Many things should be said about the grafting of Heartgrowth body parts, but the only one that mattered to Aloe was the loss of vitality. She had been long aware of the fact that loss of blood correlated with loss of maximum vitality, and amputating her fingers did – in fact – cause a lot of blood loss. The answer to such a conundrum was quite simple, just a healthy dose of self-cannibalism.

She was thankfully not required to eat her finger, most vitality was stored in the blood rather than the flesh and bones, but if she drank her spilled blood back before it coagulated, she could recover her vitality.

This meant that there was an inevitable loss of vitality, but it was minimal enough that it paled in comparison to sizeable blood infusions.

And either way, Heartgrowth evolutions provided more than enough vitality to make up for her losses.

The more she experimented and investigated with the Heartgrowth, the more confident Aloe felt. By all metrics, it was an upgrade. The vegetable parts didn't feel the same exhaustion as her flesh ones, meaning she could mistreat them more.

And more.

And more.

There was logic to stop at one hand, to not enhance every corner of her body. It was difficult working with some Heartgrowths as they were sometimes only bones, piles of blood vessels, or flayed skin, but that meant there was no piece of herself that couldn't be upgraded.

By the time she had reached one hundred and fifty mansworth of reserves, Aloe had managed to complete her left arm. An extremity fully composed of vegetable matter that obeyed her commands and behaved like a normal arm. The best part was that it could be trained like a normal one too! An arm that grew in musculature but felt only a fraction of the exhaustion.

This was truly the most wonderful of discoveries.

It took time, investigation, and a lot of failed attempts, but the cultivator was able to make the changes she pleased.

One she was really proud of was reconstructing her reproductive system. She felt an unstoppable euphoria when she managed to substitute her womb with a vegetable one that didn't suffer from her monthly bodily repercussions.

No more timely loss of vitality, only unadulterated happiness.

Sure, there had been many mistakes and pain in the process as she had to operate herself by opening her stomach, but between toughness and limitless Blossomflames, she couldn't pass out, let alone pass away.

It was a slow process that required many attempts for every substitution, but Aloe was capable of slowly bringing her body to a perfected state.

One sublime evolved self.

There were some parts she had been incapable of changing, either because the Heartgrowth didn't manifest them, or because she wasn't confident in touching them. Even as all other parts of herself vanished, her brain, her spine, and her emerald eyes remained.

That was when she became aware of more properties of the Heartgrowth.

Its sobriquet was the Synergetic Symbiont, and that much became clear as her vegetable body became one with her flesh body. Some fleshy organs may remain behind, but the Heartgrowth was more than capable of modifying them, making them sustainable and quasi-vegetable.

Even the worst parts of herself were augmented.

There was no higher elation than that.

Her eyes slightly changed, especially the sclera as it lost part of its whiteness, but she still flaunted her characteristic emerald.

But the advances didn't end there, oh no. Her evolved, vegetable self was just not a body, but far more. As the Aloe Veritas description had stated, the Heartgrowths complimented the body of the host.

And it was Aloe who decided who the host was.

Nothing stopped her from putting a Blossomflame seed in her body, forcing it to grow, and then making the local Heartgrowth act as the soil. Connected with flows of vitality, it was Aloe who truly now nurtured the plants.

With herself.

But this wasn't enough. Her work wasn't over. She needed more.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Vitality was the first step, but she still lost vitality – her reserves wavered – whenever she evolved a Heartgrowth, so she needed far more than that. Enough vitality that not even a hundred mansworth evolution moved her reserves by a decimal point.

Yet increasing her reserves wasn't enough. No. Even the Heartgrowth fell short for her evolved self, she needed new, better evolutions. Evolution couldn't be as simple as that, there was something she was missing, something she had long obviated because of her lack of previous knowledge.

She thought of the requirements and catalysts for Evolution and realized that nothing stopped her from evolving a plant only once.

Her focus was her first and most knowledgeable of plants, the one that shared its namesake with her.

Aloe evolved the Aloe Veritas.

But why stop at one single step when one could go even further beyond?

The heavens were the limit.

It took trial and error, and even when she exhausted her catalysts, Aloe found a new way to evolve plants with one of her oldest and longer-running experiments, the selective cultivation of infused mushrooms.

That experiment hadn't brought any results, infusions didn't seem capable of merging, but living beings could.

Would.

