Epsilon Twilight
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29. Plantation
🕑 Added 2024-10-22 10:54:00 +0000 UTCTo say that Aloe was motivated was an understatement. She felt as if she was in the heavens above, but she also knew not to put the ceiling before the walls.
"Okay, let's make you grow," she whispered to the Aloe Veritas seed.
This was her second time seeing Aloe Veritas seed even if it was one of her most used evolved plants, and she couldn't remember how they looked until now. As a matter of fact, she didn't know where the grown specimens stored their seeds as she had cut many leaves yet not once found them. But she knew for a fact that she was dealing with an Aloe Veritas in its ungrown state as the seed in her hand had the same coloration and refraction of the ink the mature plant produced.
"Hmm, weird," Aloe muttered as she fingered around the seed. "It looks oily, but it doesn't soil anything. No ink. No oil. Nothing. Maybe because it just looks like it and it hasn't produced any ink yet?"
Aloe was tempted to lick the seed to see if it tasted like the ink from the grown plant but ultimately, she refrained herself from doing so, mainly for fear that she may swallow the seed by mistake.
"Anyhow," she started, "time to grow you."
The good thing about Forced Growth was that the flowing stance had no real switching time like all the other stances. In a way, the time came from the vitality she was using to use her technique, which translated to time waiting to restore her vitality. This meant she basically had a one hundred percent uptime of the regeneration stance as she could now switch into it in a handful of seconds after using it constantly for these last weeks.
The cultivator forced her vitality on the oily seed, but after wasting around five mansworth, her body gave out.
"Oh, I'm too tired…" Aloe looked at her hand and noticed she had a bit of difficulty seeing it, and it wasn't because of the darkness surrounding her. "I must be doing something wrong, it makes no sense that I need to waste hundreds of mansworth to grow a single plant, especially small ones like these."
Aloe stood up and rested her back on a wall. This close to the river every surface was cold and damp, but she was too tired to walk back to the crevice she slept in.
Lazily, she reached for water and some food. She still had food for days, but days weren't enough when she needed to hide herself from assassins who were actively searching for her.
"I have that potato and I could grow it… but how much vitality will it need to grow?" She pondered the answer for a time, but alas, the only way of knowing so was trying.
For starters, Aloe started infusing the plants she intended to grow down here. She still was too exhausted to infuse more Blossomflames – which she wholly intended to – but there were others that she expected to need less. Firstly, the potato. If she really wanted the potato to be her source of food, bountiful harvest would have been the better infusion, but she doubted that the plantation would get far without shade acclimation.
As the tuber wasn't an evolved plant and its mature size wasn't that big, Aloe almost didn't feel the infusion take a toll on her. Almost. She was feeling rather lethargic as of late, and she couldn't pinpoint the cause. Was it from the cold? An old wound? The stress from the fights and the murders catching up to her?
The murderer tried not to think about it, she had avoided thinking so for a long time, but the eerie silence of the chasm gave her too much time to think.
However it may be, Aloe redirected her next efforts to the Aloe Veritas, to infuse it with shade acclimation. She was honestly prepared for the worst. Not only it was an evolved plant, but the veritas was way bigger than the Blossomflame. She didn't expect the infusion to take more than her whole reserves, and even if it did, she could stop mid-process as this wasn't an evolution, but she doubted she could take on depleting her reserves again without a longer rest.
"Ah, this does remind me that I need to evolve the grass seeds and infuse them with shade acclimation."
She practically did so in an afterthought. Even when she was just a beginner, Cure Grass hadn't presented a challenge to her. Now with her six mansworth under her belt, even less so.
Aloe evolved and infused ten seeds and planted them near the riverbed, where the soil was the softest. Ten seeds weren't much considering she was dealing with grass, but it was better than nothing. It was Karaim with the Cure Grass that had taught her that evolved plants could create offspring and populate an expansive area like the oasis had been.
For now, that would need to be enough.
Being next to the Tehen River was as close to torture as her situation got, so Aloe decided to pack her things and get back to the crevice to get a better rest.
