There was something very wrong with the landscape. Buildings couldn't be that tall, it just didn't make any sense. At most, Aloe had seen buildings – or more accurately noble dwellings – with four floors, but from what she could see with her enhanced sight revealed that even the shortest of buildings had five floors, and the tallest ones were beyond the tenth mark.

Simply mindboggling.

She had seen this imagery before in the dream she had hijacked, but that had been a dream not a… window to reality.

"Aloe?" Xochipilli pulled on her hand and looked at her with worry. "Are you okay?"

"I…" The vegetable woman shook her head to beat some sense into it. Get a hold of yourself, Aloe. How can you be so pathetic to worry a child? "Yes, Xochipilli," she smiled at him, knelt, and patted his head. "The sight has disoriented me a bit, it has been a while since I've seen the city."

Aloe looked again at the urban landscape and quickly found the old keep and signs of old walls, though most things had been buried under the sprawling metropolis by now. This is definitely Selen. She bit her fibrous lip. How long has it really been? A city this big cannot be built in two decades. Nay, scratch that. Architecture cannot advance this rapidly, and those buildings would have needed advances upon advances to reach that height without collapsing on themselves.

Her body shook at those thoughts, fear overcame her, but she didn't allow herself to show it to Xochipilli.

"Let's get going, shan't we?" Aloe held his hand again and led him to the city.

She was surprised to find no walls this close to the border; the city simply ended, and the forest started on an invisible line. And from the looks of movement along the edges of the city, it was in constant expansion.

Finding a way into the city even if it was open and unguarded would have been difficult if it wasn't thanks to her experience in the dream. She didn't know much about this new world she had come back to, but she had some fuzzy guidelines.

First, she directed herself to Sayf's safe house. It was easy to reach the slaver's house unnoticed as it was situated close to the edge of Selen, also close to some weird metal beams on the ground that worked as a landmark.

Still, even in these undeveloped lands, there were a lot of people.

Thanks to the subterfuge internal infusion, Aloe was able to go unnoticed. With her new body, the rather weak stance had become more potent as her body was able to freely change in shape. She became slimmer and shorter, and her skin partially lost its bark texture, changing instead for the somewhat fleshy texture of succulents. A dark succulent, if that even existed.

The people ignored her, but she couldn't ignore them. Their clothes were too interesting to her eyes, even if most wore the same stuff. She was surprised to find that even the common man wore fine textiles even if the clothes themselves were simple shirts and trousers. A revolution in the textile industry, she pondered whilst keeping herself mostly in the shadows.

Aloe was able to hide in plain sight thanks to these changes, but the stealth stance wasn't omnipotent, and Xochipilli was still able to acknowledge her. Xochipilli constantly hid behind her, and she couldn't blame the kid, these streets had a dark aura to them. If they were lucky, maybe a bit of her subterfuge would soak into him. His eyes opened like plates upon seeing her body shifting, but he had enough presence of mind to not talk until they reached the slaver's house. Or rather, room.

Unlike all those tall buildings in the center of the city, these neighborhoods seemed to be quite undeveloped as the buildings were made out of bricks and only reached around two floors in height.

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"It should be this building," Aloe whispered.

"What's here?" Xochipilli whispered in kind.

"The slaver's house," the cultivator responded with a smile as she took out the key to his home.

The short building – by Selen's current standards – seemed to house many other doors owned by other people, so she wasn't totally surprised to find that Sayf's safe house was composed of a single open room. Quite spacious in square meters, but still only a room.

She left Xochipilli to roam around, which the child used to sit on a sofa, whilst she inspected the place. Unfortunately, there wasn't much to see besides a kitchenette, a mattress on the floor, a quite fancy toilet that she would have expected from the palace of Sadina and not a rundown shared building, and a wardrobe.

The place she was interested in the most was that wardrobe, but she was disappointed to not find a thing inside aside from spare pants and shirts. No secret compartment, no extra money, no nothing.

Aloe tried to put one of the shirts on, but as she was buttoning it, the first button at the top exploded.

"It seems I'm too big for a man's shirt even with subterfuge on…" Once upon a time, she would have been ecstatic to have a chest so massive that it literally snapped shirts open, but right now she could only care about wearing clothes.

The more time passed by, the more conscious of her nakedness she was becoming.

The trousers were even worse. With the shirt at least she could wear it without buttoning it, but her thighs were so massive that she wasn't able to get the slaver's trousers past them.

Aloe turned her face to watch Xochipilli, and she found him poking his head slightly from the backrest of the sofa. Upon being discovered, the child hastily hid behind it. As someone who had survived the public baths of Sadina during the early days of her life, Aloe couldn't feel but a grain of shame, in any case, she was amused at the boy's poor attempts at spying.

And besides, he had seen her naked plenty of time already. Not that she could feel the same type of shame before her transformation as her bark was more of an armor than skin as it covered all genitalia and likewise.

"You wouldn't know where I could buy clothes, would you?" Aloe asked him without scolding him as she removed the slightly-too-small pieces of clothing. She hadn't even tried the man's undergarments. She preferred going au naturel before wearing the undergarments of a man.

"U-uhm, n-no… sorry…" Xochipilli apologized still hiding behind the sofa. She couldn't know if the boy was apologizing for his lack of knowledge or his lack of manners, but both alternatives amused her. "I managed to escape from the station before the train got moving again, so I'm… not acquainted with the city."

"Sorry for even asking that," she apologized back to make the kid feel better, even if she hadn't understood half of the words he said.

"No, no!" He jumped out of the sofa. "Don't apologize because of my faults! A goddess should never apologize!"

Aloe smiled and approached the child to pat him. "If I want to apologize, I will do it, okay?"

Xochipilli nodded and mumbled shyly but non-verbally.

"I guess we should watch around for a tailor then," the cultivator said with her hands on her hips.

"Won't be a problem if you walk around like this?" Aloe looked at him, which made him panic. "I mean, not everyone could handle your great divine self!"

Xochipilli never made her fail chuckling. "I understand what you are saying. But we also got here without problems, didn't we?"

"Yes, but… a tailor suitable for your station will be in the middle of the city, and… there's more traffic there."

"Yes, that could be quite the issue, I still don't know the limits on my infusions…" Aloe pondered. "Subterfuge works to be unassuming, but glamour also moulds my body… Lemme try something."

Instead of simply activating glamour how she had done to direct around the slaver's dream, Aloe let the internal infusion modify her body like subterfuge had just done. Her vegetable body and Infusion synergized quite well as even if Nurture stances could modify the body, a human body wasn't as malleable as her own.

Glamour changed her shape differently from what subterfuge had done. The stealth stance had made her thinner, shorter, and with almost human-looking skin, if a bit too dark. The charm stance, on the other hand, made her a bit taller than her normal self, though she lost most of her actual height as the Aloe Veritas on her head became smaller.

Her vine hair became longer, the green of the vines dulling a bit and becoming a rather human-looking brown; her rectangular body became more curvaceous with an hourglass shape, even going as far as giving her breasts, real breasts and not just mounds; her root-looking feet became into actual feet; and most importantly, her skin gained that succulent texture, albeit with a softer brown color, a shade almost similar to her original skin color.

In other words, she became more human.

"What do you think about it?" Aloe twirled to show Xochipilli her new self.

"Uhhhh…" The boy grunted as he was left agape, then as he processed what he was looking at, he blushed. "I-I believe you s-should wear some clothes."