To say that the near-death experience of drowning in the river had scared Aloe was an understatement. The pain induced by the Blossomflames' very healing wasn't forgotten either. She was already paranoid about the assassins being in every shadow, and her mistake didn't help her confidence and anxiety at all.
So she took the decision to play it safe.
Leisure time and wasteful use of vitality were cut to a minimum. Whilst she didn't remove the mushrooms from her diet after that fiasco, she was even more careful with cooking them. First, she left them to dry for a whole day, and only then she would cook them to near charcoal. And even with such precautionary measures, Aloe wouldn't eat the meal unless she was on her crevice and well secured under the effects of toughness.
No other stance no more.
Unfortunately, she couldn't just live on potatoes, otherwise she would have kept the mushrooms away. And whilst she didn't particularly enjoy the taste, it was better than to keep eating potatoes each and every day.
She no longer had any traveling rations at all. She had tried rationing it as much as she could, using chopped jerky in soups to give it flavor and extend its duration as much as possible, but as the second months ticked by, such frugal tactics didn't prove to be enough.
Yes, the second month.
For better or worse, her femininity allowed her to keep track of time. She could only guess when she would bleed, but toughness made the act trivial either way. Losing between one or two days each month was painful, but it was better than writhing in pain. The dampness of the chasm didn't help at all with her health.
Even with her frugality and paranoia, Aloe was able to run some long tests without dedicating them any meaningful resources. The most important one was on the shade acclimation external infusion. The taste was simple, have three potatoes with different infusions planted. One had accelerated growth, another had shade acclimation, and the last one had none.
Plants shouldn't grow without sunlight, that was the extent of her mostly surface-level knowledge, but she wanted to put it to the test.
The result was expected.
The shade acclimation potato sprouted a bit in that month, which was how fast – or rather slow – potatoes grew in actuality, even if the vital arts had totally and utterly messed her common sense applied to plants. The other two didn't germinate. Well, they had some growths on their skin, but nothing worthwhile, more fungal growth than anything else.
Her second test was a more… unorthodox one.
From the many treaties she had read, apparently, some plants that she took for granted didn't exist as such in nature and were products of human-intervened breeding. Selective breeding, if she recalled correctly the term.
Now, she didn't intend to make new plants by making chimeras out of them. That was Evolution's task. No, her intention was to see if she could 'combine' infusions.
But alas, no matter how hard she tried, that project didn't come to fruition. She hadn't given up just yet, but her attempts to breed two sets of mushrooms with different infusions didn't result in offspring that would inherit both. The reason why she chose mushrooms, specifically liberty caps, was because she couldn't get plants to grow without the shade acclimation external infusion.
"It's a long-term project, Aloe," she told herself. "The studies showed that it takes generations of breeding chosen specimens to give a desired result."
She doubted her very words as the Aloe Veritas would have shown by now a double external infusion parchment description because it didn't make sense that ten generations down the line one specimen would spontaneously generate two of them.
To see if it was even possible for the veritas to show two infusions at the same time, she infused a potato with two half-cost infusions. She still had the veritas leaf with her, even if she had thrown it into the river the potato in a fit of rage as it showed that it worked.
Species: Solanum Tuberosum
Sobriquet: Potato
Description: Member of the Solanaceae family, a species known for its perennially, growth in harsh environments, and nutritional values.
External Infusion: Resistance to Drought, Resistance to the Elements
"Awful names, Karaim. Awful names," she cursed her long-dead grandfather. Just reading the description again put her in a foul mood.
Evolution had spoiled her and made her think that results were instantaneous even when she was dealing with plants. Some even took years to grow, for heaven's sake! But that didn't mean she had the patience to cultivate the same fungal colony for months.
She still did, though.
There was just nothing better to do down here.
"I need to get out of here," she kept telling herself, but she wanted to have more vitality before doing so. And also evolve the plants she had gathered.
Much to her dismay, in this whole month, she had only grown her reserves by a single mansworth. Which was a lot, all in all being said, but it could be so much more. The blood infusions still were necessary from time to time, and that slowed down heavily her reserve growth.
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But she had had enough.
Aloe felt her sanity dwindling as if it were a tangible liquid whose level was just barely on her feet. She needed variety, she needed to grow faster. Sultanzade could reap twice a day, and assuming they did, that meant Aloe was barely ahead of their growth. If she wanted to compete with people who had military and martial training as a civilian, she would need an overwhelming amount of vitality, not just a bit more.
Her decision wasn't to evolve more cumin seeds, she just couldn't. She was evolving multiple of them per day and that was taking a toll on her body. Evolution wasn't meant to be used that repeatedly.
But she could try looking for more intense singular evolutions.
She instantly discarded the living stones. Even if it had been two months since she had tried to evolve them, the memory was still vivid in her mind. She still hadn't enough vitality to do so. Perhaps once her reserves hit the double digits she would try. Emphasis on try.
No, her first attempt would be one specimen she wanted to dispose of as soon as possible.
The death cap spores.
Truth be told, Aloe didn't fear them. Toughness could make her inhumanly resilient, and the multiple Blossomflames at her disposal would prevent her from dying even if she wanted.
She had learned that lesson the hard way.
