54. Drugs (Patreon)

Days and days of countless permutations went by. Aloe was far from being an apothecary, or anything, really. She tried every possible mixture of water and Aloe Veritas ink, but nothing worked out. Either it was too diluted, damaging the parchment with the water; or too concentrated, becoming a slog impossible to write with.

Desperation kicked up just only on the second day, prompting Aloe to try different ingredients to add to the ink. Whether it was aloe vera sap or milled Cure Grass, she added what she could to the ink to create a usable solution.

At first, she had thought making passable ink would be an easy endeavor, but the more she used the default Aloe Veritas ink, the more it showed how severely lacking it was. Sure, one-or-two-minute writing sessions didn’t present much problem, but after five minutes, the pressure she had to apply on the sluggish ink to write was hurting her wrists. If she endangered to push through the fatigue, her knuckles would end up in pain and most likely develop carpal tunnel.

That was without talking about the damage on the parchment.

After going to a full set of Aloe Veritas leaves, Aloe gave up on her ink enterprise.

“For a cheap substitute it can work... but everyone who can afford to buy ink and wants to write will buy the real deal. What’s ink made of? Is it just squid ink or do they add something else? For sure there aren’t enough squids in the world to produce the amount of ink scribes consume...”

Her original intention was to sell the ink to people who couldn’t afford ink, but for starters, would those people even want to write? A construction worker had no use for ink, only the architect. And that architect wouldn’t buy budget ink.

“Ugh... what I do now? I need capital!” Aloe smashed her desk, rage flowing in her body like vitality.

The answer was, unfortunately, quite obvious.

A small pot of seeds lingered on her desk. It had been lying there since the night she had arrived.

“I...” Her fingers slowly crept up to the pot, her sight partially blocked as the side of her head lay on the desk. “Should I?”

There was nothing wrong with cultivating plants, even this kind. Trade was slightly stricter with them, some regulations imposed by the sultanate, but she knew to whom sell it to and avoid such problems.

The problem wasn’t morality or legality.

Physicians gave such plants with the same ease as they would do with chamomile or jasmine.

No, the problem was the barrel of worms that would be opened if she did.

The attention she would gain.

An attention Aloe highly suspected her grandfather had already garnered.

But something cried to her.

She needed to continue practicing the vital arts, it was a pull on her very being. She couldn’t stop. Infusion, especially its internal variant, wouldn’t need such resources, but Evolution did. And whilst Aloe couldn’t deny the power and endless possibilities of Infusion, what truly called her was Evolution.

It was magic.

Not power, not a false promise of superiority.

No, Evolution wouldn’t make her a figure comparable to the sultanah, but it allowed her to see a different world. A world whose rules didn’t follow the ones she knew. Impossible spontaneous knowledge, invigorating energy at a single bite, alien colors and shapes, and far more that she had yet to even imagine, let alone see.

That was Evolution.

The promise of originality, of innovation, of novelty.

She wouldn’t gain anything from it unless a magnificent and valuable plant birthed from her hands, nor did she need that to continue.

It was hard to put into words but... simply striving for new evolutions made her whole. Her apprenticeship had been a slog that only slowly chipped away from her being, denigrating her. But seeing new plants birth could only be described as intrinsically entertaining.

Seeing something mundane mutate into reality defying life was inspiring.

And she couldn’t forgo that.

Aloe’s fingers rested on a porous and dry surface.

Ceramic.

And to continue her fantasies she needed income which she didn’t have.

“Nothing happened to Karaim, so nothing should happen to me,” Aloe muttered between rugged breaths. “And I don’t intend to make a whole plantation, just sell some leaves to have pocket money to survive and continue evolving things...”

She almost didn’t believe her words, nor why she was even pondering it, but the prospect of seeing more of Evolution, of learning its secrets, was too enticing to let it pass.

“It was Karaim himself who said other vital arts were silenced... so why shouldn’t I follow this one that no one seems to have discovered?”

