Epsilon Twilight
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56. Lighting
🕑 Added 2024-11-22 13:01:42 +0000 UTC"Okay, there's a bit of a problem with the logistics first," she mused as she pondered about the 'absurd nutritional value' statement of the Radiating Undergrowth's description. "Hmm, I'm liking the lighting though, I can read the veritas without donning acuity or burning a Blossomflame. How weird to suddenly have access to free lighting. But that's beside the point. How am I going to harvest this mushroom if I can't get anywhere close to it?"
The answer was quite simple.
She had realized this from the very beginning, even if the White Hole Cap seemed to defy all laws of physics she was aware of, the mycelium seemed to not share any of its properties.
"From one to ten, how painful will it be to eat a thing that has literally seared a boot?" She pondered the answer. "I guess a nine. But science must be done, and I'm getting tired of the same food all the time."
Was thinking with the stomach a good move? Nope, not at all. But she had already experienced infinite pain and near-immortality, so she was willing to give it a try. But she was getting ahead of herself, she first had to harvest the mushroom.
She read the Aloe Veritas parchment in her hands again.
"Actually, screw it. This light is too useful, I can't sacrifice it, let's evolve a new one and then eat that."
Evolving a Radiating Undergrowth would force her to break her Cottonpull evolution streak and add noise to her experiment, but after pondering it for a while, Aloe considered it wasn't much of a problem as the death cap spores only needed two mansworth more than a cotton plant seed to evolve.
In any case, it would be a correcting effort from any loss induced by her cycle.
Aloe dedicated her first infusion of the day to a new Radiating Undergrowth spore. She was pleasantly surprised to find that she only needed a single vitality pill – even if she had to take two just in case – to evolve the spore. The best course of action would have been to use the grown Radiating Undergrowth's spores, but…
"Does it even have spores?" The cultivator questioned with a glowing spore on her hand. "I can't physically approach it without being repelled and burned, so I can't tell… Anyhow, this spore is giving me ideas. In the future, when I switch from Cottonpulls to Radiating Undergrowths to increase my reserves, I could store spores instead of planting them to have eternal lamps. I think I had a glass flask somewhere…"
Accumulating bioluminescent spores to have a perpetual source of lighting was an incredible idea, but also a long-term one. She still had to evolve fifty Cottonpulls or so before getting to evolving new Radiating Undergrowths. The good news was that once she finished gathering her samples, she would likely have more than the ten mansworth required to evolve them.
Before she forgot, Aloe planted the newly evolved spore close to the evolved death cap and went to heat up her breakfast.
"I think I'll end up eating the Radiating Undergrowth before the second one has grown, I'm fed up – quite literally at that – with all of these potatoes and liberty caps." She mumbled over her reheated meal.
For the rest of the 'morning', Aloe proceeded to harvest all that could be harvested, whether it was potatoes, mushrooms, or cotton plants for their fruits and seeds.
"It's so weird to call cotton a fruit, but it's one. Cotton balls are not flowers, after all. This is even weirder than acknowledging tomatoes are fruits," she mumbled as she harvested the white puffs of the grown cotton plants.
Now with the glowing assistance of the mature Radiating Undergrowth, it was way simpler to perform such tasks. She no longer required acuity to see, let alone harming herself to light a Blossomflame. However, she wouldn't avoid that last part if she wanted to have warm meals.
Aloe wasn't the most efficient cultivator as her knowledge of cultivating and harvesting plants was self-taught and acquired, and whilst some farmers may also be like that, they would likely have years if not decades of accumulated knowledge. Even though she had been in the business for more than two years now, she had only been able to dedicate a couple of months to botany prior to her escape.
Scribal duties and whatnot had dictated too much of her recent life.
She preferred not to elaborate on what that whatnot was all about.
The reaping had taken a lot of her time, and cooking was more of the same gruel. It was painful having such quality ingredients thanks to the better taste external infusion be spoiled by her lack of other ingredients, condiments, and poor cooking ability; but she was already performing at the maximum of her current limitations and capabilities.
