It spoke at great lengths about Aloe's common sense and mental state when she considered burning her fingertips to charcoal a normal thing and a necessity.
Each day she would evolve three patches of lichen, and each day she would obliterate three patches of Slowtide alongside her fingers. They had started to lose some sensitivity because of that…
Nothing that donning a bit of acuity couldn't solve if she wanted to make use of her fingertips, but she did her best to minimize the damage by always using her left hand and the same finger.
The damage did slowly spread though. It wasn't significant but she was aware of how her sense of touch was slowly disappearing around the nearby areas. The only saving grace was that her motor functions weren't affected by the repeated radiation and healing.
"I can't keep this up," she told herself after healing her hand thrice today. "I need to evolve other things. I need to evolve the living stones."
It was a growing itch. She had known for months that they could be evolved and required a lot of vitality, so she wanted to know how much. She had several times the vitality she had had since then, surely she was now able to evolve it. At least she should try.
With growing anxiety and jitters, Aloe stabbed open one of the living stones she had planted. She had planted them months after coming down here, and yet they were already grown. How long had she been at the bottom of the chasm?
Not that asking questions would get her answers. Not that she couldn't leave either, she wouldn't allow herself to do so. Too dangerous. She had to stay here, heavens knew how far and wide they were searching for her, not just the sultanate but also the assassins. There were enemies at every corner, at every shadow, she couldn't allow herself to walk freely without contingencies ready.
And there was no better contingency than unheavenly-sized reserves.
Aloe grabbed the living stone seed, and without thinking twice, she pushed her vitality inside it with the intention of evolving it. It was but a reflex by now, no need to even muster a thought, just put her will into motion.
In that instant, as the vitality flowed out from her fingertips, her vital force being sapped by the yellowish seed, Aloe comprehended two things.
First, she was evolving it by having the seed in her fingertip.
Second, SHE DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH VITALITY.
She had already known that the living stone evolution would require a lot, but by the time her mind recovered some lucidity, she had already lost five mansworth, and the drain rate had barely slowed.
There was no time to think, no time to ponder, to make decisions.
Aloe instinctively acted.
She switched to potency, grabbed her knife, bit her lips, and brought down the edge. Her vision turned red for a moment, then the sickly snap reached her ears. Nausea assaulted her.
"FUCK!" She shouted and rolled on the ground as pain jolted her fully awake.
Most of the time she was getting hurt she donned toughness, so she was used to pain being numbed, but because she had to keep potency on for the cut, the sudden cut sent her whole being into a panic. A person's body wasn't supposed to be sliced like butter.
She switched to toughness the next instant, and she already felt the heat of the Blossomflames as they started to bloom with fire, but she couldn't stop hyperventilating as her finger bled. Her mind knew that she was fine, that she was in no danger, but her body couldn't comprehend that.
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That feeling got worse when she saw the other half of her finger on the ground.
She puked.
The gesture was so sudden and visceral that she almost choked, and when she was done, her throat hurt from all the contents she had released.
This was the first time emptying her stomach after having consumed Radiating Undergrowths so the vomit looked quite funky. But she couldn't bring herself to worry about that.
Now that a seed wasn't leeching at her reserves beyond her control, Aloe grabbed her cut finger and pressed it against the wound.
"Please reattach, please reattach," she prayed to the heavens. Then she switched her words, not praying, but commanding. "Reattach my finger!"
Fires orbited her body in tendrils of blaze, and with soft caresses, they approached her finger and focused on the line that separated both parts. Aloe didn't have to pray to forces that ignored her when she could wield her own.
The itch was one of the worst she had ever suffered.
Reattaching bone marrow and muscle tissue was somehow even worse than being steamed inside out. Thankfully, the pain was localized to a single digit instead of her whole body.
A few tendrils of fire also went to her lips as she had punctured them by biting on them whilst she still had been wielding potency, but so awful was the pain in the finger that she hadn't noticed until now.
Soon, the itches and pain subsisted.
Aloe collapsed on the ground, spent by the experience.
"Oh heavens," she groaned next to the pool of vomit. "Why did I not evolve it through my hair?"
Because she was impatient. Because she was tired. Because she needed some change in her life, and in a twisted way, she had been granted that wish.
She brought her finger to her mouth and licked the blood again as if that was going to alleviate the phantom pain and itches she felt. When she noticed it held in place and she could move it, she also kissed it repeatedly.
"Future undiscovered evolutions will always be attempted through hair contact, got that?" She told herself before standing up.
There was a lot of cleaning that needed to be done.
Aloe washed the puddle of vomit away and then cleaned her hands. Unfortunately, her kidneys failed her from the surprise, so she also washed herself alongside her clothes. Donning toughness made her impervious to the low temperatures of the Tehen River, basically immune to hypothermia.
She didn't fail to notice the white-ish color of her vomit. As her other earthly byproducts looked normal, she hadn't even questioned whether undigested Radiating Undergrowths could look this differently.
"Hmm, now it makes sense why I don't need to eat after eating undergrowths. The last time I ate was a week ago, but there were still some intact leftovers inside my stomach, meaning that more than giving me the energy to go for weeks without eating, it's closer to the fact that I digest them slowly and continuously. Nice?" She added with profound confusion at the end.
That realization didn't make much difference to her, but surely a scholar would appreciate it. Not that she was going to share that information. Not that she could in the first place.
Once she was composed, relaxed, rehydrated, and not having a heart rate above one hundred, Aloe reflected on what she had experienced.
"Okay, so how much vitality was that? Five mansworth in five seconds? Maybe a bit more?" She bit her fingernails as she continued pondering. "So far I've seen a similar pattern for evolution costs and draining rates. Maybe I can extrapolate a formula or at least a result. I need to crunch some numbers."
Aloe cut an Aloe Veritas leaf and started inscribing numbers on its surface. These were rough approximations at best, she didn't have definite values of how the Evolution drain rates actually worked, just gut feelings. But she had evolved so many living beings by now that those gut feelings were quite accurate. Or at least accurate enough for her liking.
The aspect of this drain over time was similar to a sigmoid function, though Aloe wasn't quite sure that was the name as it had been years since she had studied mathematics, no matter how advanced they were. In other words, it started with an elevated and constant drain, and towards the middle point it rapidly descended, until finishing with a low and constant drain as the evolution approached its maximum capacity.
How pronounced that decrease of this formula was Aloe couldn't tell. Her confidence in mathematics was only so high, and her abilities most likely were even lower. There was also the fact that the initial elevation and the final depression didn't have the same length – the former was way longer, meaning there was no symmetry – and the fact that this function didn't extend to infinity and was instead limited in time.
She went over the numbers multiple times, making different estimates until she was 'satisfied' with one. That was the light way to put it into words.
"Fuck!" She swore and smashed the veritas leaf before her. She had unconsciously switched to potency, so the leaf ended up in nothing more than small pieces and a splotch of ink as it exploded from the overwhelming force.
The cultivator couldn't even bring herself to care about how she had dirtied another set of clothing on the same day. The only thing in her mind was a number.
"One hundred," she muttered under her breath. "One hundred nince-damned mansworth!" Aloe let out a primal howl.
She still was far away from her goal.