Aloe exhaled heavily; she could almost swear something was leaving her body besides the air.

“First things first.” She took a single seed out of the pot. There weren’t many, to begin with, less than a handful of them.

The seed was rather round and spherical rather than oval and flat like other seeds. The cannabis seed had a light brown color that may lead someone to confuse it with a nut of some kind.

A single breath was what it took Aloe to begin pouring her vitality into the future plant. Her intent was clear: Evolution.

And her response was a near-instantaneous exhalation.

“I guess it was to be expected.” Aloe held a groan poorly before continuing. “That was the first thing Karaim was going to evolve, if he didn’t document it on the cultivation technique, it’s because it doesn’t have an evolution.”

A shame, an obvious shame, but if cannabis had an evolution Aloe would have been able to reduce its growth time to a small fraction.

“N-not that I need it.” She corrected herself. “I just need a few leaves; it doesn’t matter if it takes a lot of time to grow... But depending on how long it takes, I may not have any leaves to even sell before going to Sadina.”

If she didn’t even know how long it took a potato to grow besides the rough approximation of a season, she wouldn’t know how long cannabis would take.

“Well, I should infuse every seed at least... No, no Aloe, don’t make that mistake again!” She slapped herself before thinking twice. “I cannot have more infused seeds lying around uselessly until I learn to uninfuse them!”

That was why she could have tastier dates after all! Or also what almost impeded her from evolving black seeds into the Flourishing Spring before she found the spare seeds.

She wouldn’t like to repeat the same mistake with... drugs.

“And it’s not like I’m going to plant them all, there’s more than a couple dozen seeds here, I don’t need that many... Hmm... Nine will be enough.”

She counted them and took them out of the pot. The small quantity was manageable and left her with more than half of her reserves as a backup in case something went wrong.

“Considering how awful the greenhouse was with those dead cannabis plants, I think they are kinda frail. Though I guess I don’t intend to leave them unattended for a whole month... I think.”

Aloe left eight seeds on the desk and the remaining one she infused. Vitality poured out of her hands into the small brown spheroid. The amount, whilst not negligible, was rather trivial after almost hundreds of infusions.

“Hmm... potato-like cost of infusion...” Aloe blinked for a few seconds, repeating the words that came out of her mouth again in her mind. “Yeah, that’s certainly a brand new sentence. Anyways... I guess they aren’t going to be that big if only it takes this amount of vitality to infuse them with ‘accelerated growth’.”

With her current vitality deposit, Aloe was able to infuse the rest of the seeds without a problem. It was a bit taxing through the end, as it was reaching the middle point of her reserves, but mostly because it took a long time to infuse each individual seed, so her arms and butt had become numb from being sat down a solid half of an hour in the same position.

Aloe took out to the greenhouse to plant her newly infused seeds, not before having a disappointing gulp of stale water.

“Ugh, what a shame I have to boil good cold water. I guess it’s that or having diarrhea. The heavens truly face their strongest warriors with their mightiest challenges...”

Leaving her jokes aside with a groan, Aloe planted the nine seeds on one of the two remaining free parterres of the greenhouse. She left a lot of space between each seed, even if it wasn’t really needed as they weren’t going to grow big. But it wasn’t like she was having a space problem, quite the opposite. She owned a whole oasis and had nothing to do with it besides planting more seeds.

Now that she was standing up, Aloe decided to water the rest of the plants.

“More plants to water, yey...”

Her chores weren’t but augmenting each day, the only positive was the mastery that came from repetition. After learning the simple trick of filling an amphora up on the oasis and forcing Fikali to carry it to the greenhouse – using the beast of burden as an actual beast of burden –, watering became simpler.

As she made her way to water the several plants in the glass house, her mind no longer distracted by her future enterprise, a growth captivated Aloe’s eyes.

“Oh...” The watering can fell from her hands, water splashed everywhere, sullying her sandals.

Yet she did not care.