Yesterday had been a hectic day. Mainly a pain-ridden one, but for Aloe, that had become the bare minimum requirement as of late.
After reinfusing the cannabis plant – and almost collapsing, Aloe took a bath on the oasis. Some days she just dipped in water, yesterday wasn’t one of those days. Her skin had been incrusted with layers upon layers of sweat and dirt, meaning that even soap had difficulties scrubbing the dirtiness away.
And let’s not talk about the dress. That piece of clothing was ruined. Fortunately, it was an old one intended for these purposes in the first place, so she would still get some utility out of it whenever she needed to roll in the dirt again.
Because the day had been so exhausting, and her mind was dazed from the extreme consumption of ter’nar tea, she ended the day after the bath. Having her body torn to shreds wasn’t new, but dealing with mental fatigue was more difficult.
And no, she did not forget to uproot the Myriad.
“I still don’t know what I expected, though,” Aloe mumbled between dates as she had breakfast.
She had left the Myriad under the desk yesterday, the plant wasn’t that big, so she just carried it into home. As for the current location, it was the spot that got least light in the house.
“I mean, yes, plants have roots. But if the leaves are glass, why not the roots too?”
To her disappointment, the Myriad’s roots were made out of... whatever material normal roots were made of. In other words, the Myriad had normal plant roots. Which was at the same time an extreme clash in contrast. On one extreme, glass. On the other, roots. Both sections joined senselessly as if a random person had just glued glass and roots together.
“Magic.” Aloe sighed, lost in thought. “But I need to do something with the Myriad because it’s still very much alive.”
Indeed, after being uprooted, the Myriad showed no degradation whatsoever. No decay, no dryness, no falling pieces of glass as if they were leaves. Simply static, unfazed by the change of scenery.
“I guess it makes sense?” She downed another date. “It was planted in the desert, there was no water nor any nutrients whatsoever to take from the soil. Where do I have it...?”
Aloe stood up and began looking around for her desk for her notes.
“Here it is.” She read the rough writing of the Myriad’s description done with the earliest tests of her Aloe Veritas ink.
Description: Member of the Doya family, a species known for their ability to survive with light alone and convert sand into glass as they grow.
“Yup, light alone.” Aloe degusted another date as she read the note. “This plant ain’t dying any time soon then.”
Which was a problem. She didn’t have any usage for the Myriad. It was only dead space and an eyesore.
Quite literally at that.
“What should I do? Bury it somewhere?” Aloe ate a date. “Throw it on the oasis?” Then another. “Wait that might not even be that bad. Maybe I could use the light from it to dive down and it shouldn’t emit much light. Not at day or night, so no random passerby would find it. Dunes, I think I might do it.”
The idea of free diving around the bottom of an illuminated oasis floor was too tantalizing to pass up.
After making her mind up (and having her arm’s worth in dates), Aloe carried the Myriad outside her home.
“Fuck.” She cursed taciturnly as soon as the load in her arms blinded her. “I haven’t thought this through enough.”
Aloe dragged the Myriad behind her, and even then, that was not enough. With great difficulty, she made it into the oasis. She had to look at the sky all the way there as even looking forward blinded her. Yes, looking at the sun was less painful than looking at the Myriad.
Once her feet met water, Aloe unceremoniously heaved the Myriad on top of her head and threw it as far as she could into the oasis.
“Welp, one problem less.” She dusted her hands and made her way to the greenhouse.
The place looked as always, the only changes were minute like the Aloe Veritas that was still leafless and nothing more.
“Are there more flowers in this cannabis?” Aloe approached the cannabis she reinfused, prodding the plant’s buds, counting for flowers. “Maybe? I can’t tell. Does this mean the ‘bountiful harvest’ infusion is working?”
She wasn’t that motivated to reinfuse the rest of the cannabis, but this discovery gave her enough of a push to cross the line and do it.
“Ugh, I don’t wanna do it.” Though more than crossing the line, she just barely stepped over it.
The day was still young and she had already done her business, so nothing was stopping her from a reinfusion session. Aloe had originally estimated that the emir would take a week to be back at Sadina, and she unfortunately had already blown more than half of that estimate. If she didn’t want to beckon her ire, she should get back as soon as possible.
And that meant getting finished with the cannabis plants.
What followed was a very taxing and thoughtless day. After being able to reinfuse a cannabis plant for the first time, she had acquired the vague idea of where the string ends met – that of the innate vitality and the infusion vitality – so it was far faster and vaguely easier to reinfuse each consequent plant.
It still was absolutely taxing.
Reinfusion may not drain her vitality, but it did put pressure on her body. So Aloe compensated for that fact by also putting pressure on her vitality.
After one or two reinfusions, Aloe made her way back home to rest and continue with the seeds’ evolution. There weren’t many remaining, so with luck, she would be done with both tasks on this day.
The only moments of respite she knew were lunch, tea break, dinner, and bathroom breaks.
