Epsilon Twilight
patreon
31. Growth
🕑 Added 2024-10-25 11:49:45 +0000 UTCIt was just a drop of blood, she had shed many others if just to set ablaze the Blossomflame, yet this one in particular tired her to no end. Aloe collapsed on the ground on her bottom, her eyes still locked with the sprout before her.
"Something's wrong," she peered at her hands, which slightly trembled. "There's more here than just putting vitality on my blood, more than spending it…"
She had no idea what exactly the case was, only that she felt drained. Enough so to not be able to do a follow-up test.
The cultivator donned the recovery stance and filled her belly with food and water. Not even the dry meat could make her recover her energy, nor the frigid water vanish her lethargy.
For now, Aloe went back to her dry crevice and slept.
In what seemed a blink, she woke up completely rested, not having a way to check for how long she had slept.
"I… how long have I been down here?" The petite woman questioned as she effortlessly trekked across the tight cavern passage back to the river. "I feel like I've only been a day down here, but it must have been way longer. I mean, I slept at least thrice here…"
She decided to ignore those thoughts, if more time went by without her noticing, the better. With any luck, that would mean that the assassins would lower their guard in the future and she could go past them unnoticed.
"So what was I doing?" She mused once she arrived at the river. Today the darkness of the chasm felt ever-so-slightly darker.
The veritas sprout remained basically as she had left it, but the Cure Grass had shown some minimal growth. Which made sense, as it was grass and she had left them untouched.
"Hmm…" Aloe squatted in front of a pathetic growth of evolved grass and pushed a mansworth through normal Forced Growth. "Yeah, small plants grow way faster." She said after she almost had a fully grown blade of grass in her hands. "I guess I should be evolving all my grass seeds into Cure Grass so they grow naturally."
It was a trivial effort to evolve and infuse all the Cure Grass seeds, no matter if there were hundreds of them. With the recovery internal infusion, she regenerated a whole mansworth in a handful of minutes and when she was a newbie in the vital arts, she could already evolve tens of grass seeds with her pitiful reserves. Considering how stances worked by boosting existing traits and she was a master at using vitality compared to the sultanzade, even her meager reserves meant her regeneration stance was a force to reckon with. Albeit only on the vitality restoration side of the stance. Vitality was not an issue.
The real bottleneck was time.
Evolution had a limited draining rate, so she couldn't just evolve seeds faster. She could evolve them in bulk though. By definition, Evolution was the act of pushing vitality into undeveloped living beings with the intent of transforming them. Nothing stated that you could only evolve one at a time if you threw a wave of vitality at them.
The same was true for Infusion. The Cure Grass seeds were so trivial that she evolved the hundreds she had at her disposal in just a couple of rounds. The endeavor did leave her a bit tired, though she couldn't tell if it was for the vitality usage or the effort of the myriads of evolutions and infusions she had casually performed.
To rest, Aloe started seeding the riverbed with the hundreds of seeds, only putting them underground by a fraction of a fingernail. Most people wouldn't consider gardening as an activity to rest, perhaps a noble lady with some liking for botany, but since her first days at the greenhouse, nurturing and cultivating plants allowed Aloe to pass the time without even noticing.
The cold and the dampness of the environment – not even considering the darkness – did ruin the mood a bit, but at least her blanket was now dry, which helped keep her body heat. Once she no longer felt the pressure of the vital arts on her body, the cultivator restarted her experiments.
"The blood of the sultanah is known to turn deserts into farmlands," she narrated to herself, "having said so, I should be able to turn this small patch of soil more fertile with a single drop."
Aloe repeated the same steps as before: she switched to potency, bit her finger, switched to the flowing stance, infused vitality in the pouring blood, and finally let the drop fall onto the soil.
A simple process indeed, but it was strenuous. As the Forced Growth was completed and the blood left her body, Aloe felt her vision wane once more, the darkness becoming faintly thicker.
"Hmm…" Vague ideas flourished in her mind, but she didn't utter them yet. If she was right, she would need more samples either way.
The subject at hand now was the soil beneath her. The Aloe Veritas had grown faster with her infused blood than with just the Forced Growth technique even if the amount of vitality provided had been the same, but it was far from enough to grow it.
The same couldn't be said for the Cure Grass.
There was a big difference between a plant nearly as big as her and a handful of grass, and it showed. With her first attempt at infused blood, she had only grown the veritas by a bit; but with her second attempt… it seemed there was more than enough vitality for a single blade of blade as in a wave, the surrounding blades started to grow too.
