57. Reserves (Patreon)

Forty and a half banana trees. That was the vitality cost that Aloe would need to evolve and infuse all of the Flourishing Springs. When translating the cost into potatoes, the numbers became harder to grasp. Eyeballing it, we were talking about five hundred potatoes worth of infusion, half a thousand!

Those numbers were but approximations, of course.

Aloe had taken the cost of plants’ infusions out of a portion of her vitality deposit at the time, so there was already a non-negligible decimal difference as her deposit had grown.

“Either way, this is just too much!” Aloe groaned after having evolved her second black seed ever.

She had followed her trick of shoving a Cure Grass pill instantly after finishing the evolution, and whilst she had managed to not pass out, she was still irritable and tired. Vitality may not technically be stamina, but the effects of running low were the same, if not worse. Rugged breaths assaulted her along with dizziness.

And this had only been the first evolution, not even with the infusion included!

“Ugh...” Aloe groaned and dropped on her bed.

The best methods she had found for recovering vitality besides consuming Cure Grass were to eat and rest. Vitality was an unlimited pool of energy, but ephemeral and small. Thankfully it regenerated as fast as it consumed.

“Is there a fast vitality regeneration infusion?” Aloe joked in the bed as she swayed her head from side to side on the pillow to appease her headache, but she quickly noticed the importance of her words and jumped out of her resting position. “Wait. What if there’s one?”

Internal Infusion was a subject of trial and error, basically like all other vital arts, but that meant Aloe didn’t actually know what existed or not.

“So far, I have only found success on ‘toughness’, ‘strength’, and ‘speed’. These are very obvious physical capabilities. Or rather, properties of the body. But is vitality one of them? I’m using vitality to shift those properties around as I please, so I’m inclined to believe otherwise... But I would be a fool to not try it first.”

Intent was the key to vital arts. Whether it was Evolution with its rigid and clear message to transform a being into something greater, or Infusion with its open-ended and seemingly endless permutations.

Looking into her body, the cold yet lifeful energy that was vitality, Aloe failed to see a way to boost it.

“I guess it was to be expected.” She threw herself to the bed again and faced the ceiling. “Internal infusion works... neutrally. There’s no gain and loss of attributes, just reshifting. I can’t just empower the same energy that’s empowering me. Shame...” A sigh left her mouth.

Aloe moved on to lunch. Her meal was a potato soup from yesterday, but such low quantities of food variety were making her sick. She would need a lot of energy to ready all the black seeds, and that meant a lot of food.

Good one if possible.

“Time to use the jerky.” Aloe tied her hair in a braid, a thing she didn’t tend to do as it wasn’t exactly long, but it felt appropriate as she was going to submerge herself into cooking.

The jerky she had taken as rations was incredibly dry and tough after a few weeks, but it was still flavorful. Aloe cut the long strips of jerky into short ones with the knife and as she proceeded to drop them into the cauldron, an idea bloomed in her mind.

“If Internal Infusion is a thing and I can infuse plants...” She looked at the snippets of meat with expectation.

This wasn’t exactly a good moment to make infusion tests as she was low on her reserves, and with no vitality in the tank to speak of, but she couldn’t deny she was interested in how Infusion would interact with meat.

“Infusion cost in plants is based on their future growths and Internal Infusion follows a different logic altogether because I’m treating with my own body, so it doesn’t matter if I’m made of meat or not. So how expensive can be a square of dried meat?”

Jinx.

Recalling her previous and horrendous experiences with vitality, Aloe took a Cure Grass pill out of her satchel, expecting the worst. It had been a while since she had taken her last one to not pass out from the previous Flourishing Spring evolution, so Aloe wasn’t worried about the pill needing time to take effect.

Aloe shifted her vitality into her fingertips, just a display of craftsmanship. It would have been impossible for her a few weeks ago to move her vitality without a recipient or destiny in mind, but Internal Infusion had jumped leagues forward in her control of vitality. It was still the same slow and sluggish mess, but she could now redirect that slow and sluggish mess.

Progress!

