Aloe started the day with the most tedious and exhausting activity: evolving a cumin seed. She barely teetered on the edge of being able to evolve them without external assistance, so not evolving a Blossomflame when her reserves were topped off was a great misuse of her time and resources.
As painful as using up ninety-nine percent of her vitality in one go was, because she wasn't restoring any vitality with Cure Grass pellets, she didn't suffer from any strong nausea or vomiting.
By all means, she should. When she was beginning with the vital arts, using four-fifths of her reserves in one go would totally and utterly devastate her but her resistance to vitality depletion had grown by leaps since then. If she limited herself to her own vitality, then only mild headaches would assault her. But going beyond it was still a no-no.
The problem with the chasm was that she didn't have much in the department of leisure and entertainment, the only real thing she could do to pass up time was either sleep or explore.
And whilst the latter sounded good on paper, the truth was it was miserable navigating through the wet chasm in absolute darkness.
"Maybe if I get enough vitality, I will be able to see in the dark…" Aloe mused to herself as she rested near the Tehen River with her eyes closed to listen to the flow of water. Though there wasn't much difference between keeping her eyes open or otherwise.
She had spent the morning counting how many seeds she had remaining. She hadn't gone through all types yet, but what mattered to her right now were the black seeds and the cumin. For the latter, she had so many that the cumin seeds she planted yesterday would already be plants without her assistance before she ran out of them. The same couldn't be said for the black seeds.
"It's trivial to evolve Flourishing Spring now," she talked aloud to entertain herself, "they barely take more than a mansworth to evolve, and I feel like the 'headache threshold' is not only dependent on the total vitality I spend each day but how much pressure the individual spending puts on me. I mean, I evolved and infused hundreds of Cure Grass yesterday and I was only affected by the blood infusion."
Aloe was aware that exhaustion did slowly pile up, but if she was intelligent with her spending, her breaks, and the usage of recovery, then she could minimize her exhaustion and pains many times over.
Currently, she was limited by time.
Time to increase her reserves.
Time for her plantations to grow.
Time for her cro…
"Oh heavens, I totally forgot about the potatoes!" Aloe led her hands to her head. "I could have run out of food if I didn't notice before long."
The cultivator went back to her crevice and retrieved the single potato from her backpack. The tuber proved to be quite a resilient specimen as it had already some growths on its surface.
"I'd love to infuse you with bountiful harvest," she said whilst heaving the potato in her hand along the way. "Alas, I doubt you will survive here without shade acclimation."
As she had done on the oasis, Aloe broke the potato into pieces after having infused it, and then she planted them on the riverbed.
"Hmm?" She frowned as she looked at the ground with all the might that the sense stance allowed her. "Has the soil expanded?"
For some time now she had been thinking about how she would run out of soil and how she would be forced to search for another patch, probably at the other side of the river; but out of nowhere, her arable land had expanded, if ever-so-slightly.
"Are these the effects of the infused blood?" That was the only thought she could come up with. "I mean, I've never seen the blood of the sultanah in effect, but if it can transform the desert into farmlands… then it must be something like this."
She saved herself from commenting on how pitiful of a comparison it was between their powers. Aaliyah could create hectares of farmlands with one drop if snake-tongues were to be trusted, Aloe had used more than one and had accomplished an increase of a squared meter, if not less.
It would have been easy to demoralize herself with this trail of thought, but she avoided it altogether.
She just needed time.
Now that she was free of headaches, as infusing a single potato didn't even count as exercise, Aloe infused a drop of blood again. This time to grow the tubers. With practiced ease, she bit her finger and dropped her infused blood at the closest point between all the potato chunks.
The visible change was minimal as she was working with four plants instead of one, but all four of them did spawn sprouts. They were rather small, but it was far better than anything she would have accomplished with good ol' Infusion.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Accelerated growth was incredible for huge plantations, especially considering the hereditary properties of the external infusions, but infused blood proved quite better for localized crops. If she had an orchard, then having trees growing at twice the normal speed would save her collective centuries, but in a small potato patch, that time saving would only amount to a few months.
The use of infused blood absolutely devastated her, it hurt her more than evolving a Blossomflame even if it required a fraction of vitality, but after having performed a handful of them, Aloe had an inkling of what was happening.
"The blood infusion… it doesn't only consume vitality," otherwise things didn't add up in her mind. "I'm not sure of it, but I believe it also consumes maximum vitality straight from my reserves."
She didn't have enough proof to boast such a claim yet. If she had diminished her reserves, she had definitely offset them with the multiple evolutions she had performed meanwhile.
"But… but then it would make sense," she muttered with a finger on her lower lip. "Why would Aaliyah be so reticent to distribute her blood if it only cost her easily regenerated vitality?"
Because it wasn't regeneratable.
