Epsilon Twilight
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68. Mastery
🕑 Added 2024-12-07 13:24:50 +0000 UTCMastery over her dreams was an achievement Aloe had never expected to strive for, nor obtain for that matter.
The Dream Spores allowed her to maintain a greater lucidity and memory of her dreams as they were connected to the world of ideas. The cultivator had no idea why that happened – pun not intended – but the assassin that had such answers was nowhere in sight to ask him.
"Nince-damned Umar," Aloe found herself muttering those same words each time she was unable to find the assassin's ghost in one of her expeditions.
She had a lot of questions about the assassin's vital arts, and the only person who would answer was already dead. And even when she had found a way to speak with the dead, the man had just simply disappeared.
"He did say that he wasn't that far from dying himself," she muttered under her breath. "That the real Umar was dead, and that he – the imprint – would soon follow. Is he really dead?"
Nothing and no one answered that question for her.
Regardless of the answer to that question, Aloe still tried to search for the old assassin whenever she ended up in the world of ideas. It was still a bit random, the first dream always was, but once she regained her lucidity, the subsequent ones she had complete control over. That did mean that most of her initial dreams were of… lewd content.
She hated her mind for that. There were more pressing things, she didn't have time for that debauchery. As a matter of fact, she had had too much debauchery for a lifetime. Maybe in the next one, she would indulge in such activities, but no more in her current one.
Her life was now dedicated to and fueled by curiosity and spite. Those were her driving forces and wishes. Truly the most superb of feelings, living for one's satiation of the mind and the pain of others.
Her experiments with interbreeding infused mushrooms had yet to demonstrate any metric of success, but Aloe was patient in that regard, it was her longest-term experiment.
After her reserves reached the thirty-mansworth milestone, Aloe thought of evolving four Slowtides per day, but that presented some issues. Namely, pain and exhaustion. She was only now spending two-thirds of her reserves per evolution, but twenty mansworth were still twenty mansworth.
"Either until I reach a higher mastery of the lichen's flow of vitality or greater vitality reserves, I won't be able to evolve more than three Slowtides per day. The fourth induces acute pain, and the fifth one severe nausea."
Aloe had a fixation for testing on her own body, so of course, she had tried to evolve five Slowtides in a single day to see what would happen. The result she had already said, but it required further elaboration. After all, by 'severe nausea' Aloe referred to vomiting.
It truly wasn't a vital art experiment if she didn't end up emptying her stomach one way or the other.
Her experiments with the Slowtide's soporific properties had yet to yield any results. The more time went by, the more Aloe suspected that prey had to be trapped inside the evolved lichen's slime to be afflicted by its sleeping properties.
The only solace she found in the lack of results from many of her experiments was training. Even if her reserves lacked in comparison to most sultanzade, she was slowly becoming a force to be reckoned with. Whilst her body was still far from being as muscle-laden as Naila's or – heavens forbid – Aaliyah's, she was building her body to be even a menace against soldiers without needing to use Nurture.
Such was the truth of the world, people had to dedicate a lot of time to sustain their way of life, but Aloe could dedicate all her time to growing stronger. No need for socializing, cooking, or even doing her business now with the help of the Radiating Undergrowths. Well, she still had to evacuate, especially urinate, but she needed to do so significantly less.
She was slowly sketching a formula for how the amount of mansworth affected one's boost in physical abilities, but she needed more points to have a definitive answer. With thirty mansworth, her practical increase was closer to what twenty mansworth of virtual increase should be.
In simpler words, there seemed to be diminishing returns to Nurture.
That did give her hope, because depending on how punishing the equation for physical increase growth was, maybe she was nearing the level of the older sultanzade. How great was the falloff of the equation's growth? That was the question.
Blossomflames and Dream Spore spores did help bridge that estimated gap.
"Could I weaponize the undergrowths?" She found asking herself one day.
The theoretical answer was yes, the practical answer was no. The Radiating Undergrowths would also hurt her, and if she could survive them with her toughness, so could the sultanzade.
The trust she placed in the Blossomflames wasn't for their offensive factor – no cultivator would be defeated by measly flames – but for their healing capabilities. She could outlast anyone if she had enough Blossomflames in her person. And the Dream Spores were more of a crowd control factor. Depending on how long the affected target remained asleep, it was basically a death sentence.
But those were tools, she also needed to reinforce her body.
The advantage of Nurture wasn't its capability of boosting one's physical capabilities individually, but the versatility of raising them in demand.
