Epsilon Twilight
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36. Routine
🕑 Added 2024-11-02 12:30:03 +0000 UTCAloe woke up in pain and blood. Fortunately, she had enough foresight to wield toughness before going to sleep, meaning her cramps didn't jolt her into wakefulness and insanity. Any other internal infusion amplified her sensation of pain, which was already abnormally high during menstruation, but toughness had severely numbed her.
There were occasions where being this numb to pain could be detrimental, but right now it was a heavensent.
"This is not much blood, that recovery-boosted menstruation was a nightmare." Having expected her cycle to come for a while, she had avoided ruining her underwear with the usage of towels and rags.
Since she was young, or more accurately five years ago or so, she would suffer from extreme nausea, period cramps, and blood loss. Her mother always told her that the pain lasted for many days, but she always felt all her pain gathered in a single one, even if she was numb for the days to come.
Unfortunately, such activities were routine, so she went to the river in a tranced practice and washed herself with spare towels. Once she cleaned most of the mess, she proceeded to wash all the textiles she had soiled.
"I guess it's nice knowing I've been down here for a month… but I'd prefer another way of telling time." Aloe moaned and groaned in exhaustion.
The day was wasted.
Toughness allowed her to cope with the pain, but she had lost a lot of blood and the nausea wouldn't stop. Her vitality was also diminished by the hurt state of her body. Donning recovery would have solved many issues, but it would have left her vulnerable to the pain. Not only would she start feeling it, but it would be amplified.
Considering she typically cursed everything that composed this world in a blind rage when suffering her period cramps, she wasn't in a position to withstand amplified pain when she was weakened by her poor environment. This wasn't like the inn on Selen where she had a bed, warm food, and…
Aloe rushed to the Blossomflame.
"Nince-damned hells!" She cursed as the plant didn't shower her on fire. "Why aren't you healing me? I'm hurt! Why?" Some hints of water appeared in her eyes.
After shaking the pot a bit, she gave up.
"You did try to heal me on Selen," she muttered with a defeated tone. "Is there something different? Is it because I washed the blood away? Maybe because I fell from the bed and hurt myself? No, I think I fell before you tried to heal me… Aaaah!" The woman groaned in exasperation as she madly scratched her scalp.
For a last attempt, she bit her finger – through toughness as she didn't want to feel any pain, even if it took her ages – to make the evolved flower heal her.
Embers appeared at the hint of a wound, but they were just that. Embers. No deflagration assaulted her body whole to fix her.
"What are you implying? That there's nothing wrong with my body? That I must eternally undergo this pain and that is somehow natural? Because I refuse to accept that!"
Aloe pouted at the potted plant and threw a pebble at the river. She couldn't work in these conditions, so without eating, she went back to sleep.
As far as awfulness went, Aloe felt fine enough when she woke up the next day. Or whatever the time was.
"Huh, I could have re-infused the potatoes." She mussed as she ate her potato breakfast. She was so disappointed with her lack of foresight, that she couldn't bring herself to curse. "There was this infusion about taste, I can't remember what it was called right now, but I could use it. I have vitality to spare, and honestly, even if I didn't, having tasty food will do me better."
As she tried to remember the name of the infusion that improved taste, Aloe gave her potato plantation its daily dose of blood. Her current idea was to get enough potatoes that she would never need to blood infuse them again and instead let them grow naturally. She was already at the point that she could grow the necessary potatoes to indefinitely sustain herself, so the only improvement possible was to reduce their vitality upkeep.
"What plants do I have right now," she extended her fingers and started counting, "potatoes, Cure Grass, black seeds, Blossomflames, aloe vera, Aloe Veritas… and that's it? I think so. Hmm…" The petite woman swayed her head from side to side as she pondered. "I should plant some cumin. Wait, didn't I already? Hells, I'm so absentminded as of late."
Aloe checked for cumin plantations, but as she found none, she guessed that even if she intended to plant cumin, she had just forgotten to do so.
"This is the lowest priority crop right now," she wiped the humidity off her forehead. "I still have a lot of cumin seeds to evolve, and it isn't like I can evolve more than a handful of them each day. I should get around making vitality pills, but that also requires growing aloe vera… Ugh." She groaned in annoyance.
The nausea and sickness from her cycle were still affecting her today, so there would be not one more blood infusion today. But as she didn't have much to do when she was resting after evolving Blossomflames, Aloe picked up some of the grown Cure Grass and started working with it.
"Let's call this… reserve vitality paste. I'd rather not eat it, but it's nice to have a cushion for emergencies."
