Disregarding the events of her coming of age, Aloe felt good. These last days she had been feeling horrible as she told herself that it all had been her fault, that she had abandoned her mother, even if she had never uttered those words to herself. The cruelest of thoughts were those that came without words, those made from only raw instinct and pain.
But as she cried her loss, Aloe finally saw reality for all that it was.
Life.
She wouldn’t have liked anything to come at this point, but Shahrazad’s death was but an accident. But most importantly, out of her control. Even if she hadn’t stayed at the greenhouse and instead helped her mother, Aloe doubted she could have done more to save her than the emir’s physicians.
Still, it hurt not being with her mother in her final moments.
Scars may not heal, but they build character. Aloe was a changed woman, and instead of running away from it, she decided to embrace it. She was now alone, but she wouldn’t let that fact scare her away.
What scared her more were taxes, anyway.
“Yeah... I will need the money from the cannabis.” Before she had thought of planting cannabis for an extra coin, but now, it was a necessity. “If I only had the house’s ledgers, I could have a better estimate of the situation.”
Considering her unstable mental state when she departed from Sadina, she didn’t even blame herself for not thinking about it, even when a person in her current state blaming themselves was the first and easiest option at their disposal. There were multiple taxes to be paid, but city land property tax was the one that scared her the most.
“There are three alternatives to keep being able to pay the bills.” She accounted for not only taxes but also food and necessities as she scribbled with her veritas-soaked feather. “First, marrying a rich old man.” It took all her might to hold her laughter. “Haha, not possible. Even if I wanted to, that’s the hardest of the possibilities. I hate to say it, but I don’t have the skills nor assets to seduce anyone.”
Though it was true not many people would find Aloe attractive, that was more of her inferiority complex speaking. Inferiority in more than one subject.
“Second, keep growing plants.” That was desirable if she wanted to keep practicing the vital arts, but there were some inconveniences. “The two things that I can sell are veritas ink or cannabis, but I still don’t know how profitable either of them can be. Normally drugs come from huge plantations, so I may not even dent a significant profit. As for the ink, it may be worthless until Tamara’s contact tells me otherwise.”
Aloe scratched off some text in the parchment. There was another alternative with the plants, but that required some of the newly evolved seeds to work as she believed, and that was pulling the string and hopes a bit too much for her liking.
“Third, becoming a scribe.” Even though it had been her mother’s profession and perhaps a direct upgrade from her forgone job as a banker, Aloe couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable. “I... why does the idea of becoming a scribe scare me this much?”
The reason was obvious, even if she didn’t want to utter the words. Being at the mercy of the emir, at her range and claws, didn’t make her comfortable.
“It’s not like I have to keep the house, right?” That was true. If Aloe decided to do so, she could live in the oasis without problems or taxes.
Karaim owned her lands, and by his will, they passed down to her when he died. And per Ydazi desert land-ownership law – full ownership, mind you – she had no need to pay taxes. Such laws were made so nobles didn’t have to pay taxes, but if a nobody managed to acquire land, then the country couldn’t tax them as the law applied to everybody. Even if she had studied law during her education and training as a banker and such knowledge told her that was the better alternative, forgoing her home in Sadina was out of the question.
“I can’t do that to them.” Aloe caressed her cayora, she still wore it since yesterday. She tried to sniff the scent of her mother, but the brutality of the desert – with its dryness and heat – had eroded all of Shahrazad’s traces. “I can’t sell the house.”
If that meant becoming an emir’s fiddle or even selling drugs straight to the assassins, that was fine by her. Family meant a lot more to her now that she had none to hold onto, honoring their memory was the best Aloe could do.
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Since she steeled her resolution, the days quickly passed by. There was nothing else she could do now besides rest, and even herself knew she needed it. Her body and mind had been in constant strain even before her mother’s death, so whilst three weeks of little to no labor didn’t resolve everything, they helped greatly.
However, there was one remarkable event in that rather uneventful period. It started with her lack of Aloe Veritas leaves.
“I’m almost again without leaves.” Aloe sighed as she looked inside the jar where she stored them. “I should plant another one, if not for the leaves, for the possibility that the ink business plan goes through.”
She wasn’t that sure about the last point, but she regardless searched for Aloe Vera seeds.
“I recall seeing Aloe Vera seeds somewhere...” Aloe mussed as she stood up. That place was none other than the pantry. “Yup, here’s a pot full of them.”
