Only two epithets were needed to describe the bottom of the chasm: damp and cold. More than once, Aloe thought of changing to toughness to gain a bit of body heat, but she continued to push onward as she considered it a waste of time.
"What infusion would boost body heat?" She realized she didn't have the answer for it. "Would it be toughness as it helps me to survive? Or perhaps potency as it bolsters my body? No, in any case, it should be recovery as maybe body heat is a bodily resource…"
Just to scratch the itch on her mind, Aloe switched stances constantly for a while, keeping them up for five minutes at a time to check if one stance increased her body's temperature more than others.
The three she initially thought of brought no results, so just to make her tests more conclusive, she tried the remaining five – she had already tried acuity as that was her starting point – internal infusions to see if any brought change.
Short answer? No.
Long answer? There was change. Though not in the manner she expected.
After going through all the stances, even flowing, her body heat didn't increase once. What did happen was that, when she shifted to subterfuge, her body temperature decreased. She had no way to check it with precision, but she had become way colder when she was donning that infusion.
"I guess it makes sense," she muttered on the ground as she huddled with the Blossomflame to recover her heat. "The stealth stance is meant to make people harder to detect, and there are some animals like snakes that guide themselves by temperature, so it definitely makes sense that masking one's body heat would be necessary to be hidden."
Once she had a hearty gulp of water, she no longer was scared to run out of water with the Tehen River next to her, Aloe stood up and continued walking with acuity active.
It was a more boring trek than any of the ones she had done before, and certainly slower as she couldn't wield haste in this darkness without killing herself, but the fear and the paranoia did keep her guard up.
Now that her sight was severely deprived, her other senses flourished under this isolation, especially her hearing. Aloe was more than happy to not detect any signs of life in the underground. She knew some animals or monsters could live in caves, but this chasm not only was vertical so there was nearly no way to get out, but it was too cold and deprived of vegetable life to sustain an ecosystem.
At this point, even Aloe didn't know how she was standing up. Sure, she was wearing the cold-weather clothing she bought at Selen alongside a mantle and the Blossomflame, but she still felt impossibly cold.
Enough so to be constantly fatigued.
With a tired grunt, the cultivator sat on the cold and damp stone to rest. The humidity was killing her, it was even harder to breathe than the hottest days of summer.
"Fatima said that one of her brothers could summon fire with the flowing stance, maybe I can too?" She didn't believe even a bit that she could achieve that. "Well, I got nothing to lose."
For the next half hour, Aloe tried to adjust her mindset to shape her flow in vitality in such a way that once she emitted it from her body it burst into flames. But no matter how much she tried, she found little to no success. Even if she had the perfect example and image in the shape of the Blossomflame.
The only progress in all that time was that she managed to push some vitality out of her body. That achieved nothing as it vanished into the air, but it was the first time she had expulsed vitality outside her body without sending it into a target.
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"I guess I could use this to deplete my reserves if I ever find a sultanzade and I need to go unnoticed, but," she sighed, "the draining rate leaves a lot to be desired. It's even less than the draining rate needed to evolve a grass seed. It would take ages, if it even offsets my natural regeneration, to drain my reserves. If I'm in such a scenario, I would be better off pushing my vitality into a cumin seed and hoping for the best…"
A really stupid idea blossomed in Aloe's mind.
"Talking about cumin seeds, I have nearly enough vitality now to evolve a Blossomflame in one go," she took a cumin seed from her satchel and looked at it. She had to basically glue it to her eyes as the darkness of the chasm didn't help with such finer details. "I have grass seeds, so getting Cure Grass isn't a problem now…"
Perhaps it was the exhaustion talking, but Aloe decided to evolve a Blossomflame to clear her mind. She left everything ready before going for it as she still only barely had enough vitality to perform the evolution without assistance and things could go wrong.
First, she shifted to the regeneration stance. Her vitality restoration rate wouldn't be enough to cover a fraction of the Blossomflame's draining rate, but it would contribute something to the cause. Second, she held a Cure Grass pellet in her other hand.
Her vitality pill satchel was rather empty now, enough so that the pills jiggled inside.
It was but a drop that she offered to the cumin seed with the intent of evolving it, and it started drinking greedily as if it had been thirsty all of its life. Only now whilst evolving the seed did Aloe realize how much vitality the living stone had needed to evolve. In just an instant it had drank what the future Blossomflame seed was taking seconds.
"Well, I will either need a lot of pills or much more vitality to evolve the living stone," and that was her conclusion.
She was in no haste to evolve the curious plant; the only pressure was her curiosity at having an evolution at her arm's length yet being incapable of performing it.
Once her vitality reached around a tenth of her total reserves, Aloe consumed the Cure Grass pellet.
"Oh, wow," she muttered after the grass kicked in. "That's… nothing."
It actually was something, the pill did restore around a whole mansworth but compared to the last time she had used pellets to evolve something, her reserves had grown significantly since then. One mansworth was even pitiful now, and she only had six of them, though they felt like way more in her bones.
Without much issue, she evolved the cumin seed into a Blossomflame one. She could detect it even without the vitality drainage as the seed now emitted heat.
"Hmm…" Another idea blossomed in Aloe's mind.
She picked up the rest of the Blossomflame seeds she had evolved during all this time, basically since her departure from the palace of Asina. There weren't many as she didn't have many opportunities to evolve them these last months, but there were enough of them to fill a handkerchief and tie them into a makeshift bag.
"Mmm… wärmth…" The coziness of the Blossomflame heat pack affected her speech as she melted in pleasure. "Oh heavens, this has been the best idea I've ever had."
All things being said, the pouch wasn't that warm, but when her bones were as chilled as they were right now, the seeds felt as warm as afternoon sunlight.
Not great, but better than nothing.
After being renewed by the myriad of Blossomflame seeds, Aloe continued going forward. She felt as if the cold was affecting her more now that her vitality was spent, but recovery was pulling its weight and she would only need to walk blindly for five more minutes before switching back to acuity.
The positive – if it could be called that – thing of not donning haste was that any internal infusion was valid for displacing as her speed wouldn't be affected in any case.
The more vitality she restored, the more she could feel the heat returning to her.
"Hmm…" She mumbled. "Does vitality increase body heat by default?"
Calling back… unpleasant memories, Aloe remembered that Aaliyah's touch was certainly hot, burning even. She had ignored it because, well, there were more pressing issues at that time. Not that her mind was working correctly after being drugged with that much aphrodisiac.
Before she realized it, Aloe found herself hyperventilating; her breath taking the shape of wakes of mist.
"Don't think about it, don't think about it," she told herself in a mantra.
No matter how long it had been since that night, it still haunted her. Even when there were more recent altercations in her mind – more religious than confrontational – like murder, Aloe couldn't escape the image of Aaliyah.
That nince-damned woman had engraved herself in her body, mind, and heart, and she had cared not for the damage she had caused.
Aloe gritted her teeth and strode forward, trying to drown her thoughts in the plain repetition of treading the underground.