Epsilon Twilight
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70. Secretions
🕑 Added 2024-12-11 12:13:20 +0000 UTCNothing could stop the shiver that traveled down Aloe's spine when she read the description of the newly evolved seed. The seed as such didn't generate the heebie-jeebies that some other seeds may induce, her problem was with the Aloe Veritas description. Perhaps it was her tired mind, but she was imagining already awful things.
"Don't judge too quickly," she told herself. "Let's assess the situation one step at a time. First, the name. Heartgrowth. If it's literal… it may be a bit problematic, which I'm inclined to guess it is. The soubriquet sort of reinforces that idea. Sort of. Also, Synergic Symbiont? Isn't symbiosis the definition of synergy? That's a bit of alliteration there."
Aloe caressed the veritas' parchment as if that gesture would grant her greater insight into the plant.
"The description is also interesting; I've only seen this train of 'belonging to no family' only once before." The cultivator turned her head to face the plant in question, the Blossomflame. "I ignored it at the time, but what does that really mean? Have I created a new species altogether? Do the alignments have to do something with it?"
Both the Heartgrowth and the Blossomflame shared the same alignments, but as much as Aloe pondered about it, such was one of those questions without answers. Alignments were words mostly devoid of meaning, only pointing out the requirements for the organism to evolve.
"Yeah, no idea," she scratched her scalp as no answers came to her.
The rough motion and the usage of recovery made it so that she pulled out some hairs as she alleviated herself. But considering the poor state of her mane, it was most likely that those hairs were already hanging out and she had just noticed them. It wasn't like she had combed her hair recently.
"Now, the meat of the question. 'Mimics organs' and 'compliments the host'. The first sounds creepy, the second too, but a bit less. Based on my knowledge of previous veritas' descriptions, I'd say the former statement is visual, whilst the latter is a functional description. So… compliments the body? I can guess how I will need to test it, but I'm not looking forward to it. Let's grow this bad girl."
As she had finally reached her much-awaited milestone, Aloe no longer needed to safely keep her reserves, meaning that she could use as much vitality as she wanted to grow the Heartgrowth.
Firstly, she infused the seed with shade acclimation as she was ninety-nine percent sure it wasn't a mushroom, so it would need that external infusion to grow down here.
"Now that I think about it, wouldn't my many undergrowths recreate the effect of sunlight on my crops?" Aloe scratched her nose as she planted the infused seed. The cost of infusion had been negligible for her current self, even if it had been in the early two digits. "I… don't frankly care though? I mean, I could test it, but I'm in no rush, and accelerated growth will be a non-factor if I intend to use infused blood."
She patted the soil on top of the Heartgrowth seed and let the matter rest, it was time to force this seed to grow.
"Hmm, I want to test how fast I can grow a seed. Considering I have like fifteen times as much vitality as when I used to perform blood infusions, what if I use fifteen mansworth in this one? A bit of stress testing, we could say." She talked to no one but herself.
As no one could stop her, she did as promised. Aloe switched to potency with an afterthought and – very carefully – bit her finger. Her strength was now one of legends, if she wasn't careful, she could have bitten her finger off without noticing.
Once a drop of blood poured from the wound, Aloe pushed her vitality into it, almost pouring enough vitality to evolve a Slowtide into it.
Then as she committed to letting the blood drop, everything went wrong.
Her whole body went into a seizure. Her vision blurred, her ears rang, her extremities spasmed, and every hole of her body discharged as she was pushing vitality out of them.
She puked and her vision faded to black.
When she regained consciousness a few seconds later – she had instinctively donned toughness – she found herself on the ground. The infused blood drop had been soaked by the ground and the Heartgrowth was growing in real-time before her eyes at a speed of centimeters per second, but she couldn't care less about that right now.
"What has just happened?" She asked the heavens with a hint of fear.
They failed to answer her.
The same couldn't be said for the Blossomflames which quickly assisted her with their tendrils of fire. Aloe herself didn't feel the pain, but she was in shock and donning toughness, her whole being was numb at the moment.
