Epsilon Twilight
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52. Hallucinations
🕑 Added 2024-11-18 10:10:59 +0000 UTCDarkness was all she saw. All-consuming. Ever-present. An eternal mantle of coldness and hostile penumbra. In that absolute void, Aloe cried. She gagged for air and writhed on the cold stone floor.
This was reality.
Her awful and cold reality.
But it beat half of those sunlight apparitions.
"Ah," she groaned and without thinking it twice she donned potency and snapped her pinkie like a twig.
The Blossomflames instantly responded to her mistress' wounds and vanished the darkness with their warm fires. She felt the pain of the broken bone and the itches of the healing, but Aloe couldn't be bothered to change her internal infusion to toughness, instead, she chose acuity.
Pain was a human sense like any other, but she was so numb, so cold that she couldn't feel it. Or at least, other feelings overwhelmed it, drowning it and silencing it.
Fear still reverberated in her bones.
The Blossomflames may be able to heal wounds, but scars never heal. They stayed for eternity forevermore.
Her eyes acclimated to the light of the fires, and with a noncommittal hum, Aloe was able to keep the Blossomflames burning for a bit more even if she was already healed.
"You…" She moaned in protest at the being in front of her. A creature the size of a human head with sickly pustules reminiscent of the buboes of a plague bearer. "I should burn you alive."
The being she was talking to was none other than Dream Spore. A violet-blueish mushroom with orange pustules that glinted once exposed to light.
Everything she had experienced was nothing more than the fabrications of the evolved mushroom.
"You little nasty bitch," Aloe was too infuriated to keep her composure. "Come on try to give me an excuse."
The Dream Spore responded by exploding one of its pustules.
Having experienced this before, the scarce moments before she fell asleep, Aloe knew not to inhale the stuff. She switched to toughness and waited for the spores to dissipate.
"You fucking dared to ejaculate your spores on my face again, you nince-damned aberration?" She kicked the mushroom with all her might, and it went flying on a perfect arc into the Tehen River even if her strength had been diminished by her current stance. "Serves you well!"
Aloe collapsed on the ground, her bottom forcefully hitting the hard rock, but toughness negated any damage. The cultivator looked at the soil before her where the mycelium of the Dream Spore still remained alongside the bottom part of its stem.
"Should I allow you to regrow after everything I went through because of you?" She asked herself more than to the fungus. "Is the experimentation and side effects that may come with you worth it?"
She chose to sleep on it.
Her stomach may be empty, and she had woken up from a long and horrifying dream, but she couldn't be bothered to think anymore. Aloe simply walked inside her dry crevice and lay on her fluffy litter. She then inflicted herself with controlled wounds that let today's potted Blossomflame burn slowly and whispered endearing words to the evolved flower before donning recovery herself and going to sleep.
When she woke up after a dreamless sleep, she was fully healed and the potted flower was partially withered.
"It must have been burning for a few hours to be in this state," Aloe mumbled as she removed herself from the sleeping bag.
With a groan and a stretch of her every limb, she picked up the potted Blossomflame and went back to her riverside camp. She picked up some potatoes and liberty caps from her vegetable pile and threw them inside the saucepan. It only took her a cut on her wrist, a few compliments, and some drops of blood on the duo of Blossomflames to keep them burning for a few minutes without assistance.
As the fires burned and her breakfast slowly heated up, she transplanted the half-withered Blossomflame and put a new one in the pot.
"This one is going to need a full week to recover." She guessed from experience, she had seen many withered Blossomflames by now.
Now that she could afford to keep fires burning with minimal input and oversight, the cultivator evolved a Cottonpull in the meanwhile.
"This is what… the thirteenth one?" She threw the evolved seed in the air and caught it once it fell with a flick of her wrist. "I'm certainly feeling a bigger increase of vitality compared to the Blossomflames, but I'll need to evolve way more to have an accurate value. If I could evolve three per day, I could be done in a month instead of two, but that's too greedy. I don't guess I could handle it."
She was feeling less and less disoriented with each consequent Cottonpull evolution for two reasons. First, her vitality reserves were growing so she was no longer completely depleting herself with every evolution. Just almost. And second, she was becoming acquainted with the inner workings of the cotton plant seed's flow of vitality.
Aloe pushed her hair to the side – it had quite grown these last months without being cut – and planted the evolved seed next to its companions. The first Cottonpull to be planted showed the common shrub-like silhouette of the cotton plant, but it was far from having matured, let alone ready to flourish.
"I should do something about this hair," she said whilst handling the tips of her wild mane. "I could cut it with my knife, but that will look horrible. Though at the same time, it's not like there's no one around to watch me, not even myself. The best mirror I got is the water surface, and I can only see my reflection whilst burning a Blossomflame…"
For the time being, Aloe decided against cutting her hair. Even if it was cumbersome to have it this long as it itched her more, the truth was, the advantages were superior. Not only did the long hair allow her to trap more body heat, but also it made it easier to go unnoticed once she left the chasm.
Whenever she did that.
There was also the fact that, apparently, her long hair was naturally straight, which was incredibly curious as her long hair was curly by default. She had never allowed her hair to grow this long until now.
After having her breakfast, Aloe performed her habitual stretches and walked back to where the Dream Spore had been standing the day before.
"Alright, what should I do with you?" She questioned as she sat with her legs crossed. "You seem capable of instantly knocking someone without any type of drug resistance into a dream… but I'm not so sure of it."
Aloe scratched her scalp as she recalled what had happened that day when she fell into the Tehen River.
"I only became intoxicated when I switched to acuity, and ever since then, I haven't been high in the slightest when I eat the liberty caps with toughness on, this means can only mean that acuity boosts a sense that affects my resistance – or rather, weakness – to drugs."
Further evidence was that she had eaten near-burnt mushrooms with recovery active instead of toughness, and if she was intoxicated, it wasn't enough to make her act unwisely. The sense stance was the only possible stance that could have produced this phenomenon.
"Now, you being the little squirter that you are, you busted all over my face out of nowhere when I was using acuity as it is impossible to see a thing down here."
The more time passed, the clearer the image of her forced dream was becoming. It had been the day the Dream Spore had finally matured; the mushroom having fully sprouted from the mycelium. So, of course, Aloe went to inspect it.
Only for said mushroom to expulse a cloud of orange spores directly on her face.
"I'm unsure if I could use you as a weapon," she continued talking to the evolved mycelium. "You only knocked me down because I was using acuity, a normal person or an assassin may not be instantly affected by your tricks. Let alone a nince-damned sultanzade."
She was obviating the fact that she could instantly knock down any cultivator wielding the sense stance, but she doubted she could get near one or catch one when their senses were so augmented when such a stance was active.
"But… you do have soporific properties, which the Slowtide has failed to portray just yet. So… and I'm regretting saying this, I will give you another chance. There's too much I don't know yet about you and your hallucinations. How fast can you force to sleep someone? Do you always produce these hallucinations? Like the Blossomflame, could I control these hallucinations myself?"
Aloe absolutely hated what the Dream Spore had made her go through. It had led her to parts of her mind she would rather avoid forevermore, but disregarding and discarding such a powerful tool without experimenting with it first was moronic.
"Also, that last hallucination with Umar… it felt too real. I can't remember the details completely, it all felt like a dream, but I clearly remember how it didn't feel like the rest. Like it didn't feel like any reality I have previously experienced."
The Dream Spore's mycelium, unlike the extremely active mushroom, failed to respond.
It would seem answers would have to wait until the mushroom regrew.
"Well, we'll see us again in a few days-slash-weeks. I expect other evolutions to have fully matured before you by then."
Comments
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
The3rd
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