Maxine was angry as she walked with some difficulty out of the hospital with a nurse right behind her. She knew that Poison Emperor Guan had said that she would be able to walk after a day, but he didn't mention that it would be this hard after two. It felt like her whole body was made of lead. I guess I can't complain too much. He did reduce my recovery time to one tenth of what it should have been. Maxine remembered how bad it had been yesterday. It had been a trial just to walk without falling down. It was like she was an infant learning how to walk for the first time. If it wasn't for her iron stage cultivation, she would have been covered in bruises. Since she had improved so much, the doctors thought it would be alright to release her today.
Maxine had watched the news for the past two days. Several news programs had featured her being rushed to the hospital and many people were blaming General Jones for her becoming injured. The essence cultivators that ran were interviewed and told the public that the intelligence reports that General Jones gave them were terrible, which lead to unnecessary deaths and injuries on their side. However that news was nearly forgotten when the world bore witness to a massive creature that looked nearly one tenth the size of the moon in the night sky, but it was only seen once it started breathing fire.
When Maxine had seen that creature, she immediately thought it was a type of dragon. Although it looked like it was a cross between the western and eastern dragons. It was fighting something extremely small in comparison to itself. Maxine knew that must be Poison Emperor Guan. She didn't remember anything like this happening in the previous timeline as well and realized it was because of her that this thing could get this close. She wondered if it was because Poison Emperor Guan had come to give her that medicine, but dismissed it. He should have been able to intercept that thing well away from Earth, instead of this close. Hellen enlightened her that it could have gotten closer to Earth while Poison Emperor Guan was distracted and he only was able to detect it when it was already close.
When that dragon breathed fire towards Earth, Maxine immediately noticed an orange glow outside of her window and felt horrified. Fortunately the fire breath had been blocked by Poison Emperor Guan as he deployed a barrier. Someone had gotten lucky with a video camera and caught his tiny sillouette infront of the flames. Almost an hour later, the dragon was killed and it's corpse ended up on the moon and the whole thing had been such a spectacular sight that if the temperature hadn't climbed twenty degrees, no one would have believed it. Hellen had told her that the fight would have been over in an instant if it hadn't been taking place so close to Earth. The shockwaves from him releasing such intense essence would have caused worldwide earthquakes.. At the time, Maxine had wondered just how powerful Poison Emperor Guan was in relation to other immortal cultivators.
The very next night the world saw that it wasn't a work of their imagination because the dragon was still on the moon and a scientist estimated that it was almost six hundred miles long. Hellen gave her the exact size of that dragon and what it was called. It was called a Scarlet-Horned Space Dragon and it was 592.3 miles long. From what Hellen had told her, It wasn't even fully grown. Maxine couldn't even imagine how big an adult one would be.
Maxine brought herself back to the present as she walked outside of the hospital. She looked around, but didn't see her mother's car anywhere. Not that she could see anything with all of the reporters trying to talk to her. She had expected this to some degree, but she did not expect this many after that space dragon had appeared. Don't these assholes have anything better to do on a Sunday? Fortunately the hospital had arranged for the nurse to help Maxine get to her mother's car.
On the drive home, Maxine detected four separate spiritual senses scanning her. She immediately extended her own spiritual sense and found the four sources of those spiritual senses. The closest one was a blonde pretty boy, who looked like a model. The next one was a more rugged looking young man with brown hair with a sword over his shoulder that was wrapped in cloth. The last two were actually a pair of twin girls. Both of them had raven black hair and were beautiful. All of those four were more powerful than Maxine by at least three ranks.
"They arrived sooner than I expected," Hellen said through her spiritual sense.
"Who are they?" Maxine asked with her own spiritual sense.
"People from the alliance, I think. They must be here to either investigate or recruit essence cultivators," Hellen said, "As for which group within the alliance that they belong to, I have no idea. Although that young man with the sword looks familiar, but I don't know from where."
"Fantastic," Maxine said sarcastically. She had to resist the urge to ask if it could get any worse, but didn't want to jinx herself. It could always get worse. She had seen the power of that phrase when someone in her group during the other timeline had said it after they got rushed by a large group of bronze stage essence beasts. It had caused a pair of iron stage essence beasts to appear.
"Look at the bright side. The mere fact that they are here, instead of much more powerful members of the Alliance, is a good thing," Hellen said, "It means that they don't realize that you are my daughter."
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"I guess that's the only good thing," Maxine said and knew it was only a matter of time before one of those four came to talk to her about joining their group. Maxine really didn't want that if she could help it. If she joined a large group in the Alliance, the chances of being discovered by Poisn Emperor Guan's enemies would rise sharply and it was quite possible they would take her off world in that case. She didn't want to trust the government, or anyone else for that matter, to protect those that were important to her.
