Whilst it was unfortunate that Aloe was unable to find her much-desired sedative, she chose not to dwell on it. She had more things to do. Namely, keep evolving cotton plant seeds.

Now that she could evolve three seeds per day without harming her frail body, it only took her a bit more than a week to reach her much-awaited hundred-evolution milestone.

"It's taken a while, but I'm done!" The cultivator celebrated with the hundredth Cottonpull seed in her hands as she raised it in the air. "Time to crunch numbers."

She planted the Cottonpull, even though it wasn't like she needed any more of them. An evolved plant was normally enough to satisfy her needs, but a hundred of them… well, she now had something worthy of being called a plantation. Space was free in the bottom of the chasm, even if she had now covered hundreds of meters of riverbed with her plants.

Soil patches were rare – useable ones at least – so for every half-dozen plants, maybe there was a region of nothingness for another couple dozen meters. She did her best to put Blossomflames in every patch for lighting and heating, but she had long planted them as her reserves had run out after only evolving Cottonpulls for this long.

And most of the Blossomflames were in her main camp, either way.

Aloe cut a new veritas leaf to note down numbers and grabbed her pocket-pen-knife.

"Alright, one hundred Cottonpull evolutions in a period of… one month? I should have kept a closer watch on the time, dunes." She groaned. "Eh, I can extrapolate the amount of vitality I can gain in a day once I have the amount Cottonpulls gives me per evolution. Alright, I began this experiment with something more than eight mansworth, let us say eight-point-one mansworth to be conservative. And now I have…"

Measuring vitality amounts was a very complex subject. The best way she had to do so was by using black seeds and evolving them into Flourishing Springs, and even then, that was an approximation.

But it was the best she had.

Trivially, Aloe poured one mansworth into the black seed and a few seconds later she had an evolved water-producing plant, or rather, its seed.

"Hmm…" She mused on the results brought by the evolution, comparing the used-up vitality as a fraction of her total reserves. "That feels like one-tenth of my capacity so… I have now ten mansworth?"

The number was so round, perfectly so, that she had the best specimen to try it with. Aloe stood up and walked to her colony of death caps. They had originally been at the border of her camp, but her stubbornness with planting all the Cottonpulls she got now made it look as if they were in the very heart of the camp.

That far had her crops reached.

Just in case, Aloe donned toughness whilst handing it, even if she doubted the lethal fungus could kill her. It wasn't much of a problem as it had been before as she now had unlimited light on her camp thanks to the Radiating Undergrowth. She sat on the cold rock floor of the chasm and slowly removed the spores on her knife tip with her vitality sense until only one remained.

This one she poured her vitality into.

Instantly, she knew she was going to cut close, but over what side of the edge she couldn't tell. This was but a gut feeling. She was tempted to wield recovery whilst evolving the Radiating Undergrowth, but she decided against it as it would mess with her measurements. Instead, she had a vitality pill close at hand.

But as it would seem, all her worries were unfounded.

By the time the vitality drain of the evolution slowed down significantly, she still had around ten percent of her reserves remaining. When it finally stopped, that number went down up to five percent.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"Alright, not too shabby. Slightly over ten mansworth then. The exact amount is…" She performed some quick mental arithmetic. "Ten-point-fifty-two mansworth? I'll probably have gotten that wrong, though. Anyhow, rounding numbers and then subtracting the starting point from the final one brings a variation of vitality of… two-point-four mansworth. Pretty good."

The sheer amount of vitality she had acquired was astonishing. She remembered when she barely had that much mansworth worth of reserves, and now it was but a fraction of her total.

"Two-point-four divided between one hundred that makes it… zero-point-zero-two-four mansworth, or twenty-four milimansworth if you will, per Cottonpull evolution." Aloe frowned. "Who am I even referring to?"

She'd rather not think about it.

"This means I need forty-two Cottonpull evolutions to gain one mansworth, which – factoring in that I can only evolve three per day currently – amounts to fourteen days. Let's say two weeks as it sounds better. Hmm…" Aloe hummed pleased with her progress. "This means that I can gain around two mansworth per month, which is way ahead of the curve compared to the two-thirds of the sultanzade. Still not fast enough though."

If she kept her current speed, that would mean she would only grow by an advantage of sixteen mansworth per year compared to the imperial cultivators.

"Wait what?" She realized the magnitude of her numbers. "Oh great heavens, I'm gaining twenty-four mansworth per year!"

Aloe led her hands to the head as she comprehended how colossal the number was. In her almost two years since she had found out about the vital arts, she had only obtained ten mansworth. Yet her current projected growth estimated that she would earn double that amount in half the time.

"Wait… isn't this growth… exponential?" Exponential growth was a word that was easily thrown around in any field in which mathematics was vaguely related, but few people understood its magnitude. "And I'm not even talking about how the difference between my original reserves and my current ones, but my growth. The more I evolve, the more seeds I can evolve per day as I get used to the flow of the plant and I gain more tolerance. And sure, there's a hard limit before my body starts aching from the multiple usages of vitality, but I still have the Radiating Undergrowths – plus the Slowtides – so it's not farfetched to consider that they will grant a proportional amount of vitality compared to the Cottonpulls. Which will allow me to slightly 'bypass' my daily limit of evolutions…"

There was one word original from her first line of work that defined her current projected growth. And it made her mouth water.

"Compounding," Aloe murmured. "The… the growth I'm experiencing is not exponential – those things don't tend to appear in nature – but compound. Oh heavens, there's an interest rate in my life, and it's not in the form of debt, but in my growth!"

There were few more beautiful words in the Ydazi language than the word 'compound', or that was what Aloe thought.

"But this is still suboptimal. I've been evolving cotton plant seeds, but now I can switch to death cap spores to further my growth speed… or not?" She realized a problem with her reasoning. "Right now my growth is this fast because I can evolve three Cottonpulls per day, but if I switch to Radiating Undergrowths, I will only be able to evolve two of them. And that's with plenty of difficulties, not a breeze like at this moment…"

She started etching numbers and projections on the veritas before her. It was weird doing complex calculations after these many years, even when she was serving as the scribe of commoners of Sadina things like divisions were uncommon. Her work was making decisions and obeying the emir, not crunching numbers, after all. But now all her knowledge as a banker was being helpful.

"I reached the 'three evolutions per day' mark with Cottonpulls once I was around nine mansworth according to my projections. I doubt the cutting line is one mansworth over the evolution cost, but rather a percentage. The variation in percentage of one mansworth when the base cost is eight is twelve-point-five. Let's say I'm wrong with the numbers and round it up instead of down, so fifteen percent of the base cost plus total, or one hundred and fifteen percent of the evolution cost to get to the 'three evolutions per day'. Applying this variable to the Radiating Undergrowth nets us a value of eleven-point-five mansworth. Once again, let's assume that I'm the worst mathematician to ever exist, and let's round it up to twelve. This means that I'll need two extra mansworth beyond the death cap evolution cost when it starts being optimal. Ah…"

Aloe took a well-deserved breath after her continuous rambling.

"Dunes, it feels odd thinking this much and this hard after so long." She lay on the ground and peered at the darkness of the chasm. Not even the Radiating Undergrowth's light was able to reach the cavern's ceiling. "This means I will need another month before having to start evolving undergrowths, but that's not a bad metric at all. Not at all…"

Weirdly enough, the petite woman felt exhausted, even more so than when she exercised. Aloe's eyelids heavied down on her and she slipped into unconsciousness as her mind stuck itself in the idea of compound growth.