Epsilon Twilight
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45. Cotton
🕑 Added 2024-11-11 15:34:59 +0000 UTCAloe had the bad trait of believing her spontaneous theories as the absolute truth, and that way of thinking punched her in the gut when she went through half of the seeds and all of the requirement conditions she had thought of and found no new evolutions.
"Not all plants have evolutions," she told herself and laughed it off.
If the normal evolution process didn't work, Aloe then went for the book method. If the book didn't work, it was time for the dead plant. If being in contact with the dead plant didn't work either, her last alternative was to bathe the seed in question with an onslaught of a Blossomflame.
"Why isn't it working?" She shouted and slammed the stony ground. "I'm meeting the requirements, aren't I? Then why haven't any of these four seeds evolved?"
The cultivator washed her face on the river to relax herself. She was getting too worked up by her failures. She wanted to believe that her theories were right, that she had finally found the truth behind the requirements of Evolution. But success was a cruel and fleeting mistress.
"I…" Aloe sighed. "Unknow seed number five evolution test begins… now," she added with a tired voice.
But her eyes shot wide open as the seed started accepting her vitality. She was excited by the evolution, but a part of her hated how it was a normal evolution and she was unable to test her theories.
The seed drained her vitality at a considerable rate, barely faster than the Blossomflame, but not so much as the Radiating Undergrowth.
"Tch," Aloe tsked her tongue in disappointment. She wanted expensive – but not overly so – evolutions so she could train better as the Blossomflames were already falling a bit behind.
She took a deep breath and recovered her cool. Soon her reserves were going to be depleted, so she consumed a vitality pill, instantly recovering her little less than a mansworth. But as soon as her vitality recovered, the evolution drainage stopped.
"That's a waste of a perfectly fine pill," she puffed. "Oh, well, it's not like I'm running out of them or anything."
Because nothing was stopping her from planting aloe veras or Cure Grass, and she had a lot of free time on her hands, her vitality pill stockpile was on a new time high, standing around the three-digit mark. Unless she was dealing with expensive evolutions or tried to infuse the Radiating Undergrowth again, she would probably never get near clearing that pile. It certainly didn't help that she just kept making new ones in order to perfect her craft.
"That was around… eight mansworth?" She pondered as she fixated on her inner flow of vitality. "Hmm, it may be better to evolve this plant instead of the Blossomflames now. And it isn't like I need many more of them. Perhaps I could directly plant them instead of evolving cumin seeds now."
As a cultivator, she had done many things with plants, but planting an evolved plant that she hadn't personally evolved would be a first.
"For now, let's see what this plant is all about," Aloe walked back to the camp – she developed a tendency to evolve plant out of it just in case something happened – and cut a veritas leaf. "Mm."
Aloe harrumphed as she wasted the leaf when a drop of ink hit her skin in her haste, making her cut a new one. This new leaf thankfully didn't start shifting its random scribbles until she placed the new seed, which was almost as black as the ink itself, on the bleeding cut. The ink of the parchment shifted to reveal new words.
Species: Gossypium Levitas
Sobriquet: Cottonpull
Description: An evolved member of the Malvaceae family, a species known for its ability to produce antigravity fruits and big sacks.
Alignment: Life, Space
Many things about the description surprised her but Aloe couldn't help but fixate on one in specific.
"Oh, so it was a cotton plant seed?" The root of the species name nor the family name rang any bells, but the sobriquet could only mean one thing. "How is it that I haven't evolved a cotton plant seed before?"
Aloe scratched her seed, but her question somehow devolved as she thought about it.
"Why has an herbalist sold me cotton seeds, though?" That was really intriguing. "I mean, an herbalist is not the same as an apothecary, but why one would be carrying cotton plant seeds anyway?" She thought about it for a moment but ended up groaning in frustration when no answers came to her. "Bah, this is not worth my brain power."
More pressing matters were calling her.
"That's a new alignment, Space, huh?" She removed the Cottonpull seed from the Aloe Veritas cut before she could lose it. "I have no idea what the requirement of the Space alignment could be unless it is… outdoors?" Aloe looked at her surroundings. "Yeah, I doubt it."
She groaned at a loss. Once she thought she had an idea about alignments, suddenly one more appeared.
