Epsilon Twilight
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42. Undergrowth
🕑 Added 2024-11-08 12:12:55 +0000 UTCThere were some things wrong with the description she had before her eyes namely, how it was highlighting both a Death alignment and a high nutritional value.
"I'm no scholar but these two words… they don't exactly merge together," she didn't know how to make heads or tails out of the situation. "I've only seen the Death alignment once before, and that plant gave me so many heebie-jeebies that I didn't plant it. At least this one isn't giving me instantaneous repulsion, so… maybe it's alright?"
Her tone betrayed any semblance of confidence her words may portray.
"Also, Void?" She reread the alignment section. "That's a new one, right? Which ones have I seen so far? Let's see," she started counting with her hand. "There's Information and Arcane from the veritas, Life and Chaos from the Blossomflame, Light from the Myriad, Time from the Nature's Bounty," she was still a bit sad that she had never seen that plant grow as it had a promising future, "and Death from the Thousand Cuts."
That last one was the one was the plant she had never planted as just having it around horrified her.
"I'm surprised I even remember the name when I threw it as soon as I evolved it, I guess it really made an impression on me, huh?" Aloe scooped the evolved spore out of the veritas wound, which was a bit hard as it was completely covered in ink and its glowing properties were voided by it. "Yeah, Void's a new one. That makes it the seventh, wait… the eighth alignment I have found. I wonder if there are more."
Alignment was a word devoid – pun intended – of meaning for her. Sure, some alignments did make sense, but not all of them. And in her mind, she was relating the word alignment to element as it made no sense to her otherwise.
"I can get behind things like Life and Light, but what does Arcane and Void entail? Especially Arcane. Aren't all plants magical or am I missing something?"
Aloe left the glowing spore on top of a boulder and rubbed her temples with her clean hand. Evolutions always exhausted her, and one as expensive as this one even more, but it was the questions without answers that drove hooks into her mind.
"The Death alignment has me a bit scared but considering the last and only plant I saw with that alignment made me cringe and I still have to feel anything, not even a gut feeling, I'd say I should plant it." The more she talked to herself, the better the proposition sounded. "But what's a white hole? Does the grown mushroom have holes and is still white? Otherwise, I can't understand the meaning of that sobriquet."
The concept of a white hole was quite a curious mental exercise as she tried to imagine something like that, but the only image that came to her mind was a drill hole in a marble slab.
"Anyhow, I still have to go over some points of the description," she had latched on to the 'absurd nutritional value' part, but there were two other significant ones. "Okay, how much of the 'grow anywhere' part is true and how much is an exaggeration? Can you grow anywhere?"
Aloe tried talking to the spore, but it failed to respond to her. She didn't lose anything for trying as she had confirmed that the Blossomflames could understand her even if they couldn't talk back. Maybe one plant in the future will be able to talk. She had had those thoughts more than once already.
"Next, 'radiate indefinitely'," she read. "Radiate what? I guess it's light based on the spore, but it could be heat or something else. This choice of verb is quite vague."
After going over the Aloe Veritas' description of the Radiating Undergrowth, Aloe failed to see any critical issues with it. She wouldn't try to consume it anytime soon as the Death alignment was as off-putting as the absurd nutritional value was enticing.
"I'll plant it somewhere far, just in case. Considering it's a mushroom, it should grow fast and without needing sunlight, but an accelerated growth infusion won't hurt."
Before infusing it, Aloe waited a bit. Not only to restore her vitality, which had hit rock bottom but also to rest. Evolutions weren't nearly as taxing as blood infusions, but she had consumed ten mansworth in one go, an unheard amount until now, even if she had almost that total vitality reserves now.
The cultivator left the spore on the boulder and 'rewarded' herself with a cooking session. She was used to cutting herself by this point to light the Blossomflames, and now that she could control them well enough to only cut herself a handful of times during a whole session, but she still dreaded those sessions.
Even when she put two Blossomflames in parallel to increase the heat, her cooking sessions still would last half an hour. She wasn't unfamiliar with cooking sessions that long, even before the whole chasm fiasco, but it was different when one had to constantly control the fire.
