58. Automatization (Patreon)

Results were hard to come by. Not because the task itself was difficult, but because it was painfully slow. The cannabis was going to take a lot of time to germinate, days at best, so having a comprehensive effect of the Flourishing Spring’s irrigation capabilities in her limited deadline was impossible as the plant would take at least a month to grow from her estimations based on the infusion cost.

The next day, Aloe began it by planting a few blades of Cure Grass around the Flourishing Spring at the greenhouse. She infused them with ‘accelerated growth’ meaning they would grow around four times as fast as normal grass, but she didn’t want to cultivate grass. This was an experiment to see if the water produced by the Flourishing Spring was enough to sustain blades of grass at varying distances from the source.

She didn’t fear the Cure Grass taking resources from the cannabis seeds as they had yet to germinate, and besides, it was grass. Plants grew on grass, they weren’t needy trees that killed each other for sustenance.

Even if she passed the next days purely resting, Aloe felt paradoxically more tired than before. This had a clear answer though, she was pushing her vitality reserves to the limit.

And it was straining her body.

In three days, she had evolved and infused two Flourishing Springs per day. That meant draining her deposit thrice and consuming two Cure Grass pills.

Whilst this was the greatest quantity of pills she had ever consumed, Aloe had yet to experience any mishaps with her stomach or the latrine. She was thankful for the apparently harmless Cure Grass, though it was true that she perhaps suffered from more flatulencies than normal.

As it may be, the continuous strain was affecting her body. Unlike when one reached rock bottom of their stamina, Aloe didn’t feel any ease to sleep, quite the opposite in fact. It was becoming harder and harder to fall asleep. And the sleep she managed to get wasn’t the best. Besides the constant migraines from being at no vitality, Aloe decided to relax her barbaric pace to one seed per day.

With the five new seeds she had obtained, she planted them in various places. One in the cacti parterre of the greenhouse, one with the beans, one with the medicinal plants, one with the pistachios, and the last one with the bananas.

It was obvious to her that she had spread the water plants thin, as they didn’t produce a fraction of the water needed to water some spaces. Perhaps with the bananas and the medicinal plants it would suffice, but at the same time, the area of effect was a problem.

Flourishing Springs only produced water in a short circle around them, just enough so no drop spilled beyond their bowl. So even if the water was somehow enough to satiate the many plants, the water wouldn’t even reach them.

“I need some sort of... canals where the water could go through. But how?”

Making small trenches for the water to circulate was easy, but then the soil would absorb it. Aloe suddenly found herself overwhelmed, unable to think how to make her dream automatic irrigation system work.

“I was studying to be a banker, not an engineer!” Aloe scratched her scalp maddingly, stress overwhelming her thanks to the lack of answers.

Being unable to find a solution was something that stressed the life out of Aloe. Sure, she was doing something unheard of and as impossible as automatizing agriculture without the proper background, whether it was that of a farmer or an engineer; but Aloe didn’t tolerate stagnancy.

Since young, her father educated her on the concept of stagnation.

“When a noble house falls or a business closes, more than not it’s because they were unable to adapt.” Her father explained to her young self, barely ten. “Complacency and corruption are the parents of stagnation. The world changes, but if you don’t, then you’ll end up swallowed in shifting sands. Stagnation is the rot festering the economy.” Aloe couldn’t help but ponder what was he thinking when he told that to a child, but alas, the idea endured. So, it wasn’t wrong to say that he had been right.

Whilst her father spoke of complacency and corruption, Aloe had found her own form of stagnation: lack of progress.

Perhaps – most likely – it was that the lack of vitality irritated her, but the second she found herself idle or not progressing, the dread of stagnation latched onto her.

If she wasn’t getting a constant trickle of results-

“Constant results...” Aloe muttered, opening her eyes. “Just like...” And then laughed.

It was a maniacal laugh, but instead of one of exhilaration like the one she did when she came out with the automatization plan, it was one of hate.

“Of course it’s his fucking fault.” She hit the top of her desk. “Insidious, pesky indoctrination.”

Who she was angry at was no one else than her mentor, Farid. The man who constantly pushed her around during her banker apprenticeship.

Even when she hadn’t seen the man’s face for almost a month now, his viciousness lingered in her mind. Not only she was unpaid, but the man always expected results out of her!

If she wasn’t managing ledgers, then she was expected to judge possible loans. And what was her reward?

Absolutely nothing!

Not even a nince-damned pat on the back!

“Oooh...” Aloe seethed in pure unadulterated rage. “I haven’t noticed until now, but I was really close to killing that man.”

Aloe looked down at her hands, they were trembling. Not out of fear, but violence. She had been always distracted by work and life, it was impossible to not think about her apprenticeship. It was her future. But now that she was free of it... She just wanted to put her quill into the man’s eyes. Aloe felt the vitality inside of her accelerate, become tumultuous and bloodthirsty.

“Well... that’s going a bit too far...” She retreated shyly. “The mood swings from vitality usage are no joke... I may truly end up killing someone at this point, especially if I’m on ‘strength’ infusion.”

It took her a glass of coconut water and a few dates to relax, but after a while, Aloe was back to her coolheaded self.

“I know some kind of pipe system to make the irrigation work, but how? With what materials? I got no clay or stone. And the wood I do have I can’t work with it. If there was only an easy-to-work, tube-like material?” Aloe was but jesting, she had an idea of what she wanted, but it was impossible to get her hands on it in a short time. “Sugar cane would be perfect, and I’d like also to plant it, but that would require to go first to Sadina and then carry it to the oasis. And that’s a lot of load I would be putting on Fikali.”

Aloe tapped the desk with her finger in the rhythm of a popular nursery rhyme. She wasn’t as stressed as before after pouring all her devils into her ‘mentor’.

“Isn’t something here already that I could use to move the water?”

The answer was: no.

Or so she thought, but instants before giving up, an idea sprouted in her mind.

“What about something that moves water... naturally?” The idea was quite simple but even more scrappy than her previous ones.

Aloe put on her straw hat and marched into the oasis. Fikali lay lazily in the shade, mostly bored because she hadn’t played with her these last days. Ignoring yet again her dweller, Aloe approached the shortest palm tree in the oasis, and with a bit of finicking, she managed to cut down a leaf without needing to climb the tree.

“Rain is really uncommon here, but what are trees leaves but nature’s slanted rooftop?” Aloe toyed around with the leaf, it was almost taller than her even if the tree itself wasn’t even twice her length. “The leaf is thick, so it won’t lose water. The problem will be fitting it for the Flourishing Spring.”

She didn’t intend on outright developing the irrigation system, just prototype the pipes. They may not even work in the end. Aloe sat down in the shade and began cutting away the palm tree leaf with her knife.

What she wanted to make was a long but thin pipe that could move water from one place to another. And the leaf was too wide for her liking, so she stripped a lot of material. It wasn’t as if she was going to run out of palm trees after all.

After an hour of work, and more elbow grease than she was willing to admit, Aloe managed to make something pipe-like. She cut the tip of the leaf and mainly worked with the back as the more a leaf went from its root, the feebler it became.

“Need to check first if it works though.” Aloe stood up and stretched her arms and legs which had become numb after an hour of straight concentration. She also dusted her clothes from the many leaf filaments, making an accidental green rain between her legs.

The test itself was quite simple.

She put one extreme of the pipe on the underside of the grown Flourishing Spring in the greenhouse, and it was almost a match made in heaven as the petal water collection cup of the evolved plant brought elevation to the leaf pipe, meaning water would flow easily with the inclination. On the other end of the pipe, she put a short bowl to collect the water.

All the water collected in her tests would go to the cannabis seeds to not screw with her other tests, as those seeds were now on a pure Flourishing Spring water diet.

Thankfully – though rather stressful – as she was reading her setup, the Flourishing Spring began to squirt. The water shot everywhere in a circular area, meaning not a lot of water fell directly on the pipe. But the drops that did fall in resulted in satisfactory collection.

“Yes!” Aloe merrily hoped on the spot as most water collected by the leaf pipe ended on the bowl and not much was lost on the leaf or leaks.

It would seem that her dreams of automatization weren’t that farfetched.