49. Toughness (Patreon)

Aloe started by meditating. Though this time she didn’t get undressed. Introspection was a useful tool when dealing with vitality as it allowed her to detect it more clearly. Isolating her senses, especially sight, made it easier for her to follow the ebb and flow of her body.

“Hmm?” She groaned curiously as she took a closer look at the internal movement of the vitality.

It wasn’t static. It was in constant movement, just like blood. Is vitality blood? That was her first thought, but she quickly discarded it. Vitality, whilst tangible energy, had a metaphysical component. It wasn’t matter. Or if it was, Aloe couldn’t identify it as solid, liquid, or gas.

Giving a numerical value to vitality was complicated, if not outright impossible. So far, Aloe had worked with portions of her total deposit, but that method of calculation quickly showed its flaws.

It has grown. There’s more vitality than the first time I sensed my vitality. Aloe pondered; her thoughts came slowly to her as she had to be extremely concentrated to keep her current state. It isn’t much, but there’s more than before, that’s without a doubt. Maybe a potato infusion more. Not much, but countable. That gave her an idea on how to elaborate a unit value for vitality as the plants stayed constant, whilst her deposit was dynamic, but she left it for later.

Now it was infusing time.

“You can infuse yourself.” Aloe recalled the line of Karaim’s writing. She had virtually to no information, just speculation based on how he had written the text. She could only hope it was enough.

Let’s assume that default infusion, whether on people or plants, is accelerated growth. That’s useless to me, so I need to pour intent into my infusion to give myself something useful. But what? I only know the plant infusion typings Karaim has discovered, so if I want to infuse myself, I need to make my own... I need something visible, maybe even countable. Could I... make myself taller?

The sheer idea of growing even a few centimeters sent a pulse of energy down her spine. It wasn’t a shiver, but excitement. As she readied herself for the infusion, a grim thought infiltrated her mind. Wouldn’t that be painful? She realized. To grow my bones would need to stretch and... Nope. Nope. Nope. I don’t want to think about it.

Aloe visibly recoiled at the thought, her body tearing as she grew beyond her control, making her lose her concentration and exit her meditative state.

“Okay...” She added with a sigh. “So much for auto control and concentration.” The grotesque images still lingered through her mind, sending shivers down her spine. “What can infuse myself with then? Something that doesn’t twist my body in unpredictable consequences preferably. Ugh, I can’t come up with anything. No thoughts, head empty.”

Aloe scratched her brow in a mixture of disappointment and tedium. As no ideas came to her mind, she forced them inside by drinking from the ter’nar tea. The overthinking induced by its magical properties was incredibly useful in situations like this one.

“Hmm...” The steamy tea filled Aloe’s nostrils, ideas flourishing in her brain. “I still don’t know much about infusion, but instead of changing the body, how about boosting it? Augmenting physical properties?”

It sounded rather dumb, especially because she hadn’t even tried so with plants. She wasn’t sure if ‘better taste’ could be classified as such.

“I guess I can try now. There were more grass seeds somewhere if I remember correctly.”

Aloe stood up and grabbed a handful of seeds from the jar. Grass seeds were small and required a very low amount of vitality to infuse.

“I don’t know if this is even gonna work, but it’s stupid to not try it first.” Aloe infused a seed with the default intent for testing purposes and then infused another one with ‘toughness’.

Infusion had become somewhat trivial, not by a lot, but the low quantities of vitality needed to work with grass seeds made it easy to correct any mistakes.

“Alright, ‘toughness’ test begins?” And then Aloe stabbed the shit out of the seeds with a knife.

Stabbing may not be the right word, but there was an intrinsic violence in Aloe’s cut that certainly gave it that edge of correctness. Grass seeds had a very small surface area, making it difficult to land a cut, but when she managed to do so, the seeds easily bisected.

“No difference between default infused and normal seed. Makes sense. Okay, but what about the ‘toughness’ infused seed?”

