of two seconds until she read the contents of it. It stated that he and everyone else wanted to hang out with her next week and wanted to know when she was available. Why would he be interested in me? I have the face of the person that tortured and killed him for fuck's sake. She felt alittle depressed as she read the other two texts. They were written differently than the first one, but she felt that he was asking about the bow using hanging out as a pretext. Clearly he was impatient, but it made sense. Patrick had never needed to make his own equipment before and didn't know how long it might take.
Maxine looked over the materials she had. There was enough to make a bow for Meagan. However Maxine had never made anything like a bow before, so she didn't know if she could make it without failing at least once. That meant she would have to construct it slowly to avoid making any errors. After thinking about how long it would take her to make the bow under those conditions, Maxine sent Patrick a text telling him that she would be free on thursday next week and made it clear that this date wasn't a sure thing. She used asking her mom as an excuse, but hopefully Patrick would get the message that she might now be able to make the bow. Unfortunately she did have to still had to tell her mother about hanging out with Patrick and company. Otherwise she might worry if Maxine didn't visit her on thursday.
Before Maxine could work on the bow, she had a few things she needed to do. First had to check on Silky's reading level. Even though Silky had just started learning, she had already learned all of the sounds that each letter makes just yesterday and was now reading children's books at the first grade level. Maxine wished that she could learn something as complex as reading that quickly. Silky's capacity to learn was indeed terrifyingly high.
Next Maxine needed to find a means to scout out the area in the shadow world. For that, she decided to create a batch of ravens for that purpose. It didn't take her long to make twenty of them using copper essence cores, but have much of them left. She had given Emily more than half of the ones that she had, so that Emily could cultivate faster. It didn't matter since Maxine wasn't keen on making too many of those ravens anyways. Maxine sent them into her shadow and ordered them all to map the surrounding area of the cave and village as well as count the number of bronze stage essence beast or higher. She dedicated one of her ravens as a sentinel to alert her if the village was attacked as well. She figured since she had protected that place once that she was now responsible for it.
There was one more thing Maxine wanted to do before she worked on the bow. It was to take a look at what was inside of the dimensional pouch that she had gained earlier. Maxine pulled out the dimensional pouch from her shadow. She didn't dare carry it around with her earlier. It would paint a target on her back if anyone saw her using it. Using her spiritual sense, she searched the interior of the dimensional pouch and found alot of food and water. She decided it would be better to drop those goods off at that village that she saved. She had no idea if any of it was even edible for humans and didn't want to take the risk of poisoning herself. There was enough of it in it to fill up a her room, but most of food was field rations like jerky. However there was one item in the pouch that wasn't either food or water. It looked like a crude book. She wished she could read the characters written on it, but for all she knew it was the bandit leader's diary. Fortunately the dimensional pouch still had enough space left for her blades and the essence cores that she had left in the cave. She immediately retrieved those items and put them into the dimensional pouch. She quickly cancelled all the orders she gave the Shadow Wolves, except for the one for her shadow wolves to flee if they were to detect the approach of a powerful being.
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With that out of the way, Maxine could finally focus on making Meagan a bow. However, she had no idea where to even start. She knew what it was supposed to look like in the end, but had no idea how a collection of bronze ranked bones were supposed to look like one solid piece. Maybe, I could use the same method that I did when I made my Twilight Iron Blades. It should be the same in theory. Maxine injected her essence into the smallest bone that she had and tried to manipulate the trace strands of essence within it. Please work. The bone changed shape with great difficulty, but she didn't dare put any more of her essence into it. Huh? Why is this so much harder to manipulate than the twilight iron? Could it be because it was of a similar attribute to my own? It would certainly make sense if that was the case. I better be careful. These bones are not anywhere near as durable as that twilight iron is.. Maxine carefully used that same trick as she did with the twilight iron to try and fuse two of the bones together. Although the two bones were softer while her essence was being injected into them, the bones still took quite some time to merge together. She kept adding onto the mass of bone one piece at a time. When all of the bones were together, she knew made them take the shape of a bow, but it was over 6 feet long. She stopped there for now as she was low on essence. Removing the impurities from this bone bow and compressing it to make it stronger would take a minmum of three days if she didn't want to destroy it by accident. In the end it shouldn't be longer than three feet. Maxine put the bow into the dimensional pouch before placing it in her night stand. Unless someone knew what it was, they wouldn't bother stealing something so ordinary looking. However just in case, she placed a tracking type spiritual mark on it. She knew she had to make the bow string but couldn't make it until she finished working on the body of the bow.
It was nearly eight at night when she checked the time. It was nearly time for her to put Silky to bed. Maxine walked out of her room and found Silky resting in the middle of the living room reading a book. It was one Maxine read when she was small. She hated to interrupt Silky, but it was time for the little arachne to go to bed. It was fortunate Silky had finished the book before Maxine could reach her and Maxine put her to sleep on a blow up mattress. She didn't like to make Silky sleep in that kind of bedding, but there wasn't any spare beds other than her mother's bed. Maxine didn't want to give Silky a bed only to have her sleep on a blow up mattress as soon as her mother gets out of the hospital. Still Silky needed her own bed. It was yet another thing that Maxine needed to talk to her mother about.
Before Maxine went to bed, she checked on how much her ravens had explored. They were rather efficient as they had already explored the forest and found a grassy plain. They had also marked every bronze stage essence beasts and a few in the iron stage within one hundred miles of the cave. There were a couple other villages as well, but half of them looked like they had recieved some harsh treatment from bandits as their populations were decimated. A quick review of the explored area revealed a bandit stronghold, but it was almost ninty miles away. It had at least two hundred bandits and one of them was a recently risen iron stage essence cultivator. It would be difficult for her both physically and mentally, but she needed to eliminate them later to ensure the safety of the villagers since it was very likely the bandits she slaughtered earlier came from that place.
Maxine released a sigh as she turned off the lights around the house and went to bed herself. She had alot of things to do before she met up with Patrick next week. However tomorrow she would need to make twenty nine Shadow Wolves and one shadow clone using the bronze essence cores in preparation for demolishing that bandit stronghold. The shadow clone was going to be used to maintain the portal, so that she wouldn't have to worry about getting back. Maxine let out a sigh as she got in her bed and started to cultivate.