Epsilon Twilight
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62. Surreal
🕑 Added 2024-11-28 15:36:54 +0000 UTCSunlight warmed Aloe's skin, it was truly the most pleasurable of caresses. However, that could also be attributed to the women surrounding her. The bed was so massive that she couldn't see the end of it, big enough to fit Rani at her side, a half-naked Naila, Fatima spreading her legs before her, and…
"Mirrah?" Aloe half-said half-moaned as Rani decided it was a good moment to caress her nether regions.
"Yes, Aloe?" The housewife asked seductively. Her naked body matched that of the three princesses in beauty, but her breasts were peerless. Providers of life only worthy of legends.
The petite woman's sight was tainted in pink, and then she saw the glowing yellow liquid spread across her body and covering Mirrah's breast. Ah, it looks so delicious~ Aloe couldn't help thinking. And as if she were reading her mind, Mirah closed on her and put her mythological cleavage before Aloe.
"Come on, feel free to drink~" The middle-aged beauty offered her left breast, its nipple perk and overflowing with nectar.
Aloe almost moved her head forward to suck on the teat like an infant, the temptation was great, but repulsion overtook her.
"No!" She screamed. "I can't do this to you! Not after… Not after!" Aloe bit her lips as she was unable to utter the words. "I can't tarnish your memory like this after what I've done to you! Cease this at once, I know it's a dream!"
Aloe shouted to the heavens, and they responded.
Sunlight turned into darkness, and the figures of Mirrah and the sultanzade trio collapsed into puffs of mist. Before she noticed, she was back in the cold and unhospitable chasm gasping for air.
"Why is it that in most of these dreams there's someone naked?" Aloe mused, though she had an inkling of an idea of the why, she just didn't want to put it into thoughts, let alone words.
The cultivator clutched her chest as she slowly calmed her breathing, the spores had long gone away, but she was careful around the Dream Spore.
"That was some progress, though. Not only did I regain consciousness at the first dream, but I was able to dispel it at will." This was far from her first attempt at dealing with the regrown Dream Spore, but the results were overwhelmingly satisfactory. "I could do with less… horny dreams, though. They make me uncomfortable."
She felt especially repulsed by the last one. A part of her could understand longing for Rani. Whilst it wasn't a healthy relationship by any means, she had willingly walked into it; and partially tried to enjoy it. Fatima was also understandable, the woman – whilst a paragon of stupidity – was certainly attractive with both good looks and a defined body. Mirrah and Naila, though?
She couldn't help but feel disappointed with herself.
Naila was a minor, no matter how many members of the palace she had already bedded. And Mirrah… Aloe couldn't deny she had felt attracted to her more than once, her beauty was unparalleled by anyone who wasn't a cultivator donning the charm stance, but she had killed her husband. Even if it was a dream, an unconscious hallucination, Aloe gagged at the idea of that sin.
There were fewer worse things than killing someone's spouse and then laying with said person.
Aloe went to the river and submerged her head in it, not only to cleanse those sins from her but to wash away the horniness and the spores from her body.
"Ah!" She emerged half a minute later with a groan. "I despise the Dream Spore, but dunes, it is effective. I hate how well-rested I feel even if I can't have been out of commission for not more than a handful of hours."
Since she started her experimentations with the evolved liberty cap, Aloe had set one of her 'Blossomflame chronometers' to check how long the mushroom put her to sleep or how long it would take her to wake up. More often than not, she would have just been sleeping for a couple of hours, which was surprising as she didn't have more than a handful of micro-dreams in that span.
"It's weird how all the dreams are 'lucid', or at least I can remember them, but time is so distorted in relation to real-time." Aloe mused as she dried her hair, which was more of a chore now with her long mane. "How long was this last dream? Two minutes? But it has been more than a couple of hours in real life… Maybe this could work as a strategic combat sedative. Even if they had an impossible willpower and woke up immediately, they would still be out for an hour. Further experimentation needed."
These attempts to recollect information from the Dream Spore with each experiment reminded Aloe of the earlier days at the greenhouse, where everything vital art-related was unknown.
"I mean, I still don't have much idea of what I'm doing, but I can testify with utmost certainty that I'm doing better than at the start." Aloe placed the towel she had just used on a clothesline she had set over the chasm's width, otherwise no clothes would dry here.
And she wasn't patient enough to dry textiles with a Blossomflame.
"I want to continue working with the Dream Spore, but my body has had enough lucid dreaming for a while, time to exercise a bit. But before that, evolution time!"
The cultivator grabbed a spore from a death cap and evolved it. Simple as that. Truth be told, it took her more time to separate the spores in the knife than to evolve the spore.