“Evolution test number eleven, starting now.” Aloe chanted after having reinfused her first two cannabis plants of the day. Her hands trembled and her body protested in fatigue, but weaving vitality was thankfully a painless activity.
Most of the time.
Unsurprisingly, the seed refused her advances. Contrary to her previous disheartenment, Aloe took the failure well. She had more than enough evolutions by now. Four new plants were a lot, and two of them looked promising. Still, greed was a good trait to have, so she pushed forward.
“Evolution test number twelve, starting now.” Failure. “Evolution test number thirteen, starting now.” Another failure. “Evolution test number fourteen, starting now.” And another. “...test number fifteen, starting now.” And another one. “...number sixteen, starting now...” And another one. “...seventeen, starting... now...” Aloe bit the sand once more.
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One failure doesn’t deflate the heart, it only bolsters it. Now, seven failures in a row were a whole other subject. In this case, failure wasn’t what was bolstering the heart, but spite. Pure, unadulterated spite.
If people could do one thing, it was pushing their bodies and minds beyond all sane limits in the name of spite.
“Evolution test number eighteen! Starting now!” Aloe added with impetus. Her passion was promptly rewarded as the seed started siphoning her vitality. “Yes! Yes!” She jumped excitedly. “Aloe, relax yourself.” And quickly regained her composure lest she was to lose her concentration.
She had no fear in her mind as the seed drained her. Before her lay a bowl filled with Cure Grass pills up to the brim. She had sort of forgotten about them yesterday, leaving them on the windowsill and when she separated them from the tray, it had been difficult as the sap was far more hardened than she had expected.
This time there was no need for a pill, though.
Her hands were swift to pick up an Aloe Veritas leaf.
Species: Pilgrim of Mutations
Sobriquet: Chlorotrophy
Description: An evolved member of the Fabaceae family, a species known for its ability to change into its surroundings or unrelated flora.
Alignment: Life, Chaos
“Weird?” Aloe didn’t give the Chlorotrophy much thought – besides calling it that instead of Pilgrim of Mutations because it was too long – because she wanted to finish with the seed batch and the cannabis today.
Even though the Chlorotrophy hadn’t taken much vitality she went back to the greenhouse and continued to reinfuse whilst she waited to regenerate the vitality she had lost.
Once she had recovered after another two cannabis reinfusions, Aloe had lunch and gave the evolution tests another go.
Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three all proved failures. She struck the water again with the twenty-fourth, though.
“Oh? I’m on a spree!” Happiness was swiftly overtaken by seriousness as the seed greedily drank her vitality. Without doubting, Aloe already put the first pill in her mouth.
Remembering her previous attempts, Aloe waited to try again her tests after having had lunch. She wouldn’t like the evolution to fail because the pills took too long to digest.
The consumption rate was high, but a far cry from the Blossomflame. The first pellet went down fast, and so did the second. Using her vitality made her vitality reserves grow, ever-so-slightly. As the Cure Grass paste filled her up, she noticed how it didn’t restore as much portion of her reserves as before. These last days of continuous pressure had made her deposit grow far more than she had expected.
That didn’t mean anything for the evolution, though. She hadn’t increased her vitality threshold enough to not need copious amounts of pills. In this case, three.
It spoke a lot of how she treated herself that after draining her deposit twice, she didn’t feel any nausea or headaches. Only a mild hunger, even if she had just eaten.
“At this rate, I’m going to run out of veritas leaves again,” Aloe said once the evolution process had ended. “Maybe I should plant another one.”
This evolution was quite curious because the seed had grown significantly from its initial state. The seed had triplicated in size. There had been some changes before in seeds, but nothing so highlightable.
Aloe didn’t even need to be careful to dye the seed as her fingers were not even close to the cut on the Aloe Veritas. Ink splotches turned into words she could understand.
Species: Nature’s Bounty
Sobriquet: Thick Stump
Description: An evolved member of the Malvaceae family, a species known for its ability to spread its roots in a wide area and boost the growth rate of nearby flora.
Alignment: Life, Time
Boost the growth rate of nearby flora.
“Ah~” Aloe shrank as she read the description, her body reacting as well as her mind. “I almost peed myself.” Her body reacting far more than her mind.
Her mind collapsed with thought, it took her a full minute and ten readings to understand what she had herself.
It didn’t take her a single second after that to rush to the greenhouse and plant the seed.
Thankfully, logic returned to her mind before trying to infuse it.
“Wait, its sobriquet is ‘Thick Stump’ so maybe it’s a tree?” Not wanting to collapse on her puke, or most likely her urine considering how the situation was unfolding, Aloe waited for her vitality to regenerate.
Meanwhile, taking advantage of her location, she reinfused a few more cannabis plants. With each new reinfusion, she got a little bit faster. Not only she was growing used to the reinfusion technique, but also acquainted with the cannabis as she was reinfusing the same plant time and time again. It was a matter of seconds to find the string intersection point now instead of minutes.
