30. Grief (Patreon)

Aloe panted, her breast heaving up and down with outstanding violence. A human torso shouldn’t deform in such a manner. Air went in and out of her mouth audibly, and yet she almost couldn’t hear it as the ringing of her ears was greater than that.

Her body didn’t obey her, and only now her mind was clearing enough to muster some coherent thoughts. Not words, thoughts.

It hurt her breathing this hard, but she couldn’t stop. It didn’t matter how much air she got in and out of her lungs, it wasn’t enough. Every instant she felt as if she was drowning.

There was a coldness that chilled her to the bones as she lay unmoving on the ground. Not the soothing chill that vitality gave her, but more that of being out naked and drenched on a desert winter night. Painfully cold.

And yet...

And yet a warmth flourished in her hand.

Aloe didn’t bother to shift her eyes toward the source, she knew it very well. And it wasn’t as if she could do so. Paralyzed, she continued to look at the ceiling, the light coming through the window slowly – very slowly – growing orange as she recovered her breath.

It was totally beyond her if she could get frostbite from this cold, maybe it was only in her mind, but the spot of warmth in her left hand put her at ease.

The evolved seed irradiated warmth.

The girl couldn’t understand how an item this small could contain this much energy. By all means, it should be impossible. But at the same time, Evolution didn’t play by the rules she understood as reality.

It was magic after all.

Illustrious, grandiose, dreamful magic.

She had consumed six Cure Grass pills to evolve the cumin seed, such an amount was astronomical by previous standards. Even though Aloe needed to take a pill every time she evolved a black seed into a Flourishing Spring, that was only to not fall unconscious. Her vitality reserves were barely below the needed quantity.

Not only her current maximum deposit had increased by a factor of two since she evolved that grass seed for the first time, but this seed – whatever it was called – took five pills to near maximum efficiency.

The first three pills were used optimally, bringing Aloe’s vitality to a third each time, therefore capping her whole deposit once. The latter three were less effective in their usage. The fourth and the fifth had been digested at the same time, only restoring her vitality to half, a ten percent decrease because of diminishing returns. The sixth though... she didn’t know if she had even used it.

Her memory was very blurry, she barely remembered the pain, let alone her inner thoughts.

But if she did use it – which she couldn’t check nor recall – it hadn’t been a great amount.

Even then, accounting for the lack of usage of the sixth pill’s vitality, the newly evolved seed had consumed two times and a half of her maximum deposit, or in other words, five times the vitality she had originally possessed.

“Ah...” Aloe exhaled at the scope of the numbers, though it came through her mouth as more of a groan.

She continued there, fighting for consciousness as her eyelids became heavier and heavier as she lay on the ground until she recovered a bit.

That ‘recovery’ internal infusion is looking so damnably appetizing right now... Aloe pondered, moderately surprising herself from the long stretch of coherent thoughts.

So she tried.

It wasn’t as if she had something else to do right now.

And whilst Aloe would like to gloat how much of an expert she had become on manipulating vitality, soon enough she found out her vitality didn’t respond to her intention.

Fuck. She cursed with the grace of the greatest poets of her age. This feels like when... Her mind turned gray, her vision blurring as much if not more than when the seed sucked her dry out of her vitality. No... Aloe gritted her teeth, the unconscious gesture tiring her greatly. I cannot stay like this. I just... need to accept it. Do not show weakness. The words commonly spoken by her father cut through her thoughts as they echoed in her mind, though with her own voice instead of that of her late father.

Aloe was, of course, still grieving. And as much as she wanted to ignore it, technically she was still in her grieving period. Ydazi law decreed that a mourning period lasted from a week to a month – the former for lower-income citizens who couldn’t allow themselves to stop working and the latter for more well-standing ones – with the sole exception of a ninety-nine nights period reserved for the sultanzade, even if that clause had been rarely, to never, used.

This wasn’t just random trivia in the confines of her memory, but something Aloe had not only studied but also researched after Karaim’s death. She was still outraged that her mother had started to work before her grace period ended, but then again, she was a direct subordinate of the emir, and people of his status – and lineage – could bend the laws ever-so-slightly and no one would bat an eye.

Aloe’s animosity wasn’t lost when she discovered that Emir Hassan had been dethroned, though she had been too gloomy to celebrate it.

Since the first time she had seen that man, she hated him. Sadina had started to decline since the moment that man stood up. Whether she accepted Emir Rani’s petition – which she technically still couldn’t because of the aforementioned mourning period – Aloe could only hope that she proved a better ruler than her brother ever was.

If she kept Sadina’s splendor that was enough for Aloe, she wasn’t greedy enough to hope for more. For the city of her memories to come back.

I need to... to... Aloe whimpered as she was unable to finish her thoughts.

No matter what her education had been, the truth was that she was the only member left of her family. That weight alone heavied as much as the death of her mother.

Especially because she was a woman.

Not... yet... Tears flowed down to the side of her face as she lay face up on the ground. I’m no woman yet... It was difficult for someone who hadn’t reached adulthood – no matter how close that line may be – to deposit all the hopes of their ancestors in their shoulders to continue the bloodline.

That was the last thing Aloe wanted to think about in her current state of affairs. The idea, the weight, the hope, the possibilities of that future scared her, and in some small part, disgusted her.

Aloe cleared her mind.

She didn’t know how, but she just... did.

She ignored everything, and as her blurry and wet eyes locked with the stale and darkening ceiling, her mind was free of burden. If this was an aftereffect of the vital arts, then the cultivation shtick made it worth it just for that.

This feels like when, Aloe continued the thought that led her to the downward spiral of grief, only now her mind was more steeled – though it continued to be as feeble as before, I collapsed, and the menstruation hit me. Still, she avoided direct thoughts of her mother. I was physically weak, so my vitality got equally weaker. Karaim said that vitality was alike stamina, though not the same. So, in the same way as a tired person cannot run well or at all if they are hurt, the same thing happens with vitality. I believe.

This was a shaky theory at best, and she knew it, but it made sense. There was still a lot of uncharted territory around the vital arts, so the best she could do was be the academic cartographer who could illustrate the lagoons of inconsistency and lack of information on the map.

Yes... She pondered. When I came back to the oasis, because I was so physically exhausted, I had difficulties changing internal infusions, though not as much as... before. Aloe did her best to push her thoughts back to that, but her mind unconsciously changed the course of her vessel of thought each time she let her guard down. But there’s also a mental factor. It makes sense considering that I need to concentrate to even change infusions...

Alas, she couldn’t keep herself thinking forever. Her mind had been also tired out by the evolution process but unlike her body, Aloe didn’t allow it to rest. Maybe because she feared what would happen if she stopped thinking, or maybe it was something else entirely...

The girl, soon-to-be woman, sighed. Unlike before, her breasts just deflated the normal amount. Not too high, not too low. That simple fact calmed her down greatly.

Aloe gulped some saliva as she got her back away from the ground, only to collapse as she gagged.

“Blergh...” Her voice came out muted as if she was aphonic. She couldn’t confirm it, and she didn’t want to test if such was the case as her throat itched again. Oh, right. Aloe sighed in realization. The sand. She had forgotten how she had rubbed her tongue along the dirty floor, and honestly, she wished that memory had stayed up that way.