With a dumb smirk, Aloe poured her vitality into a single strip of jerky the width of a fingernail with the intent of giving it the ‘better taste’ typing she had used with plants.

Her eyes shot wide open.

“Fuckfuckfuck.” She pushed her arm away with enough force to nearly dislocate it from its socket and shoved the pill into her mouth with her other.

Aloe dropped to the floor, her legs buckling as they lost strength. Her deposit had been around that of four potatoes worth of infusion. That reserve had disappeared in a single second.

“If I had not been that quick with my draw...” She shuddered, her back falling onto the kitchenette drawer.

Thankfully Infusion wasn’t as greedy as Evolution. As soon as she noticed the absurd drain on her vitality, she was able to cancel it, unlike when she had evolved both Flourishing Springs. Once Evolution started it couldn’t be interrupted.

The gravitas of that realization dawned on Aloe’s conscience heavily.

“One massive Evolution, several times larger than my full reserves...” She gritted her teeth in a mixture of fear and shame. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what would happen. It was scary to die, but even more scary to die by a plant you were trying to cultivate.

Aloe spent the rest of the noon lazily making her soup as she was too dizzy to conjure actual thoughts. Twice in a day she had spent the entirety of her vitality deposit, and that was without a rest between tries.

The slow cooking of the soup and then her absentminded way of eating it resulted in her taking a few hours before she was finally over with her bowl. There was still a lot more soup in the cauldron, but she didn’t have the motivation to eat more.

Those previous thoughts had taken the hunger out of her.

“I need more vitality...” Aloe muttered half-sleep whilst resting her head on the desk after finishing her meal. “But Karaim said I need to use more vitality to increase my vitality in the first place... What a vicious cycle...”

With a yawn, Aloe stood up as her deposit was nearing its top. It was still a bit far away, but she needed to distract her mind somehow.

She donned her work clothes and straw hat and marched to the oasis with the recently evolved seed in hand. With all the revelations and planning, she had forgotten to water all the other crops.

Once upon a time – or less dramatically, a few days ago – Aloe decided to plant the evolved plants in the greenhouse just in case someone just so happened to find them. The greenhouse would somewhat hide them and save her some questions. But she opted to make an exception with the Flourishing Spring.

“It’s just basically an overgrown, big rose. That also happens to be blue.” That was her excuse. “It looks... normal. From afar.”

But she very well knew that if her irrigation system worked, the oasis would not only be self-sustainable but also fully automatic. She would only need to harvest the plants, watering them was the only process left that required a human hand. So what if she could remove that human factor? She would be able to spend a lot more time in Sadina and just visit the greenhouse from time to time just to check nothing had gone wrong.

And that idea was very enticing.

Aloe planted the first seed among the potatoes. She didn’t know how much water a single Flourishing Spring produced, or how far was its range. All of that needed serious testing, but it was a start.

A testing she would perform with her already-grown specimen.

After having finished watering all the crops and medicinal plants, she moved into the greenhouse. The amphora from the morning was still there as she forgot to take it out, but she just moved it to the side of the wall for now, so it didn’t get in the way.

Aloe knelt down on the cannabis parterre and very carefully with a trowel, she picked up the seeds and replanted them on the Flourishing Spring patch, close to the plant’s water bowl. She didn’t need to be this careful, she had just planted the cannabis seeds and they had even to germinate, but the memory of all the dead plant matter from her first visit to the greenhouse still lingered on her mind.

She treated the cannabis seeds as if they were made out of glass.

The final plantation pattern of the seeds was a circular one around the Flourishing Spring, but that was not enough. The cup of the evolved plant was in the way of Aloe’s dreams of automation as it wouldn’t allow the collected water to pass through.

Instead of tearing apart the beautiful underflower, she grabbed the petals and brought them down, slightly burrowing them under a bit of dirt. That way not only the water would flow out of the plant, but it also would flow down directly to the seeds like a slide.

A simple and crude method but for such high dreams, but most beautiful things tended to be simpler.

And Aloe expected the most gorgeous of outcomes.