Epsilon Twilight
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33. Gathering
🕑 Added 2024-10-29 11:38:23 +0000 UTCUsing up twice as much vitality as she was used to certainly took a toll on her body. Which infuriated Aloe to no end. If Aaliyah could spend hundreds of mansworth in a single blood infusion, she wouldn't allow herself to fall behind, even if her total reserves weren't anywhere near close to a hundred to begin with and the woman had half a century of head start.
It was a matter of principles.
Unfortunately, practicing and augmenting her reserves wasn't something she could speed up. Evolution took a lot from her, and blood infusion even more.
So she slept.
Sleeping was easy, but staying awake was not.
Her sleeping bag should smell like death after these many days without being washed, but even with acuity active, Aloe didn't smell it.
Days slightly blurred with one another as she repeated the same routine. She woke up, had breakfast, tended her plants, and then did whatever she could the rest of the day. Her current life was very low maintenance, so she didn't have much hunger. And the same could be said for her plantations. Because they were on the riverbed, there was no need to water them.
Her reserves slowly grew as she evolved plants, but soon she ran out of black seeds. The plantation was still there, so she would get them back in the future, but for now, she could only evolve cumin. Which was painful.
"When did it change?" Aloe drowsily asked herself. "At some point Blossomflames were hard to evolve, requiring a lot of preparation, but even then, it was only nauseating to evolve them. I would puke, but I wouldn't feel pain. So why now that I can evolve them with assistance, do I feel pain? I don't like pain. I hate it…"
The cultivator sobbed as she went on to her next task.
She was alone at the bottom of this chasm. Unlike the oasis, she had no dweller to give her company, nor she could see the sun. But if she went outside, they would pursue her…
Tiring and painful, such was her miserable existence.
Aloe continued evolving plants.
"I… if I have more vitality, I will feel less pain. It will only be a fraction of the one I feel if the vitality I consume is only a fraction of the one I have…"
That was the reason.
Her only saving grace was that she only needed to dedicate her day to evolving Blossomflames, meaning she could rest all the time. She would prefer if she didn't need to do so, but her body yearned for the breaks. Perhaps this wasn't the hardest she had pushed her vitality, but it certainly was the longest. So far, she had only gone in huge bursts of vitality spending, not sustained efforts. Aloe couldn't afford to not grow her reserves; heavens knew if the assassins would find her any day now.
Perhaps she was just lucky. Perhaps they were looking for her at this exact moment and it was only pure chance she had gone unnoticed.
It was unlikely, of course, she had been down here for days and she had not heard so much of a whisper, let alone the movements of assassins, but she couldn't help but be uneasy.
After having nearly depleted her reserves again by evolving another cumin seed, Aloe stood up. "I can't stay still; this cave is going to be the end of me otherwise." Every minute she stayed still, she could feel herself withering.
With a groan, Aloe trod the darkness of the chasm. It was hard moving around the damp cavern when her vitality still hadn't recovered, but she needed some movement in her body. Her father always said that stagnation was the worst thing it could happen, whether it was to a person or society as a whole; though she was incapable of recalling the exact words at this moment.
It only took a few minutes before she inevitably slipped and she fell to the ground. The cultivator had scratched her hand, but her body was so numb that she couldn't feel the pain. She turned back and went for the Blossomflame, and whilst the evolved flower healed her, her intention was to make use of that fire.
She still had some oil remaining in her lamp, even if it wasn't much. Now that she was growing Blossomflames she could sustain fires for longer, so she didn't think much of using her little oil for this expedition.
"This is better," she whispered to herself.
Her vitality hadn't quite been restored, but acuity was already pulling its weight by allowing her to see around the chasm as it was a bright night.
"I recall seeing some mushrooms and mold around here…" She stopped in her tracks and pondered on her words. "No, not mold. It's another thing. They have a name, but I can't quite remember it. I've got it on the tip of my tongue… ugh…"
Unable to recall the name of the plant she had seen, Aloe strolled next to the river whilst searching for the local flora. Perhaps they could be edible, but her intentions with them were obvious.
She wanted to evolve them.
If there was one thing that always fixed her mood, that was finding new evolutions.
Technically speaking, she had done so with the living stones before she fell into the chasm, but she was mansworth away before she could make any solid attempt.
"I also need more vitality pills, and I do have the Cure Grass already, but I rather not eat the grass directly… I guess I could grow an aloe vera, but that means growing even more plants." Aloe groaned in exhaustion at the idea of managing more plantations.
