Aloe woke up as if she never went to sleep. She couldn't quite exactly put it into words, but even if she felt rested, her mind didn't share the same rest. From her perspective, she had closed her eyes and opened them a moment later. This had already happened before with the recovery internal infusion, so as of late, she was leaving burning patches of Cure Grass to work as some sort of time tracker. If they were burnt when she opened her eyes, then she would have fallen asleep. And that was the problem.
They were always burnt.
The fires had long fizzled out whenever she woke up, meaning she had fallen asleep, but she never perceived it. It was an odious thing as her body was completely rested with a good night's sleep, but her mind just continued to work as if it had been awake for days.
"Can I get a tranquilizing plant or something?" She talked to the plant in her hands. It was the boring and useless brown mushroom she had collected days ago. "I'm getting the feeling that recovery isn't as useful for sleeping as I originally thought. Can't you just evolve into another fungi that helps me sleep?"
She no longer had any seeds left to evolve, so it was time to tackle the last two fungi.
"I mean, I could try sleeping without recovery, but that will only trade the exhaustion of my mind for the exhaustion of my body." There was no winning. "So, yeah. I'd prefer it if you become some sort of sedative. Can you?"
Talking to unevolved plants was useless, she knew that much. But considering one of the requirements to evolve Information plants was to get them in touch with a book, then maybe talking to them would influence something?
Aloe was at her wit's end.
The cultivator sighed and picked up some spores from the mushroom cap with her knife. With some difficulty, she slowly removed them with her vitality sense – as it was impossible to see them otherwise – until only one was left on the tip of the pocketknife. That lone spore was placed on her fingertip.
"Mushroom whose name I no longer remember evolution test begins… now."
Failure.
Her hopes had already hit rock bottom, but that didn’t excuse her from wordlessly attempting to evolve the spore by putting it into contact with the booklet for the Information test.”
Failure. Again.
"That much was to be expected," she groaned. "Well, time for the Death test. Will the dead matter finally bring results?"
Aloe grabbed her dead cumin flower sample and put it on top of the invisible spore. She knew she had a spore and a dead flower on her hands because she could feel the infinitesimal vitality of the spore, but none from the burnt flower. Then, with an intent of Evolution, she pushed her vitality into the spore.
Yet another failure.
A half-groan half-sigh left her mouth as she scuttled over the Blossomflame for the Light and Chaos requirement test. She left that one for last in the case that the fire from the evolved flower burned the sample to ashes.
Her paranoia was, unfortunately, unfounded as the spore refused to accept her vitality.
"Nince-damned hells!" Aloe cursed. "Can't I get just one damned evolution to test my theories?" Her opportunities were dwindling and limited.
Unceremoniously, the petite woman threw herself to the ground in a childish fit of rage. She had switched unconsciously to toughness, so even as she slammed the rocky surface in her tantrum, she was unable to hurt herself.
After five minutes, Aloe recomposed herself and washed her hands in the river to remove any contaminants and dust. It was time for her last attempt. Her last plant.
"You are my last shot," she whispered to the patch of green-yellow lichen in her fingertips. "No more plants down here, no other seeds that I have bought. Come on, let's end on a high note."
But before doing so, Aloe had to make some preparations—mental ones, at the very minimum.
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"You know," she continued talking to the lichen. "There's a reason why I left you for last. Because I didn't know how to deal with you. I'm far from an expert, but I know lichens are even weirder than fungi. You are a symbiont, a chimera of creatures. Fungi, algae, grass, plants in general… Who knows what's inside of you? And who knows how to evolve you?"
That was what Aloe had feared.
As she peered into her vitality sense, she could distinguish multiple pulses from the lichen. It was hard to describe it, but it was like distinguishing water and salt from seawater. The salt was dissolved and not visible, but you could tell it was a different element. Yet the two elements combined created a new one.
Aloe tried focusing on the fungi part of the lichen, but it didn't accept her vitality. And that was even without an Evolution intent, just an Infusion one. She repeated the same process on the plant side of the lichen, and she failed again.
"It's like you have forgotten you used to be two different beings." Aloe mused to herself deep in thought. "So perhaps…"
Instead of tackling both separated aspects of the plant, she infused the whole in a wave of vitality rather than focusing on a single spore or seed as she had traditionally done.
And it worked.
"Good, good," she nodded to herself and stopped pushing vitality inside. That had been the Infusion test. It was time for the one she wanted. "Lichen evolution test begins… now!"
Her visage turned sour when the whole refused her vitality. Just in case she had failed in her attempt as pushing vitality into a collective was something she wasn't experienced with, she tried again.
Another failure.
"Ehrm…" Aloe chuckled awkwardly to herself. "I still have the alignment tests!"
Trembling, she picked up the booklet. The idea of being unable to evolve her last plant unsettled her. By all means, it shouldn't. She had already evolved many plants and the living stones were still there, but she didn't want it to end like this. It was too anticlimactic.
"Lichen Information evolution test begins… now!" The symbiont refused to accept her vitality. "I… I must have failed to infuse the lichen as a whole. Lemme try again…"
The result stayed the same.
The book was the only successful of her evolution requirement tests, so Aloe's panic was brought to an all-time high as she reached for the dead cumin flower sample.
"If this fails…" She didn't finish the sentence. She still had another requirement to test, nevertheless. "Lichen Death evolution test begins… now!"
Spreading her vitality over the collective, encircling both the lichen and the dead plant, Aloe pushed her intent into them.
And it worked.
"Oh, great heavens!" Her visage was twisted by a mixture of bewilderment and acknowledgment. "I knew I was onto something with the requirements!"
This acceptance of vitality just revealed to her that the evolved version of the lichen would be of the alignment of Death. And more importantly, that her theories were right.
That was really the only thing that mattered to her.
Being right was a powerful motivator.
"Also, dunes!" Aloe quickly snapped out of her stupor as the lichen drained her reserves at a fast pace.
Having a good understanding of vitality, Aloe knew that she didn't have enough vitality to evolve the lichen in those scarce seconds. But at the same time, she was too elated to give up the evolution, so she pressed forward.
The vitality needed to evolve it would be greater than the Radiating Undergrowth which stood at an impressive ten mansworth, so she would need to pull every trick in her book to ease the evolution process.
First, she slowed down the drainage rate to the best of her extent, which wasn't much. Evolution, unlike Infusion, had a fixed drainage rate, but with her mastery over vitality, Aloe could cheat a bit. If only ever-so-slightly. Pathetically so, really.
Next, she donned recovery. Evolutions were fast, but every grain of vitality she could restore was crucial. And besides, her regeneration stance was getting more powerful by the day. Not only because she was increasing her reserves, but also because she regenerated so much vitality by herself naturally.
It couldn't be stressed enough that stances were multipliers of base values.
Finally, Aloe had many Cure Grass pellets at hand. She would need to limit their usage till the very depletion of her reserves as the more pills she took, the longer it would take them to be assimilated.
Using the first two tricks, Aloe was able to slow the consumption of her vitality reserves – her eight mansworth of capacity – by a whole minute. It wasn't much, she couldn't restore a single mansworth in that time without assistance, but as soon as she dipped into the single digits of percentage of her reserves, she instantly recovered a whole mansworth with the first pellet.
Subsequent vitality pills would be less effective at providing vitality over time, so pushing herself to the limits of her reserves was vital.
Pun not intended.
The second pill and the third one fell soon after, but Evolution was like a starving beast, and once it had some food, it was no longer ravishing its meal but instead ate more slowly. This was the only factor that allowed her Cure Grass pellets to fight against the drainage rate.
As she got slower at absorbing vitality as her stomach got fuller, so did Evolution.
But whatever formula followed both cases, it wasn't the same. Evolution's rate was always faster than Aloe's, meaning that she soon hit the critical rate where she had to shove her mouth full of pills to match the consumption rate.
It was a lot of vitality, and she was getting tired of only forcing the rate to slow down, let alone using up that vitality.
But she did it.
After consuming enough pills that she puked grass the instant the lichen stopped sapping at her vital energy, Aloe had achieved her much-desired evolution.