As far as vital arts went, this wasn't the flashiest display of magic, but it left Aloe without words, nonetheless. She saw multiple blades of grass grow in real time before her, growing millimeters per second until they finally settled in their fully grown state a few seconds later.
The grown grass blades nearly formed a perfect circle, with the blades at the center the most grown, and the ones at the edges being just sprouts.
Aloe couldn't help but smile at the sight of the growth. It wasn't the healing fire of the Blossomflame, nor the second sun of the Myriad, or even the winds sultanzade could apparently summon with the flowing stance, but this…
She giggled.
"Doesn't this magic put me at her level?" It was a pathetic excuse of a replica, but technically speaking, she had shown the prowess of Aaliyah.
Of the sultanah of Ydaz.
Her body was ecstatic in giddiness, but she knew better. Her vitality was still far away from most sultanzade, let alone the sultanah. And she also had to progress in the vital arts. There were many things from Evolution – her own vital art – that she didn't know, and perhaps there was a plant more powerful than the Blossomflame out there.
Which was hard to imagine after all the feats of strength a single flower had accomplished.
"There's a big leap between a patch of grass and a farmland but…" Aloe giggled. She giggled out of joy. "It's not an insurmountable one."
So she got to work.
This wasn't just about the growth of her plants and plantations, but also personal growth. She needed more vitality.
For a while now she had known that the more expensive it was to evolve a plant, the more vitality it would grant her, so she didn't bother with things like Cure Grass, but she didn't have unlimited supplies of seeds like black seeds or cumin, so that was her next objective.
A few steps downriver, Aloe infused a handful of those seeds with acclimation.
The good thing about black seeds and cumin was that in their grown state, they were just flowers, barely a step above herbs. They certainly weren't a colossal type of flower like the Flourishing Spring, which reached a meter with ease, or a Blossomflame that had a diameter of almost half a meter if she left the leaves to grow free.
For the time being, she focused her efforts on the black seeds and their plants. She wasn't at that point where she could evolve Blossomflames nonstop yet, and unlike the black seeds, she had plenty of unspent cumin.
Aloe watered the planted black seeds with a single drop of her blood, and that seemed to be her limit, as she fell to the ground from her squat, her head spinning.
Blood infusion was leagues above any vital art magic she had performed, especially on how much it taxed her body.
As she rested for the umpteenth time of the day, Aloe was reminded of her mortality. Thankfully not menstruation – she at the very minimum still had two weeks before that – but other bodily functions.
"How long has it been since I've defecated? Or peed?" Truth was, she didn't know.
Her body still was processing the encounters with the assassins, let alone her mind, and until now she had been on edge. She had been days without evacuating, which couldn't be healthy at all.
To preserve the sanctity of her meager refuge, Aloe walked downriver for a while and then let nature run its course.
Doing one's business on the desert was simple and clean, you had an infinite litterbox in your hand's reach. But she was in the Qiraji no longer.
Aloe had to… well… she was grateful there was plenty of water to thoroughly clean herself, no matter how cold it may be.
Now that she was on a cleaning spree, Aloe took the time to undress herself and wipe her body with a towel. Jumping into the river to wash herself like she had done so much in the oasis was not an option. She may have the strength and several other physical qualities of seven people, but swimming in the Tehen River would definitely kill her.
Fortunately, she had a spare set of clothes, the torn desert garb she had used to get to Selen. Which weren't much, but they covered her and that was what mattered. Carefully, she rinsed and washed her stripped clothes on the river. She wasn't sure if fur should be washed on water, and now that she thought of it, she should have asked to the tailor before buying Loyatan traveling clothes.
Frustratingly enough, it ended up being harder to find a place to let the clothes dry than washing them. To let them dry she had to do the whole journey to her crevice, where it was dry, then find small protrusions on the wall that would be strong and big enough to support the heavy and slippery wet clothes.
Having them dry this close to the cave walls would probably leave them dirtier than they were before, but at least now they were free of her bodily fluids. By that, she meant mostly sweat, but there was some blood here and there from the much mistreatment she had endured during her fights against the assassins. Especially the first one that had left a torn sleeve she couldn't fix.
She hadn't expected it, but it ended up being quite a productive day. She had cleaned up herself, washed her clothes, calmed herself enough to empty her vowels, planted three different plantations, and progressed on her quest for personal growth. Maybe, and just maybe, it had been more mental than physical.
Which wasn't a bad thing at all.
Comments
The3rd
Infinite cookies are here ♾️🍪
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
