Epsilon Twilight
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2. Joy
🕑 Added 2025-01-01 13:08:01 +0000 UTCThe sheer greenness of the scenery stunned Aloe. The soil was overflowing with grass and a thick undergrowth, the skies were partially covered with ample canopies of foliage, filtering through lovely rays of gold.
"Ah~" Aloe moaned as she basked herself in the soft breeze and sunlight. "I don't know what's better: the sight or the light. Radiating Undergrowth light cannot compare to the real deal. It lacks… life; unlike the sun which is truly the provider of all life."
Aloe extended her arms, letting her thick wooden skin – or rather bark – enjoy the soothing light of the heavens. Her hair almost rose up to seek more sunlight, as if it were a sunflower.
Never before had she felt such joy from the presence of sunlight, not even when she left the chasm for the first time. Now even her body took joy in it, not just her mind.
The vegetable woman almost thought to stay there, soaking in the light, forever. It would have been so easy to take roots and just remain there for all eternity…
But alas, her respite was brought short by the sounds of the forest. Or more accurately, the sounds in the forest. Even if this was her first time in a forest – and she still was confused about the fact why there was even a forest here – Aloe was mostly sure that screams weren't native to a forest.
It didn't matter that she was currently donning the recovery internal infusion, her body was overflowing with so much vitality that her senses were increased by many degrees even if she was wielding an internal infusion that should have weakened them.
For the first time in her life, Aloe had complete confidence in her vitality reserves. It had been so long that she forgot how many mansworth she was boasting now, the count had been lost ages ago. She was ready for whatever the world may throw at her.
But for now, she chased that sound.
She switched from recovery to the acuity internal infusion. The increased senses of the stance were almost too overwhelming, but even in her madness, Aloe hadn't forgotten to train her Nurture. Whilst not trivial, it was easy for her to filter out the sounds of the forest for those she wanted to hear.
Having senses so acute was mostly a disadvantage as they overwhelmed the brain. Hearing wasn't only the problem, but also touch, smell, taste, sight, balance, proprioception, temperature… the human body had too many senses to count, and now they all were boosted.
At some point, training the sense stance had gone from a physical exercise to boost them to a mental exercise to withstand them.
What surprised Aloe more was her vitality sense. Even before confining herself to a hole underground, she had been able to sense the vitality of living beings at a distance, but that was mostly limited to entities with a lot of vitality like sultanzade. Now, though, she was able to detect every individual blade of grass and leaf of a tree in her surroundings.
And with quite the range too.
Still, her ears and eyes could register things from further away than her mystical and intangible perception of vitality.
Aloe broke into a sprint.
Reality blurred as she leaped through the forest. Her physical capabilities, each and every single one of them, were the stuff of legends even when wielding a stance as innocuous as the sense stance.
With the help of her vitality sense, she was able to ebb and flow through woods as if it were second nature for her. She could feel the vitality of every plant in her very core no matter the distance, allowing her to dodge them as if she were navigating a crowd in a bazaar.
It was then that she saw them.
The child and the man.
She switched to subterfuge, but even with her almighty vitality, the internal infusion couldn't make her invisible, just hard to detect. And unfortunately, she had already been detected by the man.
"Who goes there?" The man asked with a blade in hand. Once upon a time, Aloe would have been intimidated by that, but now she didn't even fear the obliteration of the Radiating Undergrowth.
Aloe switched to toughness – her favorite internal infusion – as soon as she perceived that the man had more than a mansworth to his name. A cultivator, she thought. The vitality the man possessed was pathetic compared to her, but still quite greater than the child, so she played it safe.
Knowing better than to fake ignorance, Aloe stepped out from the foliage unto the clearing where the man and the child were.
"Oh, a dryad," he relaxed. "I wasn't aware this was part of your realm. Surely you do not care about my passage, do you?"
