39. Timeline (Patreon)

It soon became clear that there wasn’t much left to do today. Regardless of Aloe’s thoughts of incompetence, she had managed to do more chores than ever before in a single day, and the sun had yet to set.

But there still were some tasks left to do. And some weren’t the prettiest.

“Ugh...” Aloe groaned, moving her head upwards as she held the bile. “I need a ‘smellless’ infusion like right fucking now!”

She coughed multiple times, facing away, as she carried the shovel to the oasis.

One of the last chores was, unfortunately, shoveling waste.

“This has no right to smell this bad!” Her visage was contorted in a grimace, the smell making it difficult for her to walk. “I haven’t eaten anything this foul!” And that was the worst part, she was shoveling her own waste. “I could understand it from Fikali’s poops, but what in the hells has been brewing in the latrine?”

Even though she found herself nowhere near the excrement, Aloe wore her gloves zealously. As she made it to the oasis, the girl started to carefully and sheepishly scatter the wastes around the crops.

Aloe knew that feces and such helped plants to grow, but she didn’t know the best way to administer the manure, so she poured it on the crops however she could without dismantling the pipe system. Ane even if she didn’t want to use her waste as fertilizer, it wasn’t as she had a spot to dispose of it. Though I guess no one will care if I just throw it in the middle of the desert.

Her suffering at least was short as the shovel was big and there wasn’t much waste on the latrine, to begin with.

“Now with Fikali’s...” She added deadheartedly.

Even though the dweller was basically a beast of burden, she kept herself clean. As clean as an animal that hated water could, that was. Fikali had decided on a spot to do her business the first day she arrived at the oasis, and she gave it a visit every time nature called, always that spot and nowhere else.

That made it easy for Aloe to shovel the monster’s feces.

And if her own were already pungent, Fikali’s were a hazard. Her only saving grace was that the dweller’s poops came in a set of small and compact balls and were already at the oasis, meaning that Aloe could shovel them around into the crops without needing to breathe.

Though unlike with her wastes, she smashed Fikali’s because otherwise, they would stay always in the crops without degrading, a lesson she had learned the hard way.

“Alright, that’s all,” Aloe said gasping for air as shoved the head of the shovel into the sand. “I hate doing waste disposal, but it is inevitable...” she sighed and rested her chin on the handle, “can’t I get a shit-eating plant or something? I would be immeasurably thankful.”

She prayed to the heavens, the sun overwatching her with its might as it descended on the horizon. Neither of them answered her prayers. At least in an audible manner.

“It’s all a conundrum.” The tired girl shook the shovel around so the hot sand cleaned its waste-laden head. “If I shovel more frequently, I will have to spend more time with shit on my hands; but if I shovel only once in a while, the shit will be smellier.” Aloe sighed. “Truly a conundrum that not even the scholars can solve.”

Once she had the impression that the shovel was clean enough, Aloe departed to the greenhouse, where she planted the newly acquired Moonlight’s Tooth seed with practiced ease.

“Heh, that rhymes,” Aloe smirked as she patted the soil. “But this parterre is getting a bit crowded. Hmm, that’s not right.” She looked at the almost empty parcel and reworded her statement. “It’s mostly empty, but a lone Flourishing Spring won’t be enough to provide for all these plants. I guess I’ll have to make a new one. It will be a rest from all the tests.”

Her mind hammered her to keep evolving all the seeds she had in her desk, and the arguments it presented weren’t faulty – like some she normally had. It whispered the logic of “the sooner the seeds are evolved, the sooner you will plant them, and the sooner they will grow”. And whilst logical, the truth was, Aloe almost couldn’t lift a finger.

She had reached her limit.

Her arms were shaking, her breathing was rugged, and her sight was blurry.

Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t move her body to do so.

Resigned, she went to the kitchenette, where a whistling kettle waiting for her. She wasn’t unaware that she had to rest, at some point she would just collapse, so before she reached that point she lit the hearth and prepared a ter’nar tree.

With heavy steps, Aloe carried the kettle and a teacup to the entrance and then sat down. The sun was going to disappear in a few minutes, an hour at most.

“Dunes, I love the twilight in the desert,” Aloe mumbled with the cup on her lips as her eyes locked on the horizon. Splotches of orange, violet, and pink painted the skies. “Hot.”

She almost burned her tongue on the hot brew, the sight making her forget that she had just taken the teapot out of the fire.

Aloe looked on her left where a half-empty pot with black seeds lay on the ground. Karaim had many plants and seeds, so it wasn’t strange that he had a sizeable amount of black seeds in his pantry as they were used as seasoning in many meals.

“But that’s weird...” Aloe weakly said, her mouth mainly focused on blowing away the steam of the tea. “If he had this many black seeds, how is it that he hadn’t discovered the Flourishing Spring before? Did he not have enough time to experiment with all the seeds?” She turned to face the pantry with tens of pots filled with seeds. “If that’s the case... then it changes things. There are a lot of seeds that I haven’t tried, and if Karaim has neither...”

There was a lot of potential in play.

“The timeline is a bit funky, though.” Tea washed down her throat. “He spent a lot of time and years on the greenhouse, but if he only managed to evolve three plants in total, how long ago did he discover Evolution?”

Three plants wasn’t much, especially considering that on this day alone she had managed just that.

“The only thing that comes to my mind is Infusion.” Aloe drank more tea, allowing the ter’nar trees to clear her mind. “If he discovered Infusion before Evolution – which makes sense as you need to infuse seeds to evolve them – then he spent most of his time infusing plants before he ever evolved his first one.”

Thanks to the clarity of mind that the ter’nar leaves bought, Aloe recalled one of the earliest passages of the cultivation technique.

“By mistake...” She mumbled. “He couldn’t have known what an evolved plant was before the Aloe Veritas,” Aloe said in realization, not a new one, but the viewpoint was. “He did manage to evolve the Cure Grass before the Na’mul Ter’nar and the Aloe Veritas, but because it didn’t need much vitality to evolve and the grown version was almost identical to normal grass, he didn’t know what he had done until the veritas showed him its abilities.”

The timeline was making more and more sense. Karaim had spent a lot of time and vitality infusing the trees in the oasis. There were many of them and they weren’t cheap to infuse. Only after having expanded her vitality deposit through training could Aloe infuse several in one go, but for an untrained and old man... it made sense he needed more