Aloe let aside her madwoman slashes and did an empirical cut. Whatever that could possibly mean. Her pulse and angle were more... normal as she cut the seed. The infused seed split in half easily.

“Hmm... Hmm...” Aloe mused as she heaved the weight of the knife in her hand. “It felt more difficult? I can’t really tell. Maybe there was more resistance? I need a bigger sampling size.”

And with a bigger sampling size, she didn’t mean more tests, but bigger test subjects. She grabbed two potatoes from their sack, even if she made a mess out of them, they would end up in the cauldron either way.

Potatoes were considerably more expensive than grass, but even then, the cost was marginal. At her current level, Aloe could infuse a dozen potatoes before running out of vitality.

“Make it harder, make it harder.” Aloe reinforced her mind with a mantra as she infused the potato.

Even if she had technically succeeded on her first time with the grass seed, she wasn’t sure it hadn’t worked. The difference in effort needed to crack the seed was negligible...

“Negligible?” A thought bloomed in her mind. “Wait... grass needs a negligible amount of vitality to be infused, does that affect the final hardness factor?”

There was only one way to know, and that was by infusing the potato in her hands. She was patient, not wanting to fail even if doing so wouldn’t put her behind. What mattered in such scenarios was morale, not resources. Which were virtually endless.

“Done.” She sighed. “First the normal potato.”

Aloe aligned the edge of the knife with the center of the potato and pressed down. There was obviously resistance, but as soon as she pushed the knife into the potato, the vegetable was sliced into two pieces.

“And now the real test.” She didn’t know why, but her hands were trembling. Aloe pressed down the knife. And pressed. And pressed. “Fuck! It works!” Aloe cried as she tried cutting the potato with her whole body weight. “Too well in fact! Aaaaah!”

After a few more seconds of wrangling the potato ceded. Or more accurately, explode from all the force applied to it.

“I... I didn’t expect to work this well...” Aloe said between pants. “I guess I should test now with my own body.”

But how? She left unsaid.

When she was infusing other plants, she was somewhat sensing their vitality, not as an active effort, but as an unconscious one. She didn’t have an accurate look at the plant's vitality, she could only know that they had something.

But to even sense her own vitality, she had to position herself in a meditative state. But sensing vitality wasn’t the only step, she also needed physical contact to infuse something.

That step was obviously the easiest one, it was her own body after all. But just in case, before sitting and delving into meditation, Aloe grabbed her forearms with her opposite hands, making a closed circle with her arms. This way she would be touching herself. Infusion required physical contact, but until now she had only infused through her hands, so she doubted she could make it with any other body part, if it was even possible.

She quickly sunk into blackness. The desert was always silent, and the lifeful oasis was far enough that she didn’t hear any noises coming from it. The only thing she could sense was the heat, but even that was mellow. The worst temperatures had yet to come, and thanks to the architecture of the house, she was at a mild temperature in her room.

The vitality inside her body flowed slowly. When she infused or recovered it through Cure Grass, vitality felt like a jolt of lightning. Powerful, vigorous, fast. But the energy in her body was currently slow, tame, yet lifeful.

Even in that slowness, Aloe couldn’t deny the energy of vitality. A simple scoop could energize one person. But it was her own vitality that she was looking for, if she used it, she would give away her energy. If she infused herself, no energy would go away. It would mutate, and transform, but not disappear.

Make yourself harder. Her thoughts echoed in the hollow space. Apply toughness.

As per command, vitality shifted. It didn’t disappear, her body was but a closed circuit. But the flow changed. It became even slower, harder to shift.

Tougher.

As Aloe opened her eyes, she felt slow. All her energy had shifted elsewhere. As she stood up, the movement of her legs was slow, yet firm. That was when she noticed that Karaim had been wrong about infusing one’s body. It didn’t take absurd amounts of vitality to do so.

It took everything.

But instead of giving it away like plant infusions or evolutions, the vitality stayed inside. Not consumed, but transformed. It became obvious that she was already more knowledgeable in this field than Karaim had ever been.

Aloe smiled.

It was time for more tests.

And knives.