Aloe woke up to the plucking of a burrowing owl that was trying to eat her eyeballs. All in all, she had way worse awakenings. Because she had passed out whilst donning toughness, the owl had no chance of getting her juicy eyeballs. Any shape or form of durability and defense was increased by the internal infusion, but apparently, tension and compression resistance scaled better than toughness itself.

However it may be, once she finished that thought, Aloe jumped out of her prone position. The owl flew away scared from the sudden movement.

"Ugh, I feel like manure… At least I'm still alive, I guess…" Every word was hard-fought, making Aloe reach for her waterskin.

There were no more traces of animals or monsters around her. The latter wasn't surprising as it was already past morning.

"I lost a lot of time." She mussed with a hand on her temples, a headache killing her. "I pushed myself there…" The cultivator recalled her close battle against the djinn.

Too close for her liking, yet surprisingly feasible.

For someone who hadn't raised a fist in her life, she had managed to push a monster away even if she had exhausted herself to death.

"Need to push on. I've lost too much time." She reiterated.

But she knew she was still tired as she hadn't had a recovery-laden sleep. So for the time being, she donned the regeneration stance and ate a bit. Her focus was the more perishable goods like milk and cheese. The fat contents of said goods would also help her.

After a hearty lunch and a solid half-an-hour of rest, Aloe felt confident of continuing her journey. Perhaps it was the exhaustion, but the part of her body that hurt the most wasn't her legs or the parts that had been hit by the djinn, but her thumb.

Without knowing it, she had totally decimated her finger.

"It could be worse," she whispered while shifting her flow of vitality from recovery to haste. "Not bleeding nor lost, I hope recovery will heal it."

She wasn't all that worried. Losing a thumb wasn't the end of the world, even if it was from her dominant hand. The lesson she had learned from her mistake was more valuable.

Wrapping one's thumb in a fist was a moronic action.

Whether the source of her headache was her exhaustion, her pain, or the noise that echoed across the Whistling Sands, Aloe ran without a care of the world beyond her. With any luck, she should arrive at the Ridged Highlands tonight.

She took this day with more calm as she was still hurt and took more breaks, but she pressed forward as much as possible. Sleeping on the sand wasn't a possibility anymore. Djinns were solitary monsters, that much she knew, but what if – and that was a big if – she found two at the same time?

That was an unwinnable battle.

The most acknowledgeable thing that happened in the whole day was that she had to stop and strip down to check her wounds as they started to hurt. Unfortunately, they were just bruises so she couldn't do anything to heal them besides rest.

Or that could be considered fortunate as they were only bruises.

She didn't frankly care for distinction. Her head and her body hurt too much to worry about such trivialities.

Night soon came, but Aloe didn't stop moving. Whilst not as bright as yesternight, the moon still shone with enough light for her to move under the mantle of darkness. The lack of light wasn't the issue in this part of the lunar cycle, but the cold and the monsters.

Running with haste donned made her colder rather than hotter just by the sheer amount of cold air that blew at her, but it wasn't enough to get hypothermia. If she did get cold, during her rests she would take out her budding Blossomflame and cradle it in her arms to take a bit of its warmth.

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It wasn't much, and it definitely wasn't a fire, but it was better than nothing.

Slowly but surely, vitality gathered on her evolved flower through the flowing stance as each and every rest she at least gave it an adult's worth of vitality.

Using the flowing stance didn't increase her vitality like using Evolution, or that was the impression she had had so far, but having a grown Blossomflame at her disposal was far more important than a risible increase in vitality.

What was a bit scary, though, was how fast she regenerated vitality.

Naila had told her that the regeneration stance boosted vitality regeneration and that using vitality and training with it did increase that base factor, but either she was underestimating the augment in speed, or the sultanzade like her were unable to train their vitality like Aloe as they only had access to Nurture.

Unlike them, she was using Evolution too in tandem with her own flowing stance skill.

Even though her recovery factor should have been around sice that of a normal person, she estimated that right now she was restoring her vitality at least tence as fast as when she started using Infusion for the first time after what seemed ages ago.

Multiplying one's vitality regeneration by a factor of ten was breathtaking and horrifying. She could restore an adult's worth of vitality in a few minutes with recovery, which made her tremble at the idea of how fast Aaliyah might restore her own vitality.

Still a long way to go. She told herself whilst pushing her vitality into the Blossomflame. The plant had already reached the 'white petal' stage.

There was one problem with all the vitality transfusion though, and that was that she was getting tired fast. For better or worse, the constant strain of vitality that she had to suffer in the court of Sadina to keep her reserve size hidden had made her quite resistant to fatigue, especially vitality-born one.

But resistance wasn't immunity.

Her headaches weren't that bad right now, but shoving vitality into the Blossomflame was tiring her, and this was supposed to be her rest period. She was balancing on a very precarious line, if she used any more vitality than the amount she was currently using, she could run into problems.

And she was well aware of that.

Whether it was a perk of Nurture or just her knowledge of vitality, her understanding of her own body was extensive.

It didn't help that she still hadn't reached the Highlands. Aloe had been going for almost twenty-four hours straight without sleeping. And the sleep that she did get beforehand was a short nap that wasn't even boosted by the regeneration stance.

She was pushing herself dangerously close to a breaking point, she could feel it in her bones, muscles, blood, and the very vitality that was circling inside her body.

Please, where are the highlands? She found herself peering at the sky on one of the many rests, Blossomflame in her arms. The sun was already coming up from the horizon and the starry mantle of the night sky was disappearing with its progress.

"Ah.." She half-groaned, half-moaned. "Should I just sleep during the day?" The cultivator asked herself as she gazed at her trembling hands. "I do have mantles to protect myself and make a makeshift tent but…"

Sleeping during the day may be more dangerous during the night but for the opposite reasons.

Not only she would risk a heat stroke and every danger that entailed, but also visibility was greater during the day. If someone was pursuing her, which was now more likely after the events of that town, then they would see her easily when she was sleeping.

"K-keep… pu-shing," Aloe told herself. She stood up, tidied everything she had gotten out of the backpack, and marched again toward the sun.

It took her one more hour until the landscape changed.

"Yes!" She jumped in the air the instant the whiteness of the Whistling Sands stopped, then she remembered she was still running with haste on and she had jumped off a dune with a lot of momentum stored. "Fu-"

The petite cultivator didn't have to finish that word as the ground precipitated toward her, or rather, she was running headfirst toward it. Fortunately, it was more than enough time to switch to toughness and tilt her body to the side so she met the incoming sand wall with her shoulder.

What followed was a dust cloud of monumental proportions as a projectile of around sixty kilograms – backpack included – impacted against a mound of sand. Half of the dune collapsed from the impact, almost burying Aloe alive.

"Wroo!" Aloe grunted like once her dear Fikali would have done and unlatched her body from literal tons of sand. It had taken a potency internal infusion and a near-death experience. "T-that… was too close for my liking."

It terrified her how a single misstep had almost caused her death.

The defense stance hadn't done anything as the problem hadn't been the impact, but the aftermath of it.

Aloe continued to dust herself for the next few minutes as she calmly walked whilst donning recovery, still shaken from the collision to activate haste again.

"I can do without sand for a while, maybe a lifetime." Said the desert inhabitant.

But before her, they were finally there. Instead of the cream-electrum color of the Qiraji, or the searing white of the Whistling Sands, a dull landscape of grey lay before her.

She had finally reached the Ridged Highlands, and grey had never looked so colorful before.