It took many generations of already re-evolved plants combined with each other to create new specimens. She combined and combined until she discovered something that brought her infinite happiness.

A living being with three alignments instead of only one or two.

She couldn't stop herself from there.

It was a marathon to create a being with all the alignments she had found. She still didn't know if those nine were all the alignments, so she still had work before her.

Aloe evolved, merged, and grew… all with a single goal in mind.

Curiosity.

Her spite became a thing of the past as she strode for that ultimate being that combined all those alignments. She tried plants on herself, though like the plague of incest desolating humans, the more evolved and merged a plant was, the lesser effects it portrayed.

That didn't matter to Aloe. She wasn't in this to find a powerful plant, but one which could encapsulate all of reality. The lucidity brought by the world of ideas was of utmost importance and help during this process. Her mind had never felt this clear before.

She, a constantly evolving self, edging closer to finding one superior to her. To be its creator.

Such endeavor required colossal amounts of vitality as the cost of evolutions was completely random and even the most insignificant of beings could cost as much as late three digits. And by now every evolution was inconsequential as they provided no important applications whatsoever. Seemingly, Aloe had lucked out with her original evolutions.

Reality was often disappointing.

But the search for truth remained true and constant. And constant it was as she remained all the time on the recovery internal infusion as she no longer required of others. Her passive boost of other physical capabilities was great enough that even without donning potency, she was as strong as she had been whilst donning it when her reserves had yet to reach the two digits.

Aloe couldn't believe that the imperial cultivators considered the regeneration stance to be a useless one. Thanks to her practice, her vegetable body, and her massive reserves, she no longer needed to eat, breathe, sleep, and many other things.

Truth be told, she transcended the need to eat a long time ago. Plants didn't eat like humans did, and whilst Aloe wasn't a plant, she could benefit from such cases. With sunlight – or radiation in this case – Aloe could sustain herself for a long time, indefinitely whilst bolstering recovery.

The lack of sleep was the greatest blessing of all. She didn't remember anymore the last time she went to sleep, and because she lacked a day and night cycle down here, for her it was as if she had been awake for a very long and endless day.

Peak efficiency.

Progress was constant. Progress was inevitable.

Vitality. Evolution. Change. Mutation.

A slow but constant growth, like a millennial tree that saw through the rise and fall of empires. Ceaseless. Dauntless. Eternal. No act was too great or too time-consuming, Aloe continued with but an idea in mind and all the time of the world.

Soon, she reached her goal. A being that transcended animals, fungi, plants, and living beings as they were understood. A being containing nine alignments.

And it was hideous.

Words failed to describe the abominable mutation she had given birth to, for it contained all words in the lexicon and none at all at the same time. It defied logic as it was imagined. Her whole being was filled with repulsion at her own creation, and her latent lucidity finally woke up from the longest of dreams.

"You shouldn't exist," Aloe uttered a word after what it felt like millennia.

It wasn't difficult for a being of her magnitude to destroy the nascent abomination. She threw it on the Slowtide, but as she considered it far from being enough, she obliterated the slime with the many Radiating Undergrowths she could freely manipulate.

It still wasn't enough.

The memory of such a thing lingered around and her insight from the world of ideas told her that the lingering memory of a being aligned to Information could be catastrophic. Not even its records should be left. Everything had to be eradicated.

Aloe torched her camp.

Blossomflames drowned the whole chasm and burned everything she had created. That was fine. That was her decision. From the very beginning, she had only needed herself. That was what she told herself.

There was no need to let anyone else behold the sight of what she had created.

Her greatest shame.

Without looking behind, Aloe decided it was finally time to leave the underground. She had spent too much time down here and if she remained any longer, she would remember her sins of megalomania. She had lost herself on a branching path, one diverging from her real goal, and that had almost cost herself, her sanity, and her world.

No more.

The time for plants and discoveries was over, she had a quest to fulfill.

Leaving the chasm was way easier than it had once been with her evolved and lifeful self. With a handful of jumps, she made it from the bottom of the abyss to the surface.

And the sight she beheld shook her to the core.

Sunlight greeted her, and as much as she wanted to see the sun after so long, her eyes lingered not in the color yellow of the sun nor the blue of the skies, but…

Green.

Aloe Ayad, mother of plants, vegetable human, patron of Evolution, and cultivator found herself in a forest.