Despite the fact she was bursting with the giddiness to plant the Nature’s Bounty seed, Aloe didn’t take any more pills and let nature run its course. Pun intended.
If she had done so, her stomach would now be filled with more pills, and that would mean that subsequent seeds would take more time to be digested.
“Almost done.” Aloe wiped the sweat out of her forehead as she finished with yet another cannabis reinfusion. Only one cannabis plant remained, but now it was time for an infusion, no prefixes this time.
The Nature’s Bounty seed accepted Aloe’s vitality and intent easily, she felt less resistance than normal. Instead of inquiring why, Aloe’s mind was filled with thoughts like: If this plant truly accelerates other plants' growth, how will stack with ‘accelerated growth’? Additively or multiplicatively? Does it even affect itself? Will this plant grow in days even if it’s a tree?
She was so excited that she even forgot the fact that trees usually took years to grow.
It didn’t take long for the first Cure Grass pill to go down. So the second. And the third. And the fourth. And the fifth.
“Ugh...” Aloe moaned, though she couldn’t know if it was because of the pain of the absorption, because of her exhaustion, or because her stomach was filled up with not easily digestible grass paste.
Aloe did her best to keep the pills inwards, puking would only make its slow digestion even slower.
It pained her, but the seed’s absorption speed was slow enough that it didn’t physically hurt her like how it happened with the Blossomflame. The strain mostly came from fatigue.
In and out, she breathed. Her throat was becoming swollen from all the pills she was shoving down, but she kept at it. Her well-being wasn’t high enough in her priority list to care.
Vitality continued pouring, pills continued going down.
It got bad.
It was so bad that she realized why was she even consuming the Cure Grass in the first place. She didn’t need to, she was just being childish. Munchers, said the veritas. Aloe thought as coherently as she could. No need to eat, only masticate.
She forwent her repulsion and chewed on the Cure Grass pills. As if they were candy, the hardened Aloe Vera sap crushed under her teeth, revealing the grass paste inside of it. Vitality instantly flowed into her body.
Few. Not enough. It immediately became clear that the digestion method was far more efficient than chewing, but what she needed now was speed not efficiency.
“Blergh!” Aloe spat out the grass and sap shard, barely holding her desire to puke.
Without thinking twice, she crushed another pellet with her teeth. This method had around half of the efficiency of normal digestion, besides being more gross, but its quickness couldn’t be denied.
It was straight-up instant.
Though it was making her puke.
And so she did.
Aloe was surprised she managed to hold for so long. But even when her mouth was filled with grass and bile, she needed to continue pouring pills into her mouth. The flavor was vomit-inducing, and the actual vomit didn’t help in that regard.
Fifteen pills.
It took twelve nince-damned pills to infuse the nince-damned seed.
Seven at full efficiency, around a third of her reserves; eight at half of that, so, fifteen-percent. That was all counting that she had taken them efficiently to reduce the diminishing returns, which she hadn’t. So that made her take more seeds than she would actually have needed.
Eyeballing it, adding all the pills together plus her initial deposit, it had taken four whole vitality reserves to infuse the Nature’s Bounty seed.
“Dunes... that’s eice my staring pooooi-” She added before puking again.
If her thoughts weren’t this hazy, she would worry about how tedious it would be to wash the greenhouse and her clothes. In the sludge that was her consciousness, what Aloe thought instead was: how big is this plant?
She didn’t even want to think about it. Aloe planted the infused Nature’s Bounty seed alongside the new Flourishing Spring and then Chlorotrophy in the parterre next to the cannabis one.
Then she groaned, recovered the three seeds, and replanted them in the parterre where there actually was a grown Flourishing Spring. Those seeds wouldn’t be able to sustain themselves once she went back to Sadina after all.
Her mind, body, and morale were at rock bottom, but Aloe managed to somehow keep moving. First, she cleaned her mouth with clean water, then had a bath to clean the splotches of puke on her skin. Finally, she made her way back to the greenhouse and washed the vomit. She noticed that she should have done that first as it was now crusted and it smelled foul from the closedness of the greenhouse, but there was nothing she could do about it now.
It didn’t take her long after that to reinfuse the last cannabis plants. Aloe wasn’t a workaholic – she believed that if someone loved work, they were mad – but work did keep her going, nonetheless. She preferred physical pain to mental far more.
Twilight soon greeted her.
It had been a long day, even though it was almost a blink of an eye for her.
The soup was nearly gone by now, she only had one serving left for dinner, but considering how her body was being dragged down by its own weight, Aloe wouldn’t have cared if there was no more left.
Before eating the soup, she tried to evolve the last pair of the fifty seeds Umar had gifted her.
“Evolution test... number twenty-five... starting now.” She was tired... so tired.
Unfortunately, but expectedly, thrice was not the charm.