Epsilon Twilight
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74. Symbiosis
🕑 Added 2024-12-20 11:34:19 +0000 UTCIf she let her mind wander, time truly was a construct devoid of innate value. Before she became aware of the passage of time, Aloe was already evolving Heartgrowths. Even if she didn't even need half of her reserves to evolve the living stones, she still had to have maximum reserves of one hundred and fifteen mansworth to avoid any exhaustion and damage from the evolution.
Or minimize it.
With her combined natural vitality regeneration and the recovery internal infusion, she could now evolve a Heartgrowth without going lower than seventy mansworth, but she was still using up that vitality.
And one hundred mansworth were nothing to scoff at.
Even though she was already at the point of being able to evolve three per day, she was utterly spent by the end of it. Sometimes she skipped her training sessions out of pure exhaustion. She was playing on a different magnitude now, no longer she was working with two digits, but three. And a person with vitality reserves on the two digits was already outrageous, let alone one on the three digits.
The more time passed by, the more Aloe was convicted of the unnatural nature of vitality. Or at least, the accumulation of that much vitality clumped up together.
It defied all laws of nature and everything that was sacred.
Though not much had been sacred for Aloe since the beginning, and now… even less. She had had any holiness inside of her beaten out of her.
Multiple times.
And those acts of repeated exhaustion had awakened something she had ignored for a long time now. To get to the point of being able to evolve Heartgrowths on a daily basis, Aloe had to first evolve Slowtides. So many Slowtides… From twenty-three mansworth to one hundred and fifteen, she had constantly evolved that slime. And unlike other evolutions, she had to destroy them. A process that was far from clean.
Destroying the newly evolved Slowtides required a Radiating Undergrowth to obliterate them out of existence. And even with toughness on, that repeated damage left sequelae behind.
More than once, Aloe found her hand trembling out of nowhere.
She had exposed her hand to a lot of radiation, and it would seem that toughness wasn't as almighty as she always made it appear to be. Especially over such prologued amounts of time.
The trembling only got worse with time. It didn't matter that she was no longer evolving Slowtides and burning them alongside her, the damage was done and Blossomflames ignored it.
There had been some experiments where she tried to order the Blossomflames to heal her, she had also tried different infusions to try to boost their healing capabilities – bountiful harvest did seem to make flames more plentiful – but it all ended being a fruitless endeavor.
Whatever damage she had suffered couldn't be healed.
It was a lesser damage, she wasn't in pain by any means, only an occasional tremble on her left hand. But it affected her mind. The fact that she was so incapable of healing her condition when she had a physical condition far superior to any other human being corroded her psyche.
There had to be something that could be done.
Those exact thoughts were a poison that spread through her mind, not dissimilar to the all-encompassing growth of the Slowtide.
Why could she sustain her body for hours without breathing, why could she jump tens of meters in the air, why could she see in pitch black darkness, why could she twist her head three-hundred and sixty degrees, why could she move faster than thought, why, why, why she could do all those feats of strength but stop her hand from trembling?
It was maddening. Utterly deranging.
Stop. She needed it to stop.
But without answers or other methods, humans were led to extreme measures.
By now her garden of Heartgrowths was a sight to behold. So many pieces of fake meat growing from the soil in a macabre yet endearing sight. It disgusted her to realize that all these organs were human ones after a scrotum and a penis grew – separately from each other – and she noticed that they couldn't be from animals.
She should be repulsed from having a cut cock and a ball sack on her camp, but when they were deprived of a full body, it was hard to feel disgusted. It awoke some sort of… clinical curiosity on her.
After those discoveries, she quickly recognized some other organs that she had failed to tag as they were too fleshy and normally kept inside of the body. One tube, not exactly cylindrical but close to it, she finally classified as a vagina. She had only seen them from the outside, but after juggling her memory and recalling some anatomical treaties, it became clear that the tube was the whole vagina rather than the nether lips people commonly saw.
Such was the problem with the Heartgrowths, she wasn't used to seeing organs outside of the body. Some were obvious because they would be eaten if they were from animals rather than plants, or because they would be visible from the outside like tongues, eyes, and… fingers?