The cultivator woman would have inquired about the 'dryad' thing the man was talking about if it wasn't because her eyes were glued to the child. She had been unable to see the child before, only knowing it was a youngling from the small ringing vitality signal, but as her eyes informed her that she was seeing a boy with a broken leg, her sap started to boil.
It didn't even take a person with half a wit to see what the man had intended to do with that sword before she had appeared.
"Fret not, I am already going away," the man raised his hands with his weapon still on them. "You can do whatever you please with the beast boy. Uncivilized bunch, you see."
If the man had intended to portray innocence, he had utterly failed.
"A-are you a dryad?" He professed confusion. "You don't look quite like the others I've seen. Never before with a crown. That's for sure."
Crown? From all the words the man uttered, that one brought Aloe back to her senses. Ah, the veritas. She realized what he was talking about after feeling her body with her enhanced proprioception. It was true that the Aloe Veritas she had planted on her head gave her a regal touch.
Nonetheless, Aloe was not amused by what she was seeing.
Without even giving the man the chance to blink, the vegetable woman rushed before him with the haste internal infusion. There had been a dozen meters between the two, but at this level, her speed stance was faster than thought.
Even her own.
Merits to the man, he reacted only after two blinks, but by then Aloe had already grabbed him by the head, raising him up with his feet hanging a bit less than half a meter from the ground, and she exhaled on his face.
From her mouth, thousands of Dream Spore spores erupted, completely covering the male cultivator's face in an instant.
A man with his pitiful vitality and not even wielding the defense stance was useless against the soporific might of the nince-damned orange spores. In the beginning, those had been a source of many headaches and much pain for Aloe, but after repeated travels to the third hell – the world of ideas – she was able to understand them more.
How to wield them.
This was her first time doing so with another person, but Aloe was able to invade and spectate the man's dreams whilst still preserving her consciousness. She used glamour to drive the tracks of the dream a bit, though that was more of an instinct than a proven fact.
And what she saw made her see red.
Never before had Aloe seen such awfulness before, and she had seen a lot of stuff in her life.
What she saw also confused her, making her think this was more of a dream than a simulacrum. Selen a city? Wealth in the hundreds of thousands of drupnars? Slavery? Aaliyah is just giving me more and more reasons to hate her. Aloe couldn't feel rage as she was being treated as a slave in a dream. No, even worse, a potted plant. An item.
Whilst she didn't feel overpowering rage at that, it still made her sap boil. But soon she reached a breaking point as the man took pleasure in abusing a woman physically and sexually in the dream. Precisely because he didn't know he was in a dream it made it so utterly despicable.
"You truly are the worst garbage of humanity," Aloe said as she put more strength on her grip.
The increase of force made the man snap out of his dream, but Aloe couldn't care any less. She just wanted to destroy stuff. It's true that she could have changed her internal infusion to potency at any point, but she didn't want to give the man such mercy.
No.
She wanted him to suffer.
No matter how much he pathetically begged, Aloe didn't stop. As a matter of fact, those excuses only had the opposite effect and had made her put more strength. From the feedback on her fingers, Aloe noticed the cultivator switched to the defense stance to try to hold longer. Emphasis on try.
Still, a feeble being like him couldn't handle her. With a bit more pressure, his cranium cracked and soon her fingers found themselves dragged on grey matter. The body fell to the ground as her fingers had no longer a place to grip.
Her fingers greedily watered on the man's cerebral remains, finding sustenance in the red blood.
She should have felt bad for doing such a thing, extinguishing the life of a person no matter if they were a monster or not, but that type of guilt had long perished. Aloe didn't feel anything from that kill.
Honestly, that was a lie.
She felt joy. Joy in the fact that she had removed garbage from the face of Khaffat.
Now it was the turn of the child.
Comments
Epsilon Twilight
A few things have happened, yes
The3rd
Infinite sweets and goodness are here 🍨🍦🍪💖🍫🍬🍭🍮🍯🍰🍩🎂♾️
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter! Can't wait to see how long it has been. Also cultivation pills? And it appears that males are now more in power..