"With this one, they now make nine. There must be more, right? I can't stop finding them. But at the same time, those are the number of hells… What if…?" Only time would tell. "Enough with alignments, let's focus on the plant."
As always, Aloe reread the Aloe Veritas description in case she lost something of vital importance.
"Only two characteristics in the description, I think I've never seen this few ever," she put a finger in her underlip. "No, the Myriad also had only two characteristics." Another description flashed in her mind. "Dunes, there's another one with fewer characteristics. The Chlorotrophy had only one characteristic if I remember correctly. Huh."
More than surprised about the characteristics, Aloe was bewildered at the sudden clarity of her memory.
"This Cottonpull doesn't look dangerous which is good, but what is this 'antigravity fruits' that the veritas mentions? Like… do the cotton balls not respect gravity? I need to grow it to understand this description. Also… big sacks? I wish it's something else rather than the things my rotted mind is making me think."
Aloe shuddered at the disgusting images her mind was manufacturing, even if she didn't put a name to them.
"Overall, I can't say I'm excited about this plant, but at least I will be able to evolve them now instead of Blossomflames to increase my reserves… once I plant more cotton plants."
The petite woman couldn't hold the groan at the idea of having to make a new plantation from scratch. She was in no haste to start evolving the Cottonpulls just yet as she needed a bit more vitality before being capable of evolving them without external assistance.
Instead of going directly for the Cottonpull's infusion, Aloe proceeded to cook her lunch. Which was just a handful of roasted potatoes and overcooked mushrooms. Using up the entirety of her reserves had exhausted her, though not hurt her. She had mistreated her body so much that she would need more punishment to feel pain from a single evolution.
The only thing that saved her food from being overwhelmingly oppressive was that she reinfused all the potatoes and mushrooms with better taste so at least she was eating quality food.
"I'd like to have some oil and salt…" She hummed in thought. "I could try finding salt rocks, at least I know what those look like." That clay idea she previously had had gone nowhere because she didn't know how clay looked in the wild, after all.
Aloe noted it down on her ever-growing list of things she would inevitably forget. Nothing stopped her from actually writing it down in veritas parchment, just laziness.
Truly the enemy of mankind.
"Ah," Aloe groaned and stretched after finishing her food. At this point, doing so was routine. Her lack of movement kept making her extremities fall asleep. "Time for infusing the Cottonpull."
Unlike the unheavenly aberration of the Radiating Undergrowth, the Cottonpull's infusion didn't require limitless vitality. Quite the opposite, in fact.
"One mansworth," she heaved and toyed with the seed in her hand. "It can't be bigger than a normal cotton plant then."
She recalled seeing a cotton plant plantation once when she traveled with her family years ago across the farmlands, and whilst they were bigger than her – her current self, not her child self – they weren't that voluminous. Way smaller than most trees as they were just tall shrub-like plants.
"Is it me or I am finding a lot of things that require one mansworth as of late?" The values weren't exactly one mansworth, but she was right in finding that number in many places. "Is it inten… Nah, Aloe, this darkness is making you imagine wild things. First the nine hells and now this. You silly girl."
The cultivator laughed her wild thoughts away and planted the Cottonpull on a new plantation area. There were many patches of soil upriver that were free, only taken by single Blossomflames that Aloe had left there as there were no more places for them and she wanted them scattered for emergencies.
Her camp had significantly expanded in size as she continued to reclaim those limited patches of fertile ground along the riverbed.
"Now for the normal ones." The rest of the day was dedicated to infusing the rest of the cotton plant seeds she had with shade acclimation and planting them.
As expected, they needed half of the Cottonpull's vitality. Actually, they took a bit less than that, so that told Aloe that the evolved version would be ever-so-slightly larger.
She was fidgety to start evolving them, but because blood infusions would set her backward, she satisfied herself with putting a few mansworth worth – she was regretting even more the chosen name by the day – of vitality into a cotton plant with her flowing stance's default technique. The cotton shrub only sprouted with that meager use of vitality, but if she was ever in need of more cotton plant seeds, she had better ways to grow it faster.
The day was over in a flash, tomorrow she would tackle the rest of her seeds and fungi.
Comments
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
The3rd
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