As she felt warmth in her cheeks, she caressed them, only to find wetness. They weren't tears, but blood. The same held true for her ears.
"Ah, hahaha…" She chuckled hysterically but collectedly. "It would seem every orifice has pushed something out, not only the wound in my finger."
And with that, she didn't mean just blood. She quickly became aware of the puddle of urine forming underneath her, but as she moved, she noticed the roughness of her movements. She had also soiled herself.
It would have been easy to scream, but Aloe simply took a deep breath and reassessed the situation.
"I pushed too much vitality out of the sudden," Aloe guessed. "It was my body that panicked, not myself. This is like that time when I amputated my finger, and even if it was a flesh wound, my body reacted poorly."
Aloe went over the events leading up to her collapse back on her mind, and she noticed something with her vitality.
"Blood infusions use up current vitality, but also maximum vitality. By having used this much current vitality, I've also spent a great deal of maximum vitality. The question is how much."
The cultivator grabbed a black seed from one of her satchels and evolved it. The single mansworth consumed gave her a rough idea of her current reserves.
"Oh heavens," she led a hand to her mouth as she realized the severity of the situation. "I'VE JUST SPENT A WHOLE MANSWORTH ON A BLOOD INFUSION?"
She screamed so hard that her lungs and throat hurt even through toughness, so much so that a Blossomflame had to intervene to heal her. Aloe let out a few pants and took in a few puffs of air before talking again.
"My body… doesn't seem to like having a whole mansworth being suddenly removed from it. Neither do I." She mused after a while. "And as much as I want to investigate the effects of this colossal blood infusion, I… really need to clean myself up."
Never before had Aloe felt this dirty. It would appear that in the definition of 'every orifice' skin also was included. At least it wasn't blood, just sweat, but between copious amounts of sweat, blood, vomit, urine, and excrement, Aloe felt like puking a second time. Although she doubted any vomit would come out now, most likely only bile remained in her system.
If it weren't for toughness, she would have collapsed for a second time.
"Actually, I may be collapsing constantly, but my toughness is so potent now that… I may wake up before I notice." She recalled how she had fallen unconscious before and practically recovered consciousness instantly as the defense stance protected against loss of consciousness effects.
And that was when her vitality was only around six mansworth.
Even factoring in the non-linear and non-proportional effects of vitality, Aloe still was reinforced by the toughness internal infusion by many degrees.
The petite woman quickly undressed and dived in the river, such was her state of uncleanness that she couldn't even bring herself to fear the Tehen River. Her experiences had been traumatic, but trauma was but spare change for her now, for better or worse.
The cold water chilled her to the core, but she didn't gasp even as everything but her head was submerged in the torrent. Even before her massive increase in vitality, toughness already protected her against most temperature-based effects, and now that was amplified.
It was hard fighting against the current of the river as she struggled with her grip on the edge of the river walls, but she managed to hold on. This was but a slightly extreme cold shower for her. Even if she was boasting toughness, strength didn't falter her. As much as shifting stances weakened her other physical attributes, Aloe had noticed that after hitting the diminishing returns of vitality, her non-boosted attributes were not as weakened as before.
She was almost at her base level strength with toughness on.
Now, that may even seem problematic with the girl that fell into this chasm. But such a woman existed no more. She had trained her body with the zealousness of a weakened and bored mind. Fighting the strong current of a river was hard, but not impossible by any means.
Aloe took a deep breath and finally submerged her whole body into the frigid waters to remove all the nasty secretions that had come out from her head.
When Aloe reemerged, she was a new woman. Her long black hair stuck to her dark skin, but there was no rigidness in her wet self, her eyes glowed emerald. Refreshed, attentive, and pristine. Uncleanness was trivial, she had better things to focus on.
Comments
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
The3rd
Infinite sweets and goodness are here 🍨🍦🍪💖🍫🍬🍭🍮🍯🍰🍩🎂♾️
