Aloe played it smart with the Cottonpull's sack as she could already predict the future, the image impossibly clear in her head. If she broke the sack, the cotton balls would be sent flying, and she would be unable to recover them.
Her imagination was completely unfounded, but there was no reason to go against it. And she'd like to think she was beginning to understand some logic behind the inner workings of the evolved plants. And her misfortunes.
Carefully, she pulled on the root of the sack…
"It's really hard not to think about some things when you have that shape, ya' know?" She told to the Cottonpull.
The evolved plant failed to answer.
"Bah!" Aloe groaned and let her impure thoughts go away as she pulled. "Hmm… quite the pull you got on you."
She would like to blame her lack of strength on acuity, but between her increased vitality and her strength training, donning non-potency internal infusions didn't reduce her physical prowess as much as it originally did.
"Maybe the better haul of the plant aren't cotton balls, but the sack. Dunes, this is quite the strong textile!" She pulled hard but still found herself unable to pull the evolved plant's pouch more than a few centimeters toward her. "Ugh, potency it is."
Her sight slightly diminished as she activated the strength stance but compared to the darkness she had been drowning in these prior months, she had more than enough light to work with.
With potency active, it was trivial to pull the sack down, so she had to control her strength so she didn't tear it or anything. What she feared most now was breaking the pouch away from the main plant as that seemed like the weakest link as some twigs had snapped as she pulled.
"I hate being this short," Aloe mumbled as she got the sack close to her.
The protective film of the evolved cotton plant was quite large, more than enough to fit five Aloes on its volume, and because there weren't enough cotton balls inside yet, she had to pull the sack close to the ground before her short arms could pick up one.
"Theeeere!" She grabbed a cotton ball with her fingertips and slowly released the sack. "Next time I should jump for a ball instead of bringing the sack toward me."
The cultivator said with a pant and focused on the magical cotton ball in her clutches.
"Huh, it is pulling upwards, but an individual cotton ball doesn't have much pull. Also," she changed how she was grabbing the cotton as it was beginning to tear by its fibers, "it seems its pull is stronger than its tensile strength, which is… bad. This means that I won't be able to make floating textiles, which – to be fair – I doubted I could do in the first place. But it would have been nice having that opportunity."
Grabbing the cotton ball with both hands, Aloe proceeded to inspect it, but she failed to notice anything eye-catching from it.
"It just looks like a way-bigger-than-average ball… of cotton." She frowned. "I'm really stupid today, huh."
Aloe sat down with an intensifying scowl directed at her dirty mind, but no matter what angle she looked at the fluff of cotton from, her previous statement seemed to hold true. It was a big cotton ball that just so happened to fall upwards. And had the size of a human head.
"Falling upwards, what an oxymoron." She released a bit of her grip, and the cotton already tried to escape her clutches. She tested it again and the more she tried, the more the feeling was like having something slipping out of your hands rather than a force pulling on her. "Also, how does this work? I remember having another plant that defied gravity, the Moonlight's Tooth. But that one had an Arcane affinity, yet the Cottonpull has a Space one."
She had every Aloe Veritas description of the evolved plants fresh on her mind as every time she had remembered one, she noted it down for posteriority. Both plants she mentioned had a Life alignment and they only diverged with their secondary one.
"Does this entail anything? Other Arcane evolved plants like the veritas or the ter'nar haven't shown such behaviors, nor other Space plants for that matter. The only other Space evolution I have is the Slowtide, which I don't know if it could be considered a plant. For the lichen thing, not because it's now a pool of slime. Plants can be slimy, right?"
Aloe slapped herself the next moment for divagating this much.
"Ow!" Then she remembered she was still donning strength. "I think I broke something."
The Blossomflames hastily caught on to her exaggeration as they failed to provide a single ember in response to her 'wound'.
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"Let's assume for the time being that this atypical gravitational behavior is not bound to alignments. Which… makes sense?" The cultivator pondered for a moment as she caressed the cotton ball on her lap. "The moonlight had seeds that floated around her as a defined center of orbit, whilst the cotton of the Cottonpull points upwards. These may not even act under the same phenomenon after all…"
But Aloe knew what she was sputtering about was nonsense that she didn't fully understand. Her lessons in astronomy had been few and had had a more theological underlining than a scholarly one.
"Now, what applications can I give to these balls?" Aloe raised the cotton fluff above her head. It was off-putting moving the ball around as it didn't weigh anything, and the pulling force that it had was minimal. "I mean, the most obvious application would be flight… but why am I not enthusiastic about it? It is flying, the human desire to touch the heavens! But…" The petite woman looked around her and looked at the darkness and damp rock that surrounded her. "Maybe once I'm on a more open field I would be happy to try it."
As she continued thinking, Aloe realized there weren't many applications she could exploit from the Cottonpulls. Emphasis on she.
"I mean, any type of pulley would benefit from the Cottonpulls but," she looked around, "I can't say I have those things. The best thing truly is a flying machine but not that I can build one down here and… how many evolved cotton balls would I need to do so? A single sack can exert a lot of tension, but that doesn't directly translate to weight. I couldn't pull it with acuity on, but it was trivial with potency, so this sack should be exerting an upward force lesser than my body weight. Maybe with three of them, I could fly… but that sounds really dangerous. I would need to be donning toughness all the time and have several Blossomflames with me to make it safe, I don't think this has a future."
She played with the cotton ball a bit more to see if she could come up with any ideas, but those seemed to run dry today. As she stood up, her mind slipped for a moment and she let the cotton ball go, which promptly disappeared into the darkness of the chasm.
"Oh well, I have one hundred planted Cottonpulls, I could lose thousands of cotton balls and don't even notice it."
That raised the question in her mind of how high the balls would end up going, but as she had no way of answering it, she abandoned the thought.
She went on with the rest of her day as she tried to come up with other applications for the antigravitational cotton. There had to be something beyond a flying contraption that she couldn't build with her limited resources.
"Hmm, I could stuff my backpack with it." She thought as she performed some sit-ups. "I don't know how efficient this cotton is, but if I were to compress it and stuff it together inside the seams, couldn't I make my backpack near weightless?"
Making her baggage lighter wasn't much of an application, though. Not only was she stronger thanks to her exercise routine, but if she ever had to carry a heavy load, she could just wield potency.
"I don't lose anything by trying." The cultivator wiped her sweat and proceeded to collect cotton balls.
Using potency and jumping for them proved to be the better method, if a bit more physically demanding considering some balls were as high as three meters. Not difficult though, that height was almost trivial now. But it was true she missed from time to time. Physical prowess didn't correlate to physical skill, after all.
"How do I store them, though?" That problem was resolved in a handful of seconds as she simply threw the balls inside her crevice. "First try!"
Aloe noticed how the cotton balls' gravitational pull wasn't that different from the attraction their non-evolved counterparts experienced with normal gravity. With a bit of finesse and aiming towards the ground instead of up – which was a bit counterintuitive as, after all, the balls fell upwards – she was able to send the balls into her crevices from the spot of the mother plant.
She failed a shot or two. Or three.
But that didn't matter. Much.
The grown Cottonpull only ended up having around thirty balls, but considering how much the sack was sagging by the end as it started collapsing on its weight, Aloe decided to leave some behind. For her preliminary tests, she didn't need that many cotton balls.
The textile work she could do was pathetic at best considering she didn't have thread and needle. For her first experiment, she filled the cover of her pillow with the evolved cotton, taking out the normal one. She tried fitting inside as much fluff as she could, but because the Cottonpull's cotton was bigger and stuffier than the normal one, so only twenty balls ended up fitting inside.
But she had the feeling that if she tried harder, she could put even twice that amount inside the pillow cover. Maybe if she cleaned the cotton and processed it.
"Yup, that's quite the pull," Aloe said with the pillow trapped in her hands. "I guess I could do with it some… inverted weightlifting? Pulling exercises? I'm not exactly sure how to describe this activity. Anyhow, the cotton's pull seems to stack as it is way stronger than a single ball, but still… it is quite lacking. Even if they are the size of my head, an individual ball doesn't have much pull. Way more than a normal cotton ball as things weigh massively more the bigger they get, but they are still quite small. And still cotton."
Aloe tried running some rough calculations by grabbing a normal cotton ball and putting it on one palm, and then grabbing evolved cotton and putting it underneath her other palm. Both pushed on her, just in different directions. Now, normally it would be impossible for a person to tell a difference with values this small, but with the help of acuity, she had a waaay easier time comparing the magnitudes.
"Okay, I may be eyeballing this by monumental proportions, but I believe a Cottonpull's cotton weighs – or the equivalent of weight for it – a hundred times that of normal cotton. I think." After applying some simple math, she concluded the value of her pillow's pull. "Two kilograms. All that cotton for two kilograms or so of weight which… is not that bad, honestly. I could cram them even further together, so I could technically put balloons on my backpack to not only be weightless but also reduce my weight…"
But the more she crunched the numbers, the less feasible the whole project seemed. She would need thousands of evolved cotton balls to make a dent in her weight, and that was without considering the fact that the materials needed to keep the cotton in place would also weigh them down. Calculating such variables would require complex equations and fields of mathematics that she didn't have the brainpower for.
"Hmm, maybe once I get out, but right now, I don't see a future for the Cottonpull." Aloe would try experimenting with the evolved plant more, but it would fail to bring results she was satisfied with.