Remi’s excited noises caused Rae to look up from preparing her bath.
Everything was perfectly fermented, brewed and balanced. Ready for a good soak, especially now that her space was flooded with Immortal Energy purified by Karl’s new matrix.
The library was sure to get her excited, not a big deal, so Rae returned to her work.
What she needed now was the perfect base for her scrub brush. The bath itself was just right, but her old scrub brush wasn’t going to be tough enough to get the stuck bits of her old chitin off.
There had to be just the right thing in here somewhere.
Then, she found it. There was a jaw bone from a Mythic Rank Giant, with all its teeth intact. A little chopping, shaping and binding, and she had the perfect scrub brush that would slip onto the end of one of her legs for those hard to reach places.
Rae settled into her bath, and began flooding her space with power, drawing it from the other spaces and from Karl, so that the energy density of her space was nearly stifling.
That was what she needed to keep the energy levels of the bath up while she absorbed all the vitality out of it.
As she advanced, the amount of mana that was needed to extract the vitality was growing, as the blood itself resisted being stripped of its vitality. But her space was the perfect environment for it.
The warmth made every cell in her body tingle as she merged the Immortal essence with her own power.
A vision came unbidden to her mind, the natural way of advancement, which any other Bloodbath Spider would have used.
Instead of creating a beautifully balanced bath like this, they would find a much larger monster, like a Giant or Drake, and kill it in a way that minimized blood loss. Then, they would cut open the abdomen and climb inside to absorb the vital essence directly.
Sometimes, one would not be enough. Usually because they had chosen a target who was either too young, or too near the end of its lifespan, and they would have to hunt another while stuck in a soft bodied half evolved state.
That was a common source of death, or failed evolution, for her species.
But she had so many resources here that there was no need for such primitive tactics. Going for the bath within moments of death was still the best way, but her space stopped the vital essence of the blood from escaping, so she could store it for later use without it becoming ineffective.
That was an advantage others lacked.
Rae could feel her goddess’ pleasure with her tactic, and the hints of dark divinity that seeped into her bath when the Spider Goddess was watching.
That made her bath go even more quickly, and Rae’s body was beginning to shed its old outer layer as she regrew a new immortal rank body underneath it. She was getting larger as well, possibly a side effect of repeatedly using Giant blood in her baths.
Not to the point that she was ridiculous sized, but enough that she was definitely going to have to shrink herself or transform to hunt humans indoors.
This time, the internal changes to her body were much more extreme than the ones to the exterior. She had already optimized her spider form through every evolution before Immortality, it didn’t need much change, even if it was growing larger.


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