Aloe didn’t give it much thought and brought the whole pot to the desk, though as she sat down, a sense of dread – mostly nervousness – overtook her.
“I... I’ve never evolved an Aloe Veritas before.” She stated the obvious. “It’s not going to take a lot of vitality, right?” Even if she had evolved several other plants right after, the Blossomflame incident still lingered in her body. “Let’s think it logically... If Karaim was able to evolve an Aloe Vera seed, it couldn’t have been more than twice my vitality, right?” That second ‘right’ came with a bit more exasperation.
Logically speaking, Aloe was right. She had already guessed Karaim didn’t have much vitality, otherwise, he would have bitten the sand earlier. And neither did he mention passing out nor vomiting because of strenuous vitality usage, so that meant he was dealing with low-cost plants.
There also existed the possibility that he had tremendous amounts of vitality so he had never passed out or experimented anything close, but Aloe didn’t allow that thought to even fully bloom.
Just in case, Aloe left the new Cure Grass pills close at hand.
“Alright, time to make some magic plants.” Aloe pushed vitality into the Aloe Vera seed in her hand. “Huh?” And then she instantly got blocked off.
Before any more sounds left her mouth, Aloe blinked thrice and tried to pour vitality into the seed once more. The result is the same.
“Am I stupid?” That was her first thought. “Have I drunk a bit of dumb juice?” And that her second
Instead of denigrating herself even more, she left the seed on the table and picked up another one from the pot in the weird case that some random unevolvable seed had shuffled its way inside the pot even if it looked identical to the rest of Aloe Vera seeds.
The new seed declined her advance again.
“Uh...” Aloe opened her mouth to speak but closed it before a word left it. She waited for a moment to reflect and ponder. “It can’t be... right?”
She had the faintest idea of what was happening. It had to do with Karaim’s cultivation technique. In the earlier pages, Karaim mentioned how he had managed to evolve the Aloe Veritas and the Na’mul Ter’nar in a curious manner. Back then she dismissed it as the exaggeration of an old dying man, but now...
“Uhm...” Aloe reread the passage aloud. “Alike every other Evolved plant, I began affecting an Aloe Vera with my vital energy but it wasn’t until I dropped by mistake a recently cut aloe vera leaf and some seeds into an old tome. Most of the seeds became inert and lifeless, but a single seed pod had changed. Though the leaf in question had also mutated.”
Even though she had just spoken the worst and had read this quote multiple times before, yet only now processed the meaning of it all.
“It cannot be... can it?” The idea sounded so ridiculous that it did a full loop and then half more to appear true. “Are there evolutions blocked behind certain requirements?”
Instead of feeling excited by the possibilities offered by this discovery, Aloe only felt dread.
“Oh heavens...” Her eyes shot wide open. “Are you telling me that all the seeds I haven’t been able to evolve have some cryptic requirements so they can actually evolve?”
That emotion that she was feeling, that was making her tear up with dread, was called anxiety.
“Just kill me.”
That was how Aloe was. Even if this discovery only presented positives – there were more evolutions than she thought, after all, which meant more opportunities – she could only feel the pressure of all the possibilities she had thrown at the window and the paths she had torched behind her because she didn’t know everything was evolvable.
“I...” Aloe stopped talking, lest she was going to stress herself out. Alternately, she opted for trying if the Aloe Veritas evolution worked.
‘Old tome’ was a vaguely defined concept, and whilst Karaim did have some books – which she hadn’t even touched – Aloe grabbed one of the parchments she had used to test veritas ink in lieu of wasting a good book.
“How do I do this?” Her best idea was to wrap the Aloe Vera seed on the parchment and just infuse it.
And it worked.
“It fucking works. Of course.” She cursed as the seed drank her vitality with the same greediness that accompanied Evolution.
She sounded like a tired storyteller by now, but the seed’s eagerness paled in comparison with that of the Blossomflame. The Aloe Vera took around half of her vitality to evolve. And Karaim was right, the seed had mutated. It looked far differently than it did when it was a normal aloe, no longer a Vera, but a Veritas.
There was a joke there, but Aloe ignored it.
“Dunes...” The discovery of the requirements for evolutions opened a bigger playing field, but what should have been only positives ended up taking a huge toll on Aloe’s mental health.
What followed were two days of extreme paranoia as she thought about what items could make the failed seeds evolve.