"The Aloe Veritas has a definition of organ quite different from scholars, I don't believe that fingers are – or could be classified as – organs." Truth be told, Aloe didn't know the exact definition of 'organ', but she was ninety-nine percent sure that a finger couldn't be classified as an organ.
From time to time, she would see Heartgrowths like those. Individual fingers, but never a full hand. Some teeth, but never a full mouth. For the latter, those normally grew on a surface similar to a jaw in fleshiness, but the shape was completely different.
As organs piled up, a sinister idea slowly built up in the back of Aloe's mind. Though in truth, that thought had been long seeded by the Aloe Veritas when she first read the Heartgrowth description. It was hard not to have such ideas when the description so flamboyantly flaunted words like symbiont and phrases like 'compliments the body of the host'.
Caution and paranoia were core values of Aloe, but so were stress and impatience.
A schism of clashing ideals was the twisting labyrinth that was Aloe's mindscape.
With a knife at hand and a lack of second thoughts, Aloe pressed the metal down and cut her finger.
This was, unfortunately, not her first attempt at amputation, so she knew how to deal with it. Before her brain could register the separation between her digit and her body, Aloe switched to toughness to dull the pain. By now her switching speed was so elevated that it wasn't difficult, and because her defense stance was also so augmented, she barely felt the pain past the initial jolt.
She cared not for her bleeding wound, instead she calmly approached the nearest Heartgrowth to her. She would have loved to perform this experiment with her pinkie, but alas, that wasn't the finger she wanted to remove just yet.
"Halt!" She commanded the Blossomflames already coming to assist her. "Only heal me when I say so."
If the magical fires closed her wound, this could get difficult, so for now, she had to do without healing.
Without removing the finger Heartgrowth from the soil as she couldn't afford to 'kill' it, Aloe pressed her stub into it. Her blood poured into its green surface, and she focused on the thrumming pulse of the Heartgrowth, its inner flow of vitality.
She tapped into it. Wielded it. Connected it.
"Let's hope this works," Aloe half-groaned, half-panted. "Heal me!"
With her command, fires sprouted forward. At first, the blazing tendrils of the Blossomflame had difficulties understanding the wound – if that was even possible – but soon they recognized the Heartgrowth as her digit and started caressing her with healing fire.
"Mmm," the cultivator bit her lip as the itches assaulted her. Toughness may make her numb to pain, but not the itching induced by rapidly healing a wound in seconds when it should take months if not years.
But the Blossomflames weren't the only ones working. As if she were a surgeon tying together tens of blood vessels, Aloe tried to connect both of the flows of vitality – the Heartgrowth's and her one – into one. The reserves of single Heartgrowth were pitiful, so it wasn't difficult as such, but complex. This was the first time she had done something of this style and caliber.
She knew the job was done when the Blossomflames stopped caressing her with their fires. Unceremoniously, Aloe plucked the Heartgrowth from the soil, and she was pleasantly surprised to find that it didn't die out.
"A good first step, but it's time for the last and most important one," she whispered in the faintest of tones.
Aloe took a deep breath, so deep that if she switched to recovery she would not have needed to breathe for a whole day, and finally ordered her body the most dreadful of commands.
To move her finger.
Her hand spasmed for a moment, a gesture that filled her with trepidation, but her fears were completely dispelled as her finger wiggled up and down as she wanted.
Then something happened.
The Heartgrowth finger that used to be a lime-green color suddenly started shifting towards a darker one, until it gained a blackish one alongside the texture of bark, and finally, it slightly changed in size to adapt to her hand.
"So this is what complimenting the body of the host meant, huh," Aloe mused with a smile on her face.
A smile so twisted and abhorrent that it had no place on a human being.
"Wonderous, truly and utterly wonderous!" She placed her other hand on her cheek and observed her new wiggling finger. The image filled her with indescribable ecstasy.
This was the beginning of a downward spiral born out of the miracles of perfect symbiosis.
Comments
The3rd
Infinite sweets and goodness are here 🍨🍦🍪💖🍫🍬🍭🍮🍯🍰🍩🎂♾️
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