Donning potency when being attacked was no different from courting death as that internal infusion weakened the body and provided no way to avoid the attack like haste or dexterity could. But donning those internal infusions or toughness would make you impervious to most attacks.
So she practiced the switching time of the stances.
Every. Single. Stance.
Perhaps it was overkill and needless, but even non-combat stances like charm or stealth didn't escape her training schedule. It was painful training glamour – even if it was for seconds at a time – after everything that nince-damned internal infusion had made her go through, but she justified it by compartmentalizing her mind and telling herself she was practicing glamour and not the charm stance.
All for the sake of mastery.
Until she was able to switch every Nurture stance in the blink of an eye, Aloe wasn't satisfied with the results. From there, she took it on as natural training, passively letting her body gain more understanding of each stance whenever she used them.
Even though she hadn't practiced much toughness, it possessed already a switching stance lower than her reaction time. It was certainly possible, if counterintuitive, as she could just predict when someone could attack her instead of responding to an attack. That was how she guessed cultivator battles would act out like as any time the speed stance entered the battlefield reaction time meant less than nothing.
She could barely already react to her own body whilst donning haste, how more brutal would that difference be with greater reserves?
One of the few 'highlights' of her experiments was when she tried to evolve another Dream Spore as the single one she had looked too 'solitary'.
Emphasis on tried.
"Why aren't you evolving?" Aloe screamed in an outburst as the spore in her hands refused to evolve. This was the sixth time trying. "What in the nine hells is wrong with you?"
No matter what she tried, getting new spores, hunting for new mushrooms in the wild in case she had confused herself and planted mushrooms other than the liberty caps, but even with that, the spores she obtained refused to evolve.
"Am I going crazy? Am I insane already?" She asked the heavens.
They failed to respond.
For the first time, Aloe was grateful for that, otherwise, her claim of lack of sanity would have been confirmed.
"Raaaaaah!" She shouted and almost punted her grown Dream Spore like she had originally done when the fungus had induced her into a dream for the first time. "No, Aloe, calm yourself. There's no problem whatsoever. It doesn't matter that you can't evolve a Dream Spore at all. Nothing really matters. You can always try to grow new Dream Spores from its spores!"
Just in case, to quell her paranoia, Aloe evolved a Blossomflame in case she had forgotten how to evolve living beings other than lichen. And, indeed, she was able to do so. It just was the liberty caps that refused to evolve.
A few weeks later, and with a bit of the use of her Forced Growth flowing stance technique, Aloe was capable of growing a second Dream Spore via the already evolved plant.
She forgot most of the time that evolutions were still versions of their original self, meaning that they could spawn offspring.
Most of her days tended to be far calmer, devoid of outbursts like the ones provoked by the lack of Dream Spore evolutions, but she was getting more irritable as time went on. Not even crushing rocks with her hands was able to quench that underlying itch. The only solution was to focus on her growth, no deviations, just pure unadulterated personal growth.
More weeks passed by as her reserves reached the fifty mansworth milestone, Aloe couldn't hold it anymore. She had to try to evolve the living stones again. She knew she was still far, but she had to try, nonetheless.
"Let's see how far I can get, maybe I can slow its drain rate enough to compensate it with vitality pills?"
Her thoughts proved to be far too optimistic as even when she was donning recovery and doing her best to slow down the evolution's sapping of her vitality, it was still too much. By the time she ran out of vitality, she was still midway through the descending slope of the evolution cost function, having poured around sixty mansworth worthy of vitality into the living stone seed.
At least there hadn't been any amputations needed this time around as she had worked with her hair. And because she had it long now, she was able to cut it casually without even feeling a tug on her scalp.
"A bit more, just a bit more." If her calculations were right, she could use all her tools at her disposal to power through the drain rate once she reached the 'low-drain stage'. "Sixty mansworth, surely with that I will be able to evolve them."
Not even close.
"Seventy-five, with seventy-five vitality it should be enough," she added after nearly collapsing from her failed attempt.
Sixty mansworth was no joke, and that had only been her maximum reserves. But between the regeneration stance's vitality restoration, manually slowing the rate of draining, and the usage of Cure Grass pellets, that number was probably closer to seventy mansworth.
She promised herself to fulfill to goal, but for the time being, she continued with her experiments. For some of them, success must have been close at hand, she felt it. No. She needed them to be successful. She ached for success.
To this day, Aloe still has yet to decipher why the liberty caps didn't want to evolve.
Comments
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
The3rd
Infinite sweets and goodness are here 🍨🍦🍪💖🍫🍬🍭🍮🍯🍰🍩🎂♾️