When Maxine got home, Silky was extremely happy to the point that she was literately bouncing up and down with joy. It was adorable. Maxine immediately gave Silky a hug before going to her room and Silky followed her. As soon as Maxine got in her room, she sat down on her bed and checked on her Shadow Wolves. Two days ago when she hadn't been able to move, Maxine had ordered them to start hunting bronze stage and iron stage essence beasts within two hundred miles. She had done this on the off chance that one of those two Tempests Weasels were not the iron stage essence beast responsible for the next essence beast horde.
When Maxine tallied up all of the essence cores that her Shadow Wolves had collected, She came up with a total of 242 bronze and 10 iron stage essence cores and only two of her Shadow Wolves had been destroyed during their hunt. She wasn't suprised that so few had been destroyed since her Shadow Wolves were essentially unkillable, unless their essence core was shattered. As for her ravens, they had joined up with her Shadow Wolves shortly after General Jones' death by jumping from shadow to shadow.
Maxine thought of a way to retreive those essence cores and ordered one of the ravens to come to her house. While it was enroute, Maxine tried to use her essence and immediately recoiled in pain. Although it hurt, it was still less than it was yesterday. She hadn't even cultivated for the past couple days because it had caused her too much pain to do so.
Maxine's raven arrived ten minutes after she had summoned it and she opened the backdoor to let the raven inside. She summoned one of her shadow clones and had it combine with her raven. Just like she had expected, it turned into a harpy version of herself. She wanted to use this version of her shadow clone to retrieve the essence cores that her Shadow Wolves had collected, but since it was still light out and didn't want it to be seen, Maxine ordered her shadow clone back into her shadow.
Maxine wanted to talk to Hellen again about how she was able to kill that Tempest Weasel before. For some reason, she couldn't accept that she was able to kill it just by using all of her essence at once. To her, it felt like her strength had jumped by a rank and the Tempest Weasel's strength had dropped by a rank. It had been a bizzare feeling. Hellen always gave her a vague answer whenever Maxine asked about it. It was frustrating. However It was clear that Hellen didn't want Maxine to ever do a repeat performance of it.
Maxine sat down on her bed and was about to talk to Hellen again when her cellphone made the tone to indicate that she had recieved a text message. She got it out to see that she had recieved a text message from Patrick. The content of the text was a code that she and Patrick had used in the previous timeline. To anyone else, it would look like runic symbols, but to Maxine it was as easy to read as english. Apparently, Patrick had harvested both of the two iron essence cores from the Tempest Weasels and wanted to give them to Maxine since she did all of the work. She had wondered what happened to them. Patrick wanted to give her both of them since she had done almost all of the work. However Maxine thought it might be better to give Patrick alot of bronze essence cores as well.
Maxine called Patrick to setup a place where they could meet up. Maxine suggested that she give them one hundred bronze essence cores and she immediately heard Meagan tell Patrick to agree in the background. She wondered for moment why Meagan was with him and realize that he must have taken Meagan out to eat. After a few moments, Maxine found out that they had a hard time finding any bronze essence beasts for the past couple days. Am I responsible for that? Maxine realized that her Shadow Wolves hunting range would include the areas that Patrick's group could have chosen to hunt for bronze stage essence beasts. She immediately decided to double the number of bronze essence cores that she would give Patrick. However she wasn't going to change the areas that her Shadow Wolves hunted. This method would ensure that no more essence beast hordes would appear anywhere near where she lived. Eventually they decided that they would meet sometime tomorrow. As she ended the call, Maxine noticed that Silky was looking at her from the hallway.
"Mama, a weird man is watching the house," Silky said.
"It's probably just a reporter, Silky," Maxine asked.
"That man doesn't look like a reporter," Silky replied.
"What does he look like then?" Maxine asked.
"He has brown hair and has the cool rock that keeps changing colors," Silky said, "He also has a sword." He came here way faster than I thought. I thought I would have at least another couple days before they would come near my house. I wonder where the other three are.
"Don't worry about him, Silky. If he wanted to do something bad, he would have done it already," Maxine said, "Now let's go watch TV with grandma."
"Alright," Silky said.
As Maxine walked towards the couch to watch TV with Silky, she extended out her spiritual sense and found that same young man with the sword looking at her house from nearly half a mile away. When she found him, he immediately looked at the stone in his hand. It had just turned blue and the young man started smiling.
Maxine asked Hellen, "Hellen are there any stones that change colors when exposed to spiritual sense?"
"Hmm? Yes, there are," Hellen said, "Several as a matter of fact. Although most of them are used to detect any attempts at spying from stronger essence cultivators."
"Do any of them turn blue?" Maxine asked.
"Yes, those are bloodline stones. They are used to locate missing relatives amongst weaker essence cultivators," Hellen responded, "But they don't get used much by the stronger ones since their effective range is less than a mile and it only works for those within two generations of each other. Why?"
"Because that young man from before is holding one about half a mile away and the stone in his hand just turned blue when I scanned him with my spiritual sense," Maxine answered, "Why the hell didn't you tell me that I might have blood relatives looking for me?"