Her intention was to only take a nap, but truth be told, she had no idea how long she had slept. Her exhaustion had been replaced by drowsiness, no matter if with recovery she had slept more hours than her body needed.
Whilst she wasn't exactly hungry, she was a bit peckish, so Aloe gnawed some jerky as she prepared to infuse the veritas. She had some vitality pills at hand, but she still was reticent to use them as their amount was limited and heavens knew when assassins would drop on her.
And considering how had been her experiences with them, she meant that quite literally.
The murderer took a deep breath and let her vitality flow into the oily seed. The thing about Infusion was that she could control the vitality output to a degree, so she slowed it as much as she could, and whilst she couldn't slow it enough to be offset by her vitality restoration – not by a long shot – her efforts weren't in vain.
As she poured vitality into the Aloe Veritas, she managed to restore a whole mansworth after putting in three of them. Not great, but quite the good pace. Her vitality, and by consequence her regeneration, would continue growing, after all.
In the end, the veritas took five mansworth, which only left her at half her deposit by regulating her flow of consumption, but she was still exhausted by the end. What affected her wasn't how much vitality was left in her reserves when she ended her evolutions or infusions, but how much vitality she had spent.
And five mansworth was practically a Blossomflame.
"Hmm, I should be able to evolve a Blossomflame without needing to use Cure Grass pellets now." Not that she was going to do so now as she had more evolved seeds that she could count in her satchels, but it did motivate her having reached that milestone. Aloe let out a yawn. "Well, time to expand the plantation."
This time she left the sleeping bag and the backpack behind as it would be a bit tedious to store everything and carry them up and down each time she wanted to go to the river. Before, she had carried the luggage with her because she feared an assassin attack, but now it should be around two days since she fought those three assassins, meaning that if they hadn't found her since then, she could lower her guard.
Slightly, at least.
Once at the riverbed, Aloe made a hole with her fingers to put the veritas seed inside and then pondered about her Forced Growth technique.
"I must be doing something wrong, I just must," she muttered whilst squatting in front of the planted seed. "If my theory about my flowing stance skill being the same as Aaliyah's… then it makes no sense at all how I need hundreds of mansworth to grow a single plant. She must have more than a hundred mansworth of deposit, perhaps a thousand, but that still wouldn't be enough to grow a parterre, let alone farmland… How does the blood of the sultanah make…"
Providence struck her as an idea blossomed in her mind.
"Blood of the sultanah… blood… vitality… It can't be right?"
But it could.
The only real way to know for certain was by trying it, so Aloe switched her internal infusion to potency – darkness filling her vision in the process – and bit her index finger. The wound was big enough to let a big droplet of blood out, but before doing so, Aloe turned her finger to face the heavens.
She needed to modify her blood first.
Instead of putting her vitality with the flowing stance directly on plants, she kept the vitality with the Force Growth intention on her blood, specifically that drop of blood trying to flow downward.
A single mansworth, not much, not enough to make a visual difference. That was how much she put in that drop.
She felt nausea and dizziness assault her as she did so. Using vitality could lead to dizziness, but she hadn't wasted enough to reach that point. The corners of her mouth curved upward; this could only mean she was on the right path.
With much expectation, Aloe turned her finger and put it on top of the hole where the infused Aloe Veritas seed was.
Then, the drop fell.
As if by magic, the soil greedily drank her blood. To dispel the darkness surrounding her, Aloe donned the sense stance again. The ground, or rather some grains of dirt, trembled. Where the hole had been, the soil was displaced and in real time a sprout grew from it.
It stopped soon after, the sprout didn't end up bigger than a fingernail, but that didn't matter at all. She had only used a single mansworth and got the progress of what would require a dozen if not more of them.
"Oh heavens," Aloe's mouth curved in a smile leagues uglier than a djinn's, that was just how much elation she was in.
A single drop of blood was enough to birth a plantation from nothing.
Comments
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
The3rd
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