The soup was hot.

That wasn’t to say she hadn’t expected the soup to not be hot, but she meant that there was nothing else highlightable from the bowl of water, potatoes, beans, and jerky. Aloe sighed as she left the bowl on the ground.

Instead of eating at her desk, she decided to sit down at the doorway to observe the oasis as she ate. The sight was more tasteful than the food. After sleeping for so many hours these last days – even when she was staying in Sadina – she opted for getting as much fresh air as possible. Of course, fresh was a relative word as the sun thrashed the suns.

“I don’t understand how winter can be cold in Loyata and other countries,” Aloe commented whilst hunchback as she rested her head on her hands. “I mean, it does get sometimes actually cold during the night, but they speak of all-time cold during the winter... Figures.”

She stood up and poured herself another serving. The soup didn’t deserve another serving, but her stomach needed that fuel. She had eaten too little for a girl like her that was still growing.

As she sat back down, Aloe noticed Fikali starting to eat herself. However, instead of indulging in doubtful quality soup, she was having her share of lush Cure Grass.

“Well, it was time for the sleeping peon to wake up.” Then she took a spoonful of her soup. “Ugh, that is looking way more appetizing than this,” Aloe added even though the last time she had Cure Grass she gagged and did everything in her ability to not have to taste it.

She played with the pellets in her satchel.

“I have a lot of seeds to evolve now, but let’s just hope I don’t need to take any of these bad girls.”

After enjoying of a good rest and a mediocre lunch, Aloe put the lid on the cauldron and left the wooden bowl on the kitchenette counter. She was not going to clean the bowl because a thing called dinner existed and she may as well reuse it.

“Alright, let’s do this.” She added unenthusiastically as she sat down on the only chair in the house.

There were less than a handful of seeds, but seeds were small, and even this small quantity would take her ages to categorize. The first part of her plan was to play the biggest and most complex game of pairs she had ever seen. Not only most seeds looked alike, but this type of game was normally limited to a dozen cards, not half a hundred of very similar items.

There were three major ways to distinguish seeds from each other: color, size, and shape. Color was the most visual and easy of them, so Aloe started from there.

The most common colors were black and brown – regardless of light or dark – but there were some outliers. Some were rather reddish, or just straight-up red. They weren’t few enough to separate them with color enough, but they formed their own tidy group. The easiest to classify was the only pair of white seeds.

“That’s one less.” Aloe expressed with a bit of vigor, even if her voice was dead. Classifying seeds was not fun.

The result of color separation ended up with five groups: blackish, light brown, dark brown, reddish, and white.

At first, she decided to go with size next, but as the white seeds – the only pair she had connected yet – differed a bit from the size to each other, she considered it was not a reliable variable to take into account.

Whilst not as visually striking as color, shapes were still easy enough to identify. The most distinct groups were: spherical, ovoid, flat, and miscellaneous. These shapes would have probably meant something to a farmer or a scholar, but for Aloe, they were just ways to finish this stupid self-imposed game – or rather, forcefully imposed by Umar’s part – as soon as possible.

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“Oh, cumin!” Only now Aloe noticed the very distinctive elongated white and black seeds. Her mind had been autonomous behavior, parsing through colors and shapes like a three-year-old. “That’s another pair less to classify, nice!”

The five original-colored groups now became many more once those colors were also ordered by their shape. She ended up with a total of thirteen groups, and considering there were only around fifty seeds, most of her job was already done.

“That was way faster and easier than I expected,” Aloe commented as she put the cumin and white seeds away from the seedy mess as they were already paired up. “It shouldn’t take much time to pair the rest up!”

It took a lot of time to pair the rest up.

Because she had worked mindlessly, her sorting methods hadn’t been exactly precise. So even if most groups were composed of two pairs of seeds, maybe those pairs weren’t correct. Size did not help at all because seeds could – rather obviously in retrospect – have any size they wanted.

The hardest to pair were the browns because they looked identical. Not fully dark, not fully light. Not fully spherical, not fully ovoid. It was a total mess. Even when she left those for later, when she came back after having paired up the rest, her eye which should have been trained by now noticed no differences.

“Okay, I give up.” She pushed the brown seeds in one corner of the desk and forgot about them. “I’ll just deal with them later. I have a deposit full of vitality and it needs to be consumed.”

Aloe didn’t expect to drain her reserves fast. Evolution was a rather chaotic and unexpected field. Some seeds evolved whilst others did not. She hadn’t been able to evolve potatoes and beans but had found no problem with bananas. Even if the end product had literally nothing to do with the original plant.

“I still cannot come around to the idea that the Myriad came from a banana seed. Talking about the Myriad...” Aloe gazed outside the window and looked at the sun. “Hmm, still too early. I’ll go later to pluck out the plant.”

But as she turned her attention to the paired seeds, her eyes locked into another kind of pair.

“Oh...” She smacked her lips. “Yeah, I forgot to water them, haven’t I?”

What Aloe had seen were the pots where she had planted her Cure Grass seeds when she was originally testing how different infusion typings worked. One had been infused with ‘bountiful harvest’ whilst the other with ‘fast growth’.

Nonetheless, both were dead.

Not only she had not watered the pots for the four days she had been away, but far earlier than that too. She kind of just forgot they existed.

She sighed. “Well, they held more than I expected. The blades only look dry instead of fully dead and the grass must have been in the sun for weeks without being watered. Kind of impressive.”

Aloe grabbed the pots from the windowsill and then she unceremoniously scattered the dirt on the entrance.

“Back to business.”

She could have surely done some experiments on the near-dead plants, like if she could infuse them to revive them again or something. But that would have required the skill to reinfuse plants, a skill that she had yet to learn, and Karaim’s cultivation technique showed no light on how to acquire it. Her only thought on the dried Cure Grass was to throw them away so they didn’t stench the house.

Aloe smelled herself.

“Yeah, I got enough stench here.” She groaned in a mixture of pain and exhaustion. “I’ll take a bath when I run out of vitality.”

She grabbed the white seeds first just for the sheer virtue of being the first seeds she paired up together. Aloe took a deep breath and felt the vitality on her body. These previous days her inner coolness had felt perturbed and weak, but now it refreshed her as always. Her body – and mind – may not be at their peak level, but her vitality certainly was.

Concentration.

Intention.

Evolution.

That was the only thing she needed to mutate the structure of a common seed into a fantastical being, just to concentrate on the intention to make it evolve.

Simple as that.

Aloe poured her vitality and intention on one of the white seeds and...

Nothing.

As if her vitality had crashed headfirst against a stone wall, the seed refused her call to evolve.

Aloe sighed. “As expected.”

The girl didn’t know much about the vital arts, the magic that contained the magics of Evolution, Infusion, and most likely the powers of the royals, but even in that lagoon of uncertainty she was sure of what logic Evolution followed.

None.

No matter if she felt like a seed had a great chance to evolve or even tried to guess the outcome of that evolution, the arcane chaoticism of Evolution – if that was even a word – impeded her from developing a flowchart or building some theories on the working of the vital art.

There was only one way forward.

Trial and error.