For heaven's sake, she had to motivate the fire!
Literally!
Blossomflames did grow hotter and brighter if she whispered them words of motivation and encouragement. How did that work? She had no idea, but at the same time, she was objectively a witch who used different magics. The irony was palpable.
As she wielded recovery in her cooking sessions, mostly to ease her healing, by the time Aloe had eaten she had long restored her vitality.
"Ah," Aloe groaned as she stretched after finishing her meal. "Time to infuse this Radiating Undergrowth." The name resonated with her more than the sobriquet.
A fleeting thought flew across her mind wondering if the spore would have taken root already as the veritas stated that it could grow anywhere, but she discarded it as she had only taken an hour to get back to it.
"Okay," she cracked her neck. "Let's see how much vitality you need to be infused, evolved mushroom."
Aloe started infusing the Radiating Undergrowth spore with the accelerated growth external infusion. And she infused. And she continued infusing. By the time she had spent a whole nine mansworth on the infusion, she felt something was wrong.
"How much vitality do you eat?" She incriminated the innocent spore. "I need to do something about this."
As she didn't want to break the tether of vitality between her and the spore, she kept her finger pinched and trickled small amounts of vitality into it – enough so that she would still restore vitality with recovery – to keep the infusion process up indefinitely.
"Two alternatives," she told herself. "Either I keep putting vitality inside of it without falling asleep until it's full, or I stuff myself full of pills until the spore itself is full." Silence permeated the bottom of the chasm. "I kinda prefer the former option, it can't take that much vitality, right?"
It did.
Aloe pinched the bridge of her nose and rubbed her eyes as she let out a sigh of exhaustion. She was donning recovery and had infused already twenty mansworth on the spore. Yet it showed no signs of stopping, she couldn't even feel the vitality she had put inside already.
"Am I missing? Like… literally? It's as if my vitality is being erased instead of absorbed." She rubbed the corners of her eyes. "I… was my whole theory of plants needing an amount of vitality proportional to their mature size wrong? Either that or… this mushroom is really big. Like impossibly so. A tree can take around one mansworth to be infused, so even if I take into account the Radiating Undergrowth's evolved status that doubles the cost… the numbers still don't make sense."
She was at an impasse. Her body was hurting from using so much vitality without resting, but at the same time the sunken-cost fallacy was hitting her hard and she didn't want to lose her progress.
"I… does it even matter?" She realized a critical problem with her actions. "It's a mushroom, it doesn't need shade acclimation and it will grow fast, so I don't even need to infuse it with accelerated growth. Hells! I'm not even in a hurry to see it grown!"
Aloe finally decided to give up on the Radiating Undergrowth's infusion as it was too much of a resource siphon to be viable, even if her curiosity was urging her to check how much vitality the evolved mushroom would need to evolve. Was she really close to the infusion point or was she far away? Could a living being reach the three digits in vitality cost?
Her experiments didn't end quite yet as she left the spore on top of the boulder. If the veritas description was right, then the spore should be able to grow on that boulder. If it didn't… well, she would evolve more of them in the future, once the cumin seeds were no longer as feasible to evolve as they were now.
"Oh…" She groaned in a mixture of horror and laziness. "I will need to plant death caps, that's bad… very bad…"
Whilst she highly doubted any common poison could kill her in her current state – thanks to the Blossomflames rather than her toughness – she still didn't want to be subject to the inevitable pain that would follow by being poisoned.
"Maybe I could train my tolerance to poison and practice toughness by eating them," she said jokingly, though she couldn't help but linger on that thought. "Nah, just kidding. Unless…"
She was effectively immortal under the watchful fires of the Blossomflame, if she consumed poisons, she could develop furthermore her beloved toughness internal infusion like she constantly did with recovery.
"Would that only reinforce my poison resistance or toughness as a whole?" It scared her that she was even pondering it, but if she was willing to withstand the pain, nothing was stopping her.
Nothing would stop her.
"Let's put this idea on the backburner… for now."
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