"Stupid army and stupid war…" Aloe groaned and grunted as she cut herself to rekindle the duo of cooking Blossomflames. "I would be seasoning my food with oil and salt now and probably would have a bigger pan than this… thing." It took a lot of willpower on her part to not swear. "I could have reacquired some of my lost plants by now too. Ugh…"
Once she was done with her meal, both cooking and eating it, Aloe proceeded with her second evolution of the day. This one now was the appropriate cotton plant evolution. Because her vitality reserves were oscillating around the nine mansworth mark now, the exhaustion she felt from the complete evolution was severely less taxing.
However, she doubted she would be able to perform a third evolution today as the Radiating Undergrowth had required external vitality sourcing, which taxed her body.
As anything vitality-related was off-limits for the rest of the day, Aloe dedicated the afternoon to more training.
She collapsed after ten push-ups.
"How… is… it…" she mouthed between pants, "that I can perform impossible feats of strength for a woman of my build but the moment I do trivial exercises I am one step away from the grave?"
Aloe lay on the ground with her extremities extended. Her arms were trembling from the exertion, she almost couldn't feel them.
"Like, really. Why? I've climbed a whole ravine and a mountain in a matter of hours without so much of a break, but ten push-ups are the death of me. How does that even work?"
She continued asking those questions as she rested before going to her next exercise. Each repetition was only formed by a series of ten, and she always rotated the type of muscles she was using as Naila had taught her to not put too much stress on them.
The constant exercise made her sweat like a pig. Though most of the dampness on her skin was from the river rather than her sweat. No matter how scorching the heat was or tiring the activities she was subjected to, her skin didn't seem to sweat much. Rani had seemed to enjoy that from her, but that wasn't something Aloe wanted to linger in.
"Hashish!" Aloe let out a cutesy sneeze. "Dunes, I'm going to catch a cold at this point. I had forgotten I could do so as every time I clean myself I wield toughness to not freeze myself."
As always, the defense stance proved to be her most useful and versatile tool.
Aloe wiped her skin with a towel to remove all the accumulated moisture and went through again every repetition she had done. By the end her every muscle and bone was sore.
"At least it's way easier on the mind doing exercises with light. Heavens bless, I didn't know I needed light this badly." Once more, she thanked the heavens for the presence of the Radiating Undergrowth as she wiped with her towel for the last time.
With a single evolution, her camp had gone from a poorly lit place that was fueled with blood to a room lit by the sunrise, albeit with a curtain covering the windows. Aloe's analogies weren't the best. It was good lighting – especially because it was free – but she would appreciate it if she had more of it.
As much as she tried to deny it, Aloe was a greedy soul. If she could have any resemblance of comfort and luxury, she wanted as much as possible.
The maturity of the Radiating Undergrowth ended up being the only highlight of the day, so Aloe's life on the bottom of the chasm continued as normal, if ever-so-slightly brighter.
With three Cottonpull evolutions per day, she was able to massively increase her reserves and progress on her self-imposed one hundred evolutions quest.
But the real change came a week after that. Her count had passed the seventy-evolutions mark, but that wasn't important at the moment. A new Dream Spore mushroom had started growing from the old mycelium, but it still lacked a bit more to achieve maturity. The accelerated growth was certainly pulling its weight.
No, what caught Aloe's attention was the Slowtide.
The evolved lichen had been growing in the wall she had placed it on since then, but as a lichen, there was no state of maturity. Or at least one she could discern. No, the change was more subtle. Before, the Slowtide was just the size of a thumb, basically nothing for a lichen. But after these many weeks, it had reached the size of a person.
Why was this change so important? After all, it had just grown as the veritas' description had indicated.
Because it had reached the ground.
And it was growing on it.
"Oh, dunes." Aloe suddenly realized the problem with the lichen. One that she should have put more thought into after she had theorized about its infinite size when she failed to infuse it. "It's going to grow into my crops, isn't it?"
Comments
The3rd
Infinite cookies are here 🍪♾️
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