"Two out of three today." She said with the glowing spore in her fingertip. "Now that I think about it, I am planting a lot of them. Unless I start eating them – which I still don't know if I should – the chasm is going to turn brighter than the outside."
She chuckled at the idea. It was so… unreal. This place had been a cage of darkness, but because she was now on pace for evolving a hundred Radiating Undergrowths per month, darkness would be a thing of the past.
"Hmm, undergrowths can grow anywhere, and whilst I've not tested it for everywhere, maybe I should think of planting them in more uncommon places. There's a limit on how far I can plant them within a logical distance."
Her solution? Planting them on the walls.
Not that this was a new idea, mushrooms already grew on walls after all. What were mold and lichen but fungal growths that told gravity to fuck off?
"Climbing here will be a tiny bit difficult, though." She mused as she looked around her camp.
Unlike the open section of the chasm – in other words, the ravine where she had entered from – with its rugged and terraced walls, the section of her camp had very smooth walls, likely a product of the Tehen River.
Aloe turned acuity on and began exploring the walls of her camp for any spot minimally climbable. With her enhanced physical prowess, she was confident in performing improbable acrobatics, so anything worked.
She tried several methods of climbing without much support like jumping from wall to wall to preserve her height, but even in the narrower sections of the chasm, the walls were too apart to do so even with potency. And even if she could, such demanding activity would tire her to no end as any other stance beyond recovery would diminish her stamina.
"Lemme try something stupid," she mused before donning potency and leaping a few meters in the air without gathering any momentum.
Having thirteen mansworth allowed her to perform legendary feats of strength as if they were casual exercises, but there was a limit to what she could do. That especially became apparent after she passed the ten mansworth mark, her stance multipliers seemed to no longer scale linearly with her mansworth, but she still had too little evidence to confirm such a devasting claim, so she refused to acknowledge it for now.
Still, even with that possible handicap, Aloe jumped ten meters into the air without much trouble. Even now, the mental image of a woman as frail-looking as her stood out as the surreal product of a feverish mind.
Moving midair was difficult as she lacked balance as she was still using the strength stance instead of the sense stance, but that wasn't much of a problem for her current idea.
Punching.
Without any hesitation at all, Aloe punched the rock face before her. Having the virtual strength of fourteen adult men, her punches packed quite the punch. Pun intended. But doing so wasn't without consequences. By donning potency, she had made herself physically frailer.
Her ears met the disgustingly wet sound of her bones cracking and her hand exploding.
That didn't matter whatsoever to Aloe, though.
Only that she managed to chip the stone wall.
But with any action, there would be a reaction. The strength of fourteen people condensed on her fist and then suddenly decelerating on an immovable object meant that her body was propelled backward at great speed. In a blink, Aloe's back had met the wall at the other side of the chasm, but by then she had already changed into toughness, so the impact wasn't even able to push the air out of her lungs.
If all her other stances currently augmented her capabilities by a factor of fourteen, then toughness did so with a factor of twenty.
Or that was what she imagined.
A few seconds later, Aloe fell to the ground, and not even her knees processed the impact from a height of ten meters. She had difficulties even processing the pain from the punch even if it had shattered her hand. Her many experiences had made her dull to pain, and the defense stance magnified that by many degrees.
She didn't even need to cross the Tehen River for several Blossomflames to start healing her.
"Ah," Aloe groaned in a muted manner. Even if she couldn't feel the pain, the itches of having her shattered bones regenerate and snap back in place still provided her with discomfort.
A minute later she was patched back, her hand whole as if nothing had happened. She still gestured her hand open and closed to verify she hadn't lost any motor functions.
"Not bad at all," she commented about the healing of the Blossomflames and the whole on the wall.
The cultivator donned potency again, jumped over the Tehen River, and with a quick switch to acuity midair, she directed herself to the small rift she had created. She wielded the strength stance again to support herself with only her fingertips and then pressed the newly evolved Radiating Undergrowth spore on the stone wall.
It had needed a bit of work to get it off her finger as in these few minutes it had already entrenched into her skin, but with a bit of finagling, she was able to leave it stuck on the wall.
Aloe unlatched herself from the wall and fearlessly fell with toughness activated. When she landed, she stretched her extremities.
"What a refreshing workout!" She groaned in pleasure after more than one joint popped into place.
Once upon a time, Aloe Ayad would have hated exercising herself, but now she rejoiced before the idea of having to perform these painful and body-intensive acrobatics for each future death cap spore evolved. Her real life could no longer be distinguished from that of dreams and fairy tales as everything turned into a surreal mush.
Comments
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
Epsilon Twilight
Damn, goodness is eateable?
The3rd
Infinite sweets and goodness are here 🍨🍦🍪💖🍫🍬🍭🍮🍯🍰🍩🎂♾️
