Epsilon Twilight
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37. Parchment
🕑 Added 2024-11-03 12:32:20 +0000 UTCIn the following days, Aloe dedicated all her blood infusions to the Aloe Veritas. She went easy on her body and just performed one per sleep cycle as exhaustion kept accumulating no matter how much she rested. Even if she was rested for the first time in her life, Aloe felt the pains of her menstruation last for more than a couple of days.
Her poor state of living amplified every pain she was subjected to.
Once she had to skip the veritas to drop some blood on her potatoes. She had many in reserve and in other plantations, yes, but her traveling rations were now practically nonexistent so potatoes were the only thing she could consume.
"The first thing I do when I get the veritas online is check if any of the mushrooms I've found are edible. These potatoes are going to be the death of me."
In the end, her initial estimates about the veritas were wrong, and she needed three blood infusions to grow the Aloe Veritas to maturity. Overall… it was quite a lot of time. It had taken her around a week to grow it, when with accelerated growth the plant would have grown naturally over a month. Yes, it was a three hundred percent increase in growth but considering she could only focus on one plant at a time, it was no longer as impressive.
By the time the veritas no longer benefited from the effects of her blood infusion, all her other plants had long shown signs of sprouting, and her field of Cure Grass was long grown.
"Alright, does this work?" Aloe carelessly cut the grown veritas leaf and it started writing itself as soon as the ink made contact with her hand.
Name: Aloe Ayad
Species: Human
Description: Female member of the human species, a species known for their ingenuity, high adaptive capabilities, and societal structure.
Internal Infusion: Acuity
"Nice, nice," she calmly voiced out as she read the text on the Aloe Veritas' leaf, albeit with some difficulty thanks to a certain omnipresent darkness.
Nothing that a bit of wrist-cutting couldn't solve.
Even if she liked to joke about her casual usage of the Blossomflame, she had noticed how there were some vague traces of scars on her wrists, even though the Blossomflame had perfectly healed every wound until now. She let it pass for now, mainly because she didn't know if the problem was with her always cutting the same spot or because the flower was losing its potency. She would have her answers in a matter of weeks, if not days when the rest of them grew.
"I knew that the veritas would work, but I can't help but listen to how the whispers of anxiety said that I would somehow botch it," she told herself as she cleaned her ink-laden hands on the river. "Well, it's now time to check if I have any new edible plants in my reserves. But before that…"
She grabbed one of the potatoes in her cooking pile and cut another veritas leaf.
Species: Solanum Tuberosum
Sobriquet: Potato
Description: Member of the Solanaceae family, a species known for its perennially, growth in harsh environments, and nutritional values.
External Infusion: Shade Acclimation
"I had to check if they were actually infused with shade acclimation, it was gnawing me inside," she let out a sigh of relief. "This reminds me of something…"
With the potato still in hand, Aloe inferred in its flow of vitality and changed its external infusion. The cost of doing so was minimal, and soon the intent of the potato's vitality had changed.
As Aloe moved to cut yet another leaf from the Aloe Veritas to test that she had changed the potato's external infusion, she noticed something in the corner of her eyes. It was very dark at the bottom of the chasm, but also very static. The glints from the water's surface weren't many, so every time she detected some change, her head instinctively darted towards it. Even if it had been so far only the imagination of her mind.
Until now.
She almost expected an assassin attack as she had only perceived some change in the corner of her eyes, but as she waited and looked around, she found nothing. With her ink-coated knife, Aloe cut herself again to turn on the Blossomflame, but no drug-addict shadow was visible nor attacked her. Instead, she looked downwards, where had dropped the previous veritas leaf.
It wasn't obvious at first, but something in the back of her mind told her that something was off, so she re-read the parchment-looking plant again.
Species: Solanum Tuberosum
Sobriquet: Potato
Description: Member of the Solanaceae family, a species known for its perennially, growth in harsh environments, and nutritional values.
External Infusion: Better Taste
"Oh, heavens," she gasped and frowned. "Can veritas leaves actualize by themselves?"
The cultivator thought she was imagining things, high in some substance like her pursuers, so she grabbed her leaf with her information and changed her internal infusion.
Name: Aloe Ayad
Species: Human
Description: Female member of the human species, a species known for their ingenuity, high adaptive capabilities, and societal structure.
Internal Infusion: Toughness
"Dunes," Aloe cursed. "How haven't I found out about this before?"
Probably because she threw outside every used Aloe Veritas leaf to return them to nature and never bothered checking them again after that. Not that she had used that many leaves on herself to notice changes in internal infusions and switching the external infusions of plants was a somewhat recent trick.
"I guess this is neat but is not really useful, is it now?" She was proud of her resourcefulness, but her dulled mind couldn't come up with any application of this self-actualizing feature. "Maybe it works on evolved plants too, but that is much of the same, I'm just saving a leaf and…"
The petite woman turned her face to look at the Aloe Veritas. She had only removed two leaves from the evolved plant, but it was looking rather naked now.
"I can't use them up at this pace until I grow more of them. But, and just maybe but…" Aloe knelt before the veritas and switched her sense stance for the flowing one.
The first lesson she had learned with her Forced Growth technique was that it could affect a mature living being like it was a sultanzade in its prime. So perhaps it wasn't just growth in age but in any shape or form.
Aloe took a deep breath and poured vitality into the veritas. She knew that a single mansworth wasn't going to cut it and she would need to use more. As she poured vitality, the cultivator settled on five mansworth if just because it was a round number.
"Ah," Aloe slightly panted in exhaustion. "At least I can control the drainage rate, unlike Evolution," she pouted, "and also limit how much vitality I want to put in."