To mill the evolved grass into a paste without a mortar and a pestle, Aloe used her resourcefulness, which in this case was using her ceramic pot and an elongated rock that could pass for a pestle if one squinted their eyes a lot.
Grinding, milling, powdering, however you wanted to call the action of turning herbs into fine paste, was an endeavor so repetitive but of low intensity that it was the perfect activity to wait as her vitality slowly restored herself.
She may be able to restore a mansworth in a handful of minutes, but as she needed six of them to evolve a cumin seed, that meant that she could only evolve one every half an hour. And that was without taking into account her fatigue, which meant she had to rest more.
The worst part of the regeneration stance was that it didn't evaporate fatigue. Maybe it could alleviate it, but its effects weren't as significant as its healing or vitality restoration factor.
Milling grass in complete darkness and dampness was something Aloe had never imagined doing, but here she was, and she was enjoying it. Her mind was sometimes feeling like a trap, so just being able to do a repetitive task without thinking about anything was liberating.
Healthy? Probably not. Effective? Up for discussion.
After was felt like an hour, she was done with the Cure Grass and had a fine paste at her disposal. She left it all on a stone slab waiting for it to dry. It would have dried faster away from the river, but it wasn't like she was in a haste to use it.
Nowadays her time was mostly spent on cooking as the Blossomflame wasn't exactly the best source of fire. Well, it was, but she didn't want to amputate her hand each time she wanted to boil a potato.
"Hmm, still thinking about the infusion's name." Aloe mused as she stirred the ceramic pot.
She had already washed it after using it for the grass, and now she intended to have some boiled potatoes. The Blossomflame's fire was potent but too erratic, and if she pushed it too much, the plant would also wither.
It was for that reason she wanted more Blossomflames, to rotate her fire consumption and avoid needless withering.
The problem with her ceramic bowl was that it was small, so she had to smash the potato to boil it, otherwise it wouldn't fit in.
"Better taste!" She exclaimed at her revelation as she cut her wrists to fuel the fire. "Damn, I didn't remember that the name was this bad. I should think of a new one."
Unfortunately, her mind wasn't at its strongest today, so Aloe left the poor name Karaim had chosen fly for now and just infused the potato. Because she now knew of internal and external infusions and how to access the flow of vitality of other living beings, the cultivator was able to shift the potato's flow and remove its shade acclimation infusion to substitute it for better taste.
Compared to dealing with the flow of people like that one time with Fatima or dwe…
"Oh…" Aloe whimpered. Not because of the pain of her wrist in flames, but the one in her heart. "I was doing so well; I hadn't thought about Fikali for so long… dunes." Even her curses were weak.
She spent the rest of her cooking session and lunch break brooding.
Yet again, Aloe went to sleep after that. Each time it was easier, if not by much. But that was what mattered, that there was a change, even if it was infinitesimally small.
The next day she felt better, so she allowed herself to perform two blood infusions. With the first one the potatoes already grew, so she not only replanted some of them, but she brought the excess to another 'field' – even calling them parterres was exaggerating as she was using patches of soil – to plant them there as she still had some leftover potatoes.
"Dunes, once I have more vitality I could grow any plant on a whim." She was still far from that, but being able to grow potatoes on a handful of days without much investment was prodigious.
The envy of all cultivators, bodily and earth-wise.
Her second blood infusion of the day was used for the Aloe Veritas. It wasn't that she had any need for the plant just yet as she was going to wait before trying to evolve the new plants, but there were other aspects of the veritas that interested her.
And there was an advantage with the veritas that she couldn't exploit with the rest of the plantations. She was pushing her Forced Growth on a single plant, not multiple, which greatly increased its effectiveness.
Sure, the veritas was next to the Cure Grass, so some potency was lost here and there, but most of the blades were grown by now anyway.
With a single drop of her blood, the Aloe Veritas grew by days in question of seconds before her eyes. The leaves and its characteristic silhouette were already well-defined, and Aloe guessed it would take only two drops more for the plant to be fully grown.
"The potatoes take a drop less to be fully grown, and they are more, but they are also smaller. A grown veritas is big, I mean, it has like a radius of a meter, whereas the potatoes are slightly bigger than my fist. Is size just the only factor, or does its evolved status also influence the growth rate?"
She left the question for later as it was bound to answer itself in the future, not that she could do anything about it even if she had the answer.
After performing her daily routine, plus washing herself as she was starting to smell, sleep beckoned her once more.
Perhaps mind-dulling, but she preferred this routine to having to fight her inner djinns. Anything else was better than that.
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