"Nope, nope, nope. Fuck that shit." Aloe cursed as she hastily left the mountain's peak, not even bothering to climb it down and instead donning toughness and constantly jumping to her death.
If she wasn't nince as tough as any other person, that was.
Maybe even way more as she was a sturdy gal, and Nurture was all about boosting base values. And Aloe could physically sustain a lot of abuse.
She was well aware that the Loyatan army wasn't here for her, the conflict between Loyata and Ydaz had most likely finally erupted, but she didn't want to get caught between two clashing armies.
And besides, long hair or not, she was quite a recognizable person. There wouldn't be many young and short Ydazi women here with glistening emerald eyes like hers. That was the only trait of her person that she considered beautiful, everything else was utter garbage.
Aloe couldn't even care that she had seen the sun for less than five minutes, she rushed the fuck back into the ravine, like she would say in her current unstable state. The sun would always be up there, her life not so much. Nor the marching army.
For her mental sanity, Aloe didn't instantly jump back into her misery hole but waited around an hour with acuity active to give her goodbyes to the sun for a season at the very least. Maybe even more. Nobody could tell – not even the heavens – how long this war would last.
She also wielded recovery for a bit to get a bit of 'sun’ faster, though she doubted that had any effect. Before the sun had fully grazed the spot where she had come out of the ravine, Aloe had already made her way back inside.
"Dunes, that was scary," Aloe mumbled to herself as she walked alongside the Tehen River.
The way down the chasm had been way faster than upwards as she could just jump several meters down with little to no consequences. Most of the time the Blossomflame in her backpack didn't even show embers, though the fatigue and stress her knees were building up was considerable.
"I had hoped there wouldn't be a war, but I guess this has been brewing since far before my departure from Sadina." The cultivator scratched her scalp in frustration. "Maybe I could take this chance to make a run for the ports of the fjords, but knowing my luck, a Ydazi warship will sink whatever vessel I'm traveling on even if it's a civilian one. Yeah… it's scary how easily I can imagine that."
Aloe had learned the hard way her luck was incredibly polarizing. Either she was the most fortunate woman in Khaffat or the incarnation of misfortune. The worst cases were when both things occurred at the same time when she had incredible luck and misfortune so they 'canceled out', but the bad luck always left lasting wounds and fortune rarely gave lasting boons.
So playing it safe was her only real alternative.
The following days were quite stressful as her mind loved to play tricks on her in the form of auditory illusions as she heard the sounds of marching armies. That was, of course, impossible. She was hundreds of meters underground and several kilometers away from where she had spotted the army. And even if armies were slow, they should already have left the nearby area by now.
Her mind, though, didn't seem to comprehend that.
Her paranoia was at an all-time high, and the fact that two days after having spotted the army her cycle came in didn't help at all. In fear of being caught at her lowest, Aloe didn't leave her crevice for the whole day. Eating was overrated, after all.
The truth was, she probably inflicted more damage on herself by forbidding herself from eating during her period than what an assassin attack could have caused to her. There were some types of damage that the Blossomflames couldn't heal, and nutrition-based damage was uncharted territory. What even counted as a wound for the fire flower? Stress and fatigue certainly didn't, nor did menstruation.
During that awful and fearful day, Aloe didn't evolve a single Cottonpull as she couldn't muster enough courage to drain her reserves.
The previous and following days she wasn't as affected by her paranoia. A 'week' after her little outing, Aloe had brought her Cottonpull evolution count to twenty-five. A quarter of her self-imposed milestone.
"I don't want to extrapolate numbers just yet – I want the biggest sample possible before crunching numbers – but I guess that I should be able to evolve three Cottonpulls per day in a week or so. So that should accelerate my pace a bit."
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With her limited knowledge of botany and the textile industry, Aloe guessed her Cottonpull would still need a few months to fully grow as she recalled hearing it was a bi-yearly harvested plant in the fields blessed by the blood of the sultanah. And technically speaking, she had the same setup going on here.
She wasn't in any rush to have her first Cottonpull germinate, especially when she was not even close to the twenty mansworth mark yet. Her original plan was to leave the chasm once she had enough vitality to evolve the living stones, but considering how there was a war going on… she was amenable to changing her timeline.
Perhaps even years.
Playing it safe wasn't an exaggeration.
Aloe didn't want to leave anything up to chance, every time she had done so before, it always played against her. She preferred growing roots on the chasm floor before letting an assassin or a sultanzade catch a glance of her hair.
Perhaps extreme solitary reclusion wasn't the best choice, but Aloe wasn't known for her marvelous decision-making. Yet for better or worse, those decisions had kept her alive until now. And she intended to keep it that way.
Another week went by. One of her weeks, at least.
Her estimates were on point, as eight days later she was able to start evolving three Cottonpulls per day without overexerting herself. She was nearing closer to the halfway point of her short-term milestone when her camp finally saw a change.
One a bit too visual for her liking.
"Dunes, that's bright!" Aloe averted her gaze after coming out of the crevice as it looked like a second sun descended into the chasm.
She had a good guess what the source of the light was, but until she saw it with her own eyes, she couldn't be sure. The light wasn't as potent as the sun like the Myriad had been but, combined with her active sense stance and the fact she wasn't used to having much lighting here, it left her blind.
To counter her visual difficulties, Aloe wielded toughness. Not only was her sense of sight diminished by virtue of donning anything else besides acuity, but the defense stance also granted her more tolerance to being blinded. Having one's corneas melted did count as damage and it was one of the resistances her favorite internal infusion provided.
"Hmm, I wonder if I could be able to be infused with shade acclimation to resist this?" It was a good question, but it made her mad remembering she couldn't try that whole field of Infusion because she couldn't infuse herself externally and she had no one to try it with.
Aloe blinked several times until her eyes finally acclimated to the light.
"Yup, as I guessed." Before her lay a mature Radiating Undergrowth. "Weren't you supposed to have infinite size?" She pondered and crossed her arms as she pouted. "What a way to throw off any theory I make."
The grown Radiating Undergrowth looked… like nothing she had ever seen before. It was as if light itself had taken shape in a three-dimensional object and then it warped in the vague shape of a mushroom. The mycelium was completely normal, but the mushroom was made of light and painful enough to get hurt by watching it for a long time.
The mushroom itself looked like the silhouette of a death cap, only purely white as it was only light, but there was something more to it. The light slowly bent at the edges and degraded into shades of purple and blue with an undertone of pink, highlighting the white shape of the fungus' fruit.
"Trippy," she commented as she walked around the mushroom. Light distorted as she moved, but the silhouette of the phallic cap remained static. "Even more so than the Dream Spore's acid trip."
Aloe approached the evolved fungus and like any normal person that had a miniature sun before her, she tried to touch it.
"Huh?" She groaned as she found herself unable to touch the Radiating Undergrowth. "What's happening here?"
As she moved her finger toward the mushroom, she felt a force repelling her. The closer she got, the stronger the force became. It was as if the very light had become tangible, and it was pushing her away. The invisible force became so strong well into the colorful halo of the Radiating Undergrowth, that no matter if she pushed her whole body weight into her finger, it wouldn't advance a millimeter more.
"Will you," she pushed, "allow me," and put more strength, "to touch you!"
She tired herself out before getting nowhere close.
"Okay, have at it!" Aloe switched her internal infusion from toughness to potency and threw a fist at the mushroom.
The mushroom defied her will and Aloe's attack stopped midway through. She started putting so much force in her fist as she pushed that she could feel the blood vessels in her temples pop and more than one bone in her fist crunch.
"Alright, you win." Aloe raised her hands and walked away from the Radiating Undergrowth. "Haha, you fell for it! Haste-boosted Drop-Kick Attack!"
The cultivator switched to the speed stance and dashed toward the mushroom, which she proceeded to kick with all her momentum. She fell on the ground as she felt as if she had kicked a solid wall.
"Motherfucker!" She cursed and clutched her foot in pain.
The Blossomflames seemed to think along the same lines as Aloe was aided by two different sources of fire with her recovery. The pain was substituted by itches, but both quickly vanished.
"Doesn't something smell burned?" Aloe looked downward to find a strand of smoke coming from her boot. "Oh… it would seem that maybe, just maybe, the radiating part of the description wasn't only light but also heat. I should have expected it."
Aloe took her boot off and inspected it. Fortunately, the damage was minimal so she wouldn't need to wear a boot with a hole for the following months.
"Talking about the fungus' description," Aloe waddled to her veritas' leaf pile as she calmed herself and picked up the Radiating Undergrowth's one. "Grow anywhere?" She looked at the rock substrate where the mycelium was. "Check. Radiate indefinitely? Check." That one didn't need further confirmation as her footwear almost took a casualty. "Absurd nutritional value?"
The petite woman squinted her eyes to their utmost limit whilst still being open. Now, after everything she had experienced would she dare to test that last part?
Probably.