The problem with her current method of growing plants was that it was very vitality-intensive and taxing. She couldn't just perform blood infusions all the time, otherwise, she may lose all her vitality before she killed herself from overworking.
"Who would have thought that it was this difficult to grow plants without sunlight?" She continued talking to herself, if not, her ears would start ringing from the silence.
Not that it was dead silent this close to the river, but her brain had long filtered the noise of the flowing water.
"I've only been here a few days, right?" Truth be told, she had no idea.
Her body was mortality exhausted by the constant use of vitality, but she worried more for her mind which was slowly withered away by the constant darkness. Sometimes she would just hurt herself to light the Blossomflame. Those magical flames not only brought her some change in her monotony, but they were also beautiful in their contained destruction.
Unlike the fires of the Blossomflame, the flame of the oil lamp wasn't warm. It was hot. The difference may seem to lie only in semantics, but the Blossomflame would never harm her, this fire – on the other hand – definitely could and would if given the chance.
Aloe was very tempted to burn herself with that small flame, a part of her mind whispered to her to do so; but logic won, and she simply continued to walk.
She didn't start to gather any plants until her vitality reserves finally filled back up. Being topped certainly helped with her vision, but there was a mental component. As if ninety-nine percent of her reserves and being full were worlds apart, even if that wasn't the case at all.
After many days, her eyes had already adapted to the darkness, and with the help of the lamp and acuity, Aloe didn't have much difficulty guiding herself around the chasm and gathering plants.
The first one she found was a green substance growing on a rock akin to mold.
"No, it isn't mold. Ugh!" Aloe groaned in frustrated agony. "Why can't I remember the name?"
Still unable to recall the plant's name, the petite woman scratched the surface of the rock with her knife and put the scraps of the plant inside one of her satchels. She'd rather not evolve any plants outside the comfort of her camp, last time she evolved a plant outside it… ended up well, but better not to tempt luck again.
The next item she gathered was some sort of white mushroom with a thick stem and flat head.
"Mushroom or fungi? I remember reading the difference, but I can't recall it… I… damn… Today I'm a bit slow-minded."
Aloe sat down and had a gulp of fresh river water. She had already decided that at the faintest sign of aches or cramps, she would switch to toughness so the river water wouldn't kill her. Five minutes into her break, some semblance of coherent thought finally made it through her sluggish mind.
"Okay, so fungi are like the root or what's underneath and the mushroom is like… the fruit? I don't really know, mushrooms are… weird."
She had read many botanical texts from time to time, and one thing was certain about these little specimens. They confounded the scholars. Mushrooms felt and looked like plants, but they weren't plants. They possessed no flowers, or seeds, or needed sunlight to grow. It was as if they were their own thing. But that was for the scholars to discuss, for what Aloe respected, fungi were plants.
"Instead of seeds, fungi use spores to propagate," Aloe mussed, more or less paraphrasing a treaty she had read a while ago. "This means if I want to evolve them, I would need to focus these spores, which should be on the little folds underneath the mushroom's cap."
Evolution needed the ungrown state of a living being, so if she didn't know about spores, Aloe would have been unable to evolve any type of fungi no matter how hard she tried.
For now, she cut one of the white mushrooms and put it on a satchel. According to her very limited and second-hand knowledge, there should have been more than enough spores for all her lifetime in that single cap as fungi germinated in the hundreds instead of tens like most plants.
As the lamp's flame started to dim, Aloe made her way back to the camp, though did so from the other side of the riverbed. She was partially scared of jumping across the Tehen River, but she waited until the river tightened and the flow was calmer, in case she fell inside.
Which she didn't, but there was no reason to take risks.
But considering the amount of water flowing through the river, the Tehen was deeper than it was wider, which made it way scarier and intimidating if she ever fell inside. There she would find another ravine, only more narrow, colder, and devoid of air.
On her way back, she collected two other mushrooms. One black and brown, and one gray and grown. Perhaps they were the same ones as colors were very muted with the limited light at her disposal, but she considered against that idea as she found them in different colonies.
"Lichen!" Aloe shouted in a stroke of brilliance. The constant refreshing and usage of botanical terms brought the word she had been searching for all this time. "It isn't mold, but lichen!"
Being able to remember such a little thing brought joy to her withering mind, more than the gathering of many new plants.
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