And her control of the Blossomflames was short of admiration and miracle-working. With double digits of Blossomflames under her wing now, not only cooking was trivial, but she could afford to keep one alight each day for an hour. It wasn't much, just a fraction of the day, but it was something. It was free lighting, heating, and company as she didn't need to pay for it. Her control of wounds and commands over the evolved plants had grown enough to keep a Blossomflame flaring for however long she wanted whilst she didn't allow the wound to close.
She had tried drying Cure Grass and using it as a fuel for fires, but the dead blades burned too fast to even work as a light source, let alone a fire. Her best bet for unlimited fires was still growing an overwhelming amount of Blossomflames.
From time to time, she had transplanted some Blossomflames around the riverbed, because if she had them placed together, the deflagration caused by a measly wound would be shy of a city-wide fire. This meant she could comfortably move to the outer boundaries of her camp to try evolving the death cap whilst still being in the range of a single Blossomflame.
One day she would make the crevice's soil fertile and transplant some of them there, but right now, she valued more her reserves than a good night's sleep.
Aloe 'preheated' her Blossomflame by biting her finger. Just a healthy dose of paranoia to check that the evolver flower did, indeed, work.
"Oh, I'm scared. What if this new plant is really toxic?" Nothing assured her that was the case. As a matter of fact, nothing assured her that she would be able to evolve it in the first place. "Okay, okay. I can do it," she fanned herself with both hands and took a deep breath before grabbing the death cap spores.
There were multiple of them as dealing with spores was way different than with seeds, but with all her experience in managing vitality, she was able to focus and lock her flow of vitality into a single spore.
"Alright, it's been a while since I've said this. Death cap evolution test begins… now!"
Aloe's gaze instantly turned serious as the singular spore started to accept her vitality. She rejoiced that her first attempt was successful, but right now she had to focus on evolving the spore.
She was donning toughness as a precaution, so there would be no free grains of vitality for her over the evolution's course by donning recovery. Instead, Aloe had a handful of vitality pills on her other hand. The aloe veras had long grown, so in her free time – which was always – she milled Cure Grass and coated the resulting mush with aloe vera sap.
These new pellets were way inferior in quality to the original product as she lacked the same resources she had in the greenhouse. First of all, no sunlight to dry them. This may seem trivial, but with the copious humidity of the chasm, it was needed even more than before. Secondly, her lack of tools. She had to leave the finished pellets on the stone to dry, which was a bit yucky, but if she left them on any rag, they would stick to it and make a mess.
In other words, she was doing what she could with the tools at her disposal.
The drain of the death cap spore was so slow that even if it drained her whole reserves - and the drainage rate was on its way to do so – there was more than enough time to take the Cure Grass pellets.
She even remembered to keep her stomach empty!
Though at this point, it was a given. Just like keeping recovery off whenever she felt she was nearing that time of the month.
The low drain rate was very relative. It was significantly faster than the Blossomflame's, but because her reserves were eight mansworth big – large? Massive? Truth be told, she didn't know how to classify the magnitude of her reserves – she now had more of a breathing room even if the drainage was faster.
However because of the comparatively faster rate, Aloe had to consume her vitality pills rather early, otherwise her body wouldn't have time to digest and absorb the vitality. The loss wasn't massive as she started taking them at a tenth of her reserves, and it wasn't like she had a limited amount of pills any longer, but minimizing losses was important as there was a limit on how fast her stomach could absorb vitality.
If she reached that critical point, then she would no longer be able to restore vitality or evolve the plant.
Her backup plan for that was to run to the river and scratch her hand against the stone to separate the spore from her skin. As always, Evolution targets glued to her skin and refused to let go by any means. She was more than disposed to cut off a patch of skin or flesh to remove the evolving spore from her body if it ended up reaching that point.
"Nothing that the Blossomflames can't heal," she said aloud as she still poured vitality into the spore. She was going by her third pill now. "Now that I think about it, aren't I too over-reliant on Blossomflames?" A part of her was scared of how she was willing to sacrifice her own flesh without batting an eye.
As she was right to take the fourth pill, the spore stopped intaking her vitality.
The cultivator couldn't help but exhale in relief. It had been a lot of vitality, but nothing insurmountable, and she was thankful for it.
"Not too shabby, only around ten mansworth," Aloe opened her hand to reveal a single spore emitting the faintest glow imaginable, which already revealed its evolved status. Her mind was already making plans about gathering multiple of them to have a non-Blossomflame source of light. "Let's hold our dwellers for a bit. I need to check if this spore is highly lethal or something along those lines first."
Carefully, she placed the spores on her hand on a boulder and cut a fresh veritas leaf. With some difficulty, she placed the glowing spore on the bleeding cut as, unlike seeds, the spore was very small and she couldn't grab it between her fingers and let it go.
When the parchment on the leaf started shifting, Aloe thought for an instant that she had wasted the leaf on herself, but she soon noticed that the spore was no longer in her hand.
The Aloe Veritas leaf revealed the following information.
Species: Radiating Undergrowth
Sobriquet: White Hole Cap
Description: An evolved member of the Amanitaceae family, a species known for its ability to grow anywhere, radiate indefinitely, and its absurd nutritional value.
Alignment: Void, Death