"Each time someone demands her blood to renew a farmland… she's consuming her vitality."
So many thing things made sense now if she was right.
The thought of Aaliyah doing something good for the world never crossed her mind, nor was she considering that right now. Aloe wasn't pondering how many lives the sultanah was saving by literally bleeding out for her country, but rather how many people she was raping to do so in the first place.
It took Aloe a solid minute to realize that she wasn't just scowling, but also growling. Her blood burned as she seethed.
It was impossible for her to remove the blood of the sultanah from her mind, so she repurposed those negative thoughts into something more constructive.
"How much maximum vitality is she consuming with each drop of blood?" There was no way for her to reach a conclusive answer, but pondering for answers did relax her, and above everything else, distract her. "I don't even know how strong the scaling of the blood infusion is. It could be linear, exponential, or something else. Perhaps instead of diminishing returns, there's… incrementing gains."
It made sense for her as even if Aaliyah had hundreds of times her reserves, the increase in area was quadratic after all.
"Quadratic, huh? Assuming if we are working with a square, even if a circle makes more sense for expansion and surface…" Aloe pondered about her mental image and the words she had used. "Hmm, I guess it doesn't really matter, both have squared values. Base for a square and radius for a circle. Anyhow, maybe that means that the formula for blood infusion efficiency has a squared value, which scales greater the larger that squared value is…"
Doing math was surprisingly refreshing. The thing that was mortally exhausted was her body, not her mind, and even if she didn't particularly enjoy numbers, she had been forced to crunch them in both of her jobs.
"One mansworth what could be… around a one-meter radius of effect?" She was making numbers up, but considering she wasn't a scholar, she could afford the eyeballing. "So technically speaking, if the consumed vitality is the squared value – which doesn't make sense if it's another variable in any case – then putting two mansworth means I'll have an area of effect of… uh, I'm too lazy to make the calculations, four meters of radius. I don't care about the actual area."
Aloe stopped thinking for a moment and revised that number in the small chance that she forgot what two times two was. She had studied very advanced math like trigonometry and some physics when she was younger, but even exponents weren't something she used when she was a banker's apprentice, let alone a scribe.
"Yeah, four meters of radius. I need to check if that's true."
She had been resting for a while on the comfort of her blanket, but she still felt somewhat exhausted, so she lazed around for five more minutes and took a hearty gulp of water before trying something else.
"Hmm, I'm almost out of well water, should I do something about the river water when I run out of mine, or is it alright to drink straight from the river?"
She always boiled the water in the oasis because she was mostly dealing with stale water, but the river…
"I mean, they got the well water in Selen from a nearby aquifer, and that one must be connected to the Tehen River, so there should be no problem if I drink straight from it. What's the worst that could happen?"
Diarrhea.
That was the worst that could happen.
The crux of the question was whether that sickness would be fatal or not. Which could happen, especially to a person as weakened as her.
"I guess that if I get sick, I could just wield toughness for a while. Unlike recovery, it hasn't shown any… adverse effects."
She would never forget that bloody night in Selen for the rest of her life.
"Talking about blood, I've postponed this enough. Time for the two mansworth test."
The steps were almost ritualistic in nature. She would change her internal infusion to potency, bite her finger, draw some blood, infuse it with the flowing stance, let it drop, and then shift to recovery to restore the lost vitality.
There was no added difficulty when dealing with two mansworth with flowing stance in comparison to the previous attempts. Yes, this was the first time she was using the stance with more than one mansworth, but she had worked with higher amounts of vitality before with Evolution, so she found no problem there.
The issue was when the blood left her body and dropped to the soil.
"Oh heavens, that's trippy." Aloe almost fell to the ground as an impossible nausea assaulted her. Like when you got up from your chair too fast, but in a way prolonged manner, and nothing actually like the analogy in the first place. "I can't say how much maximum vitality I've lost here, but it's uncomfortable, to say the least."
She was used to obtaining it, not losing it, after all.
Whilst not outright instantaneous, the effects of her infused blood became apparent as it didn't stay on the potatoes – that was the crop she chose as food was more important to her right now than any other plant – but extended to others like the Cure Grass. She couldn't tell if the effects of the Forced Growth reached other plantations, but the blades of grass that had yet to grow finally matured as they needed far less vitality than any other plant.
"Okay, good, good!" Aloe clapped with some trepidation, even if it was to dust her hands. "The range does indeed scale up with vitality consumed, that's good to know!"
This meant she was a step closer to understanding the power of the sultanah because using one hundred mansworth for a Forced Growth meant the range of the effect would reach up to ten kilometers in range, which was certainly in line with the farmlands the blood of the sultanah could create.
"In the future," Aloe dreamt, the acute loss of vitality making her dizzy, "I'll turn these lands green."