If the lack of a day and night cycle didn't mess with Aloe's perception of time enough already, her lack of hunger put the final nail in the coffin. Not needing to eat meant that she didn't have a natural clock to measure the passage of the day, and she now had more free time on her hands as the many hours she dedicated to cooking had vanished.
It also didn't help since a while ago now her cycle had been erratic at best. Sometimes it took far more weeks than it should have, which partially scared her. Though, at the same time, curses weren't without their blessings, and not having to bleed for what felt like months certainly was one of the biggest blessings there were.
To counteract her erratic menstruation, Aloe stopped donning recovery to sleep. Whilst she would rest less each time she went to sleep, that was a sacrifice she was willing to make to avoid making her crevice into a pool of blood. And it wasn't much of a problem as it originally would have been as the Dream Spore left her well-rested with her dream experiments.
The Radiating Undergrowths provided unlimited food and lighting.
The Dream Spores provided quality sleep.
The Blossomflames provided warmth and healing.
She had everything she needed in her hand's reach. She had no reason to leave her little bright hole underground. She had all the time in the world to slowly experiment and grow in power.
Slowly but surely.
All the previously listed factors accumulated into a singularity, making her incapable of acknowledging the passage of time. Hours, days, weeks… all but just a blur.
Before Aloe noticed, she had already reached the point of optimal evolution for the Slowtide, which was twenty-three mansworth. A staggering amount of vitality by any metric, but still not enough to fulfill her wishes. She would still need far more for that, orders of magnitude more.
But when it was time to evolve her first Slowtide after ages, she reached a conundrum.
"I can't plant more of them, they grow too fast, and they don't seem to stop. I don't know how many I will need to evolve before reaching the necessary vitality for the living stones' evolution, but at the very least, it's safe to say it will be more than a hundred Slowtides. Too many. This… pool of slime growing hundreds of times faster will be a problem."
The Slowtide hadn't grown that much in all this time, only about the size of the sand bathtub she had in her home back in Sadina, so around four square meters. That was only after a handful of months, so by itself, it wasn't much of a problem, but the constant and unrelenting growth and her knowledge of the evolved lichen's infinite infusion cost made her assume with confidence that it wouldn't stop growing.
A few square meters a year wasn't a problem, but a few square kilometers each year? Now that was a catastrophe in the making.
This wasn't the first time Aloe had had that thought, so she tried some tactics to slow down Slowtide's growth. First, she tried to burn the slime with Blossomflame, and whilst it seemed to work, it had taken her hours to chip away a few centimeters. Her next idea was planting a Radiating Undergrowth next to it. The strategy behind it was that the evolved death cap expelled great amounts of heat, so that would already make it hard for growth, but if the evolved lichen ended up getting too close either way, then the halo of infinite repulsion of the Radiating Undergrowth would definitely stop the pink slime from expanding.
And, surprisingly, that idea did work.
She had planted the Radiating Undergrowth between the Slowtide and the Tehen River as she feared the ever-expanding slime would contaminate the waters. Once the success of the evolved death cap was proven, she planted another one between the bright pink slime and her camp, so the Slowtide now could only expand upwards or away from her.
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That brought her to today. The only planted Slowtide was 'contained' but she was worried what would happen if she planted the one she was going to evolve.
"It's too dangerous for no apparent benefit, I've yet to perceive these 'soporific properties' of the Slowtide, I have to destroy any Slowtide I evolve. It's the only way."
It hurt her having to destroy the living beings she was pouring so much vitality into to evolve, but that was the only way. She couldn't risk that much just for morbid curiosity.
Aloe grabbed one of the patches of lichen she had been growing. Just in case, she had crops of everything she could evolve even if she didn't need more. Currently, she had black seeds, cumin, aloe veras, cotton plants, liberty caps, death caps, lichen, and finally, living stones. Because she didn't know how long those took to grow and she had a limited number of them, she decided to plant them instead of leaving them to rot in a pouch. She gave them shade acclimation and left them to grow at their own pace without external assistance as she still didn't feel close to being able to evolve them, but she was going to try in the near future if just to check how far away she still was.
Evolving a Slowtide was trivial as she purposely had waited before having the optimal amount of mansworth to be able to evolve three of them per day. Still, spending twenty mansworth in one go totally exhausted her even if the process was devoid of pain.
"More. I need more vitality," Aloe talked to herself between pants as now a patch of bright pink slime rested in her fingertips. Then it was time to destroy the plant. "I don't blame you," she told to the Slowtide, "such is your nature to expand, but I'm worried what will happen if I allow you to expand freely."
Aloe donned toughness and approached a Radiating Undergrowth. There was a faster way of disposing of the Slowtides than slowly roasting them with the Blossomflames.
She pushed her finger against the halo of radiation.
No matter how much strength she applied, how many bones she broke even through toughness, Aloe was incapable of pushing through the halo of colorful violet-pink-blue of the Radiating Undergrowth. It was a wall of infinite pushing power that repelled her from moving closer.
This also meant that the nascent Slowtide wasn't trapped between a rock and a hard place, but a hard place and the hardest place.
Even through the pain, the flames, and the smoke, Aloe held her finger against the Radiating Undergrowth until she felt the vitality from the Slowtide completely extinguish, its life force vanished from existence.
"Ah," she groaned as she clutched her hand. "This hurts even through toughness. Blossomflames, heal me."
Aloe was nowhere near a Blossomflame's effective radius, but upon hearing her words, several of the evolved flowers woke up from their slumber and formed strands of fire across the air to connect with her burnt finger.
So severe had been the burns from the prolonged exposure that the tip of her finger had turned into charcoal and her nail had partially melted. And all of that was only able to cause her a 'pestering' amount of pain.
Nothing that magical healing fire couldn't solve.
What was more surprising was that after donning recovery for five minutes after that, not only she was patched up like new, but her vitality reserves were full again. She dedicated a lot of time to building muscle mass to make her strength stance stronger and also did some exercises to practice her speed and sense stance. But without a doubt, the stance she trained more was the regeneration one.
Every action she took basically pushed her vitality restorative capabilities.
Her current recovery infusion allowed her to restore almost her maximum reserves in five minutes.
Which meant she was slowly making it combat-suitable. The main reason why the sultanzade told them regeneration was a bad stance was because it couldn't be used in combat scenarios, it was too slow for such purposes. But she now restored around a tenth of a mansworth per second.
"I still need a way to use that vitality up, I should try to find out how the sultanzade perform their flowing stance techniques. My current advantage is not the size of my reserves, but how fast I can restore them as the imperials don't have a fast way to expulse their vitality as I do."
Aloe was confident that most of the power behind her recovery internal infusion came from the fact that she was restoring tens if not hundreds of mansworth each day. Even the sultanzade who did use the flowing stance wouldn't be spending that much vitality.
"How am I at the bottom of a chasm, devoid of any need to work and also self-sufficient, but work keeps pilling up?" The cultivator groaned at her growing list of duties.
She had to increase her reserves; keep herself alive, heavens knew when a random assassin would drop on top of her; practice with the Dream spore, she still had to make any significant progress; evolve the living stones; find a use for the Slowtide; train every one of her stances, both in prowess and switching time; and last but not least, discover new flowing stance techniques.
"Hells, there are probably more items in that list I have forgotten."
She had a lot to do, but she also had a lot of time. All in the world. It just blurred so easily…