After a few more weeks and restoring the mansworth-sized hole that the blood infusion had made on her reserves, Aloe was ready to evolve a new Heartgrowth. Even readier than before as her reserves edged on the three digits.
With recovery on, she had nothing to worry about as she poured her copious reserves into the living stone seed, but she still performed the evolution through her hair.
Just in case.
Maybe she was impervious to amputations – or more exactly, could shrug them off – but that didn't mean she looked forward to them.
Her fears soon proved to be unfounded as she finished the evolution with time to spare. Restoring one mansworth per second was a scary ability.
"I wonder if at some point I restore so much that evolutions won't even be able to offset my natural regeneration?" Aloe said as she picked up the seed from the tips of her long mane.
It was uncomfortably long by now, certainly more than a meter long, but she was curious how far she could take it. It seemed that vital arts, or a Nurture stance, boosted the growth of her hair, so she was interested in seeing what the limits were.
But now that didn't matter.
"Let's grow you, shall we?" Aloe giggled with the Heartgrowth in her hands, and she planted it near the 'deceased' Heartgrowth.
She didn't want to repeat the blood infusion accident, nor halt her reserve growth for the time being, so she opted for using Forced Growth. The flowing stance technique was inefficient at growing anything, it required far too much vitality for the little growth that it stimulated, but the last time she had tried it was when she didn't have much vitality at all.
Her current self had that much vitality every handful of seconds.
Continuously.
With a deep breath, Aloe planted her palm against the ground and focused her vitality sense on the Heartgrowth seed. It was unfortunate that she couldn't have both the flowing stance and the regeneration stance at the same time, otherwise this would have been a much simpler process.
"Ah, what would I give to have two infusions at the same time?" She knew the cost, and the answer was nothing.
It was too much of a sacrifice, too much of a liability to have someone dote on her with an external infusion. And she still didn't know if external infusions could be transformed into Nurture stances. There was a high chance that she could only use the external stances she knew of, which weren't very useful except for longevous perennity that would extend her lifespan.
Yes, she had tried it on plants to ensure the mythical external infusion existed and wasn't a lie weaved by Aaliyah, or that it only worked on humans.
"This is not the time for this," she told herself. "Focus."
And she blasted the soil with her vitality.
One thing she had discovered about the flowing stance was that it wasn't really needed to compartmentalize limited amounts of vitality to push them outwards like she had been doing all this time. Like Infusion or Evolution, she could just keep pushing her vitality out with that intention.
There were benefits and disadvantages to this method, though. If she constantly kept the flowing stance on, that meant she couldn't use other stances. If she needed to continuously supply vitality to the stance then it was a non-issue, but she wanted to keep her vitality up. So instead of making the flowing stance behave like any other stance, Aloe compacted blobs of vitality worth ten mansworths and then shifted to the regeneration stance.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The vitality with the Forced Growth intention still remained on her fingers, but she could push it out of her body slowly with recovery on to continue regenerating her vitality.
"Ah yes, the poor man's double infusion," she joked. "If I could discover other applications of the flowing stance, I could technically use two stances at the same time. One would have to always be the flowing stance, though."
Nothing stopped her from pushing her ten mansworth of Forced Growth vitality into the seed in one go, but it also wasn't worth it to do so. Even if the vitality had left her reserves, it still was on her body, so if she were to expulse it in one go, that would exhaust her. Better to keep a slow and steady pace and pour vitality out as she restored her reserves.
She weaved in and out of the flowing stance as she used up the stored vitality. Using up this much vitality would have exhausted – should have exhausted her – but because she wasn't going even lower than ninety percent of her total reserves, she didn't feel the exhaustion as much.
It was slowly building up, but it was way less significant than it should have been. Instead of a powerful exercise or something frenetic like a fight, this was more akin to taking a walk. Perhaps a few hours were a bit too much, but one hour didn't affect one much.
There was something beautiful about seeing plants growing at her touch too. With an uninterrupted flow of vitality, she was able to basically make any plant grow in real time, tens if not hundreds of times faster than they should.
A bit beyond the hundred mansworth mark, the Heartgrowth was fully grown, its own pulse of vitality shifting from occasional pulses to the true thrum of life.
"Ah," Aloe groaned in exhaustion and collapsed on the ground, her palms supporting her body from fully crumbling. "Forced Growth is soooo inefficient, early three digits for a plant this small does not bode well. I mean, it has only taken me five minutes to grow it, but heavens, I'm beaten. I want to sleep soooo badly…"
Contrary to her words, Aloe rebounded with a jump and then started inspecting the grown Heartgrowth as if her exhaustion had been a mirage. Recovery tended to do that, even if it could only alleviate tiredness.
"Alright, so this one is a liver. Right…" She tried to come up with a joke, but there weren't many things one's wit could muster about a vegetable liver. "I do wonder if it can be eaten, or how it tastes. I mean, it is a liver. Perhaps it even tastes like a normal one?"
Whilst she was not an expert cook, she had helped her mother or… Mirrah cook more than once, so she had seen her fair share of animal innards. Goat liver was quite a delicacy too.
"Let's go step by step first," she wiped out her drool. "The organ Heartgrowths mimic are set at… birth? Sure, let's go with that. The moment they are born and manifested as seeds, they are assigned an organ. Now I wonder, do Heartgrowth seeds of a specific organ produce the same organ or a different one?"
There was only one way to test it.
Aloe carefully stabbed the living Heartgrowth in search of seeds. She had become aware of this with the heart Heartgrowth, but seemingly, the seeds could be anywhere on the plant, even the outside. They seemed to not follow any given or discernable pattern.
After removing a seed that was barely prodding out from the tissue, the cultivator planted it next to its parent. As she was still quite exhausted, Aloe searched for more seeds and planted half of the ones she found. Her next test would be to kill this new Heartgrowth – then eat it – and see if the seeds extracted before the plant's death would be sterile or not.
Fast forward to tomorrow, her experiments brought some pleasant surprises.
Seeds original from a Heartgrowth didn't necessarily inherit their organ type. In this case, Aloe got a lung, which was frankly creepy as it kept filling and emptying with seemingly no purpose whatsoever. What would she do with so many different vegetable organs, she had no clue.
The next day, she finally killed the liver Heartgrowth and cooked it. Unfortunately, this experiment wasn't as successful. Even if the vegetable liver didn't taste bad, it wasn't goat liver. She wasn't dramatically affected by her loss of possible cultivated meat – growing meat from trees sounded like a dream – as she had long ago given up on taste, meals, and cooking.
The Radiating Undergrowth made everything too comfortable, and she never enjoyed eating, to begin with.
Now, her latest experiment was a curious one. Seeds from a deceased Heartgrowth removed prior to its death were still fertile, but if she were to plant seeds taken from a dead Heartgrowth, these would never grow.
Somehow.
Even though she was dealing with magical plants and magical arts, that fact irritated her to no end. Even inside the twisted logic of the vital arts, seeds losing their fertility because their parent died made no sense whatsoever.
Having nothing better to do until she started evolving her Heartgrowths instead of planting existing seeds like any normal cultivator, Aloe planted all her existing seeds. She didn't have an answer or a justification for why she was doing so, but there was something compelling and enthralling about having a garden composed of organs pulsing and living on the soil.
"I wonder how long it will take me to have a fully grown body," Aloe mused to herself as she overlooked her camp. "That image sounds quite… exquisite."