Epsilon Twilight
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28. Namesake
🕑 Added 2024-10-19 13:06:25 +0000 UTCEven with these many boons, Aloe didn't let her hopes get too high. Soon enough she detected a critical problem, sunlight, or the lack thereof.
"Plants need sunlight to grow," this wasn't just common sense talking, but some of the scripts and treatises she had read from time to time in the library of Sadina, both from the palace and the university. "How do I solve this problem?"
Aloe didn't consider herself an intelligent person. Resourceful and wise, but not precisely intelligent. But it was that resourcefulness that she needed right now to solve her issues.
"Drilling a hole in the ceiling is not an answer, I don't know how thick the cave ceiling is, nor how far away it is. Hells, I don't even have tools to drill it," her resourcefulness was proving exceedingly effective. She groaned. "If I still had a Myriad with me… a stray glint of light would be enough to bring the sun down here…"
Alas, the plant had stayed at the oasis. And whilst she knew how to evolve it, she didn't have a banana at her disposal, and going out to buy one wasn't an option when her trail was still this hot. Maybe after a few days, if not weeks, she would give it a second thought.
"Maybe… maybe I'm focusing the problem with a wrong angle," Aloe pondered. "Do I really need sunlight in the first place?"
She recalled her early experiments with the Force Growth flowing stance technique and when she grew the Blossomflame back at the oasis most of the process had occurred at night. Not much sunlight in sight.
"Because I do the growing for the plants myself, I don't think I need the sunlight," she theorized. "I still have soil and water to maintain them, but to be honest, I need to run more experiments, maybe not even soil is needed to cultivate plants with Forced Growth, I just did it because I felt like it. And either way, I wanted to keep the Blossomflame alive."
With this piece of information, she sensed her reality enlightening a bit. The darkness in her heart and mind was slightly pushed away.
"I need to perform more tests," for once, she spoke with eagerness in her voice. "But first, sunlight."
She had given up on the idea of obtaining sunlight this deep underground, but she would prefer if her plants – future and present – didn't wilt from lack of it. And she believed she had a way to counter this, or at least, lessen the effect.
"There's resistance to drought and the elements, so there must be resistance to sunlight…" Aloe frowned and stopped for a moment to think her words. "No, that's not quite right. It shouldn't be resistance to sunlight, but the effects from lack of sunlight, do they have a word? Hmm… it sounds stupid, but I need a clear image and a clear name for the infusion to stick."
That was why her previous attempts to discover the stances that the imperials already knew had failed. Because she hadn't had quite the right image. Though in this case, her problem was with external infusions rather than internal ones.
"How about… solar stockpiling?" She muttered to herself. "No that's not quite right. They can't stockpile sunlight if there's none… ehrm, photosynthetic reduction? Oh heavens, that's even worse, it sounds as if I'm crippling the plant instead of bolstering it. And photosynthetic substitution? But no, this implies I'm substituting the sunlight with something, whilst my intention is to make them need less if not at all…"
Aloe knelt on the ground and led her hands to her head, scrubbing her still-wet hair in search of answers. The longer she spent with them, the more furious her scrubbing became.
"Raaaaaaaaah!" The cultivator groaned in exasperation. "Why is this hard to come up with a term for the infusion?"
She collapsed on the ground, tired from thinking this hard about what should have been an afterthought. Time was hard to measure here, but she had at least dedicated a solid quarter of an hour to this foolishness at the very least.
"Honestly, I give up…" her voice was low and defeated. "Maybe I should go with something simple like resistance to darkness, even if it's not wholly correct as it's the absence of light that affects plants rather than the presence of darkness…"
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that she was on the verge of gouging her eyeballs out.
"I…" she smacked her lips together. They were paradoxically damp and dry at the same time. "Shade acclimation? I've heard that in some dense forest of Loyata or Pincerare the foliage is so thick that some plants receive no sunlight, but they still flourish." Aloe squinted her eyes and tilted her head to the side. "Not bad, not bad… Not exactly perfect, but I believe it gets the work done."
Aloe stood up with a groan and grabbed the Blossomflame.
"Alright, shade acclimation external infusion test begins… now," the cultivator poured her vitality into the evolved flower with the intention of donning her an infusion with said name.
The Blossomflame took in her vitality, which was a good signal. Infusion was more predictable than Evolution as it only needed an amount of vitality proportional to the plant's mature state to be infused instead of a rather value. However, in the case of evolved plants, that value was twice as big.
A few seconds later, the Blossomflame stopped taking in more vitality, only having consumed a handful of mansworth. Enough to significantly dim Aloe's vision as acuity lost most of its power, but not enough to make her dazed or, heavens forbid, make her puke.
"Alrighty…" Aloe tried putting more vitality into the plant with a half-cost infusion like resistance to drought, but as not even a grain more of vitality fit into the Blossomflame, she guessed shade acclimation was a full-cost infusion. "The Blossomflame is infused, that much I can see. But with what?"
The only way to check for a plant's infusion was to manually verify the effects, which was difficult and time-draining as most effects were subtle or took time to verify their effects.
If one was doing it the non-magical way, that was.
"I need a veritas, like right fucking now," Aloe said in frustration.
Mostly because she was reminded of the fact that she had lost her Aloe Veritas.
Aloe took out all the necessary materials from her backpack. She had bought multiple aloe vera seeds a while ago to get an Aloe Veritas, but this was the first time she had a chance to evolve one with everything that had happened. She recalled evolving one ages ago to test Karaim’s words, but the memory was a muddy one.
"Karaim explained that he evolved the Aloe Veritas and the ter'nar by mistake on his cultivation technique diary," Aloe narrated to herself to refresh her mind. "He only managed to find their evolutions when he tripped and the seeds merged with a book or something like that, I can't remember it."
Which spoke at great lengths of Aloe's current mental state as she had read the diary multiple times, and she had gone as far as reading it every day during those first weeks at the oasis.
"What matters is that he found out there were some conditions to some evolutions. I think I gave that phenomenon a name… but I also can't remember it," Aloe sighed exhausted at her forming headache.
The cultivator took out a booklet she had bought dirt cheap on Selen. The pages were gnawed and the ink-work was messy, nor she had bothered to read what the book was about. After all, it would probably end in a worse state than now when she was done.
"Okay, okay," she comforted herself as she put the booklet and the aloe vera seed on the same hand. "Aloe Veritas evolution test begins," she performed her usual dramatic stop, "now!"
Instantly, the seed began drinking from her vitality reserves.
That was good, but she got worried from the speed the aloe vera was siphoning vitality from her. It was mostly stress speaking as after she gave it half a thought, she realized the draining rate was lower than the Blossomflame.
Not by much, though.
Aloe panted as the seed took her vitality and she was still exhausted from the Blossomflame's infusion. She had long restored her reserves to not get caught with low vitality whilst evolving – she would never ever make that mistake again – but the exhaustion from using up vitality still lingered in her body.
"Ugh…" Aloe groaned and collapsed, palms to the ground. Then, slowly, she raised the hand that had been grabbing the seed. She looked at the booklet and it now had a hole spanning several pages downwards. The cultivator turned her hand and opened her hand, a seed lay in her palm.
Pure black.
Coated with oily ink.
"Yes!" She turned her head to face the heavens and jumped on the spot with unfiltered euphoria. "Yes, yes, yes! I have an Aloe Veritas again!"
Her inner flame grew bigger still. Nothing will douse it. She was going to be indomitable, ceaseless, unstoppable. All because she had a seed sharing her namesake in her hands.
Comments
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
The3rd
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