Working with precise amounts of vitality was hard as even her 'mansworth' were pure approximations of an adult person's reserves, though the amount was closer to the amount needed to evolve a black seed as that was the amount she was most used to.
Much like when she had discovered the technique with Fatima, and perhaps because she was also working with a grown living being now, the Aloe Veritas visibly grew before her. It was as if it was healing in real-time as the parts she had cut coagulated and closed, not just with a crust, but with the parchment of the plant's surface. A bit more and then it gained a pointy tip of a grown leaf, even if it was still shortened after being cut.
"Alright, I can heal plants, that's good to know," Aloe chuckled. "Plants already healed me, and now I can heal them. I wonder what will be next."
She sat down and had a bit of water while donning the regeneration stance as the massive usage of vitality had left her blind to the oppressive darkness.
"It feels so nice, breathing, yeah…" Her thoughts were muddled, but she felt a budding peace inside of her. Her reality had gained some semblance of equilibrium as she became able to heal and be healed. "I doubt I can use this on myself, though. The flowing stance works very similarly to Infusion, and considering I can't apply external stances to myself…"
That didn't stop her from trying, but she needed more than a few seconds to find herself incapable of pushing vitality inside of her body from the flowing stance.
With a groan, she stood up and went to do the actual activity she had planned before she had distracted herself with these many new discoveries.
She wanted to test if any of her new mushrooms were edible with the Aloe Veritas descriptions of the plants, but because she had only gathered the spores of the fungi and she didn't want to contaminate her samples with the ink, so she decided to take another stroll along the river.
In another time, she would have groaned and protested about leaving her comfort zone, but right now, there wasn't much comfort to be had. She enjoyed having an excuse to move around, to exercise her ailing body. Considering she had been forced to run for her life when she got out of her wheelchair, Aloe never had the chance to appreciate her regained ability to walk.
The feeling was liberating in its mundaneness.
It was hard telling how long she had been away as she gathered mushrooms, but she guessed at least two hours as she moved a handful of kilometers with the round trip.
Because she only had three types of mushrooms – she hadn't picked up any lichen as she doubted it was edible, to begin with – and had only removed two leaves so far from the veritas, Aloe decided to inspect all these new kinds already.
The results were… something. They could have been better.
Species: Amanita Phalloides
Sobriquet: Death Cap
Description: Member of the Amanitaceae family, a species known for its striking white color, phallic shape, and lethality after consumption.
The moment she read the description of the white mushroom, Aloe instinctively threw the mushroom into the river and switched to toughness.
"Oh dunes, oh shit, oh fuck," she rushed to the Tehen River to clean her hands. "I'm okay, right? It said consumption so I should be fine. Right?" She asked the heavens, but nothing answered back.
With a lot of care, Aloe picked up the satchel where she had stored the death cap's spores and put it far away from her camp. She didn't throw it away as it was a perfectly good satchel, and she still wanted to use the spores to try for an evolution, even if the end product may result in increasingly toxic fungi.
The next mushroom she tried, the brown and gray one – which ended up being whiter – proved a much better find.
Species: Psilocybe Semilanceata
Sobriquet: Liberty Cap
Description: Member of the Hymenogastraceae family, a species known for its edibility, nipple-like protrusion, and psychoactive properties.
"I… I didn't want to deal with drugs, but at least is edible." Taking into account who her pursuers were, she preferred not to think about hallucinogens. "Maybe if I cook them a lot the effect will be lost. I'd prefer eating something more than potatoes, that's for certain."
The last mushroom, the black and brown, proved dull in its description. There wasn't much to highlight with it. Whilst it wasn't toxic, it didn't specify edibility, so Aloe decided not to risk it. She had enough of hallucinogenic mushrooms already.
"Quite the productive day," Aloe mumbled over one of her very slow cooking sessions.
She wasn't cooking with the 'liberty cap' yet as a single mushroom didn't give for much of a meal, but as she prepared the potatoes, she planted the spores she had at her disposal.
And there was a very big advantage of working with mushrooms.
Her knowledge of fungi was scarce and riddled with lagoons, but she knew for a fact that they didn't require sunlight to grow, so instead of giving shade acclimation to the spores, she gave them accelerated growth, which would facilitate their proliferation.
It took her one whole hour to cook her potatoes, but with her newfound Force Growth healing trick, she realized she could give the Blossomflame more oomph in its fire as it would wither slower. Or rather, she would offset the withering with her vitality.
She would rather not use this tactic, however, as it was very vitality extensive. Having multiple Blossomflames in parallel seemed like the better strategy, once she had them.
But her day wasn't over with the meal. Not by a long shot. Before even wanting to check for plants and evolutions, she had concocted a use for the Aloe Veritas. One wasteful use that didn't make much sense to exploit on her time at the oasis, but now it was impossibly appealing.
Aloe cut the biggest leaf of the Aloe Veritas straight from the root, something she didn't commonly use as the tip was more than enough for plant identifications. But what she wanted to do now required the maximum amount of space available.
With the utmost care in all Khaffat, she removed the leaf without its ink meeting her skin. Her plan required a blank veritas, or more specifically, a clean parchment. She waited a bit for the cut to coagulate so she didn't prompt the leaf by mistake and then she soaked the tip of her knife in the wound.
The thick sap of the Aloe Veritas clung to the tip and then, very roughly, Aloe dragged the knife's tip across the blank parchment. Her strokes were rough, unpracticed, and quite honestly, pathetic.
But that didn't matter.
The petite cultivator smiled as her traces slowly gained a cohesive shape.
What was she doing?
Simple.
She was drawing.
In the confines of the deepest darkness, Aloe Ayad used her knife as a brush and she drew on the surface of the Aloe Veritas parchment. And she rejoiced herself in one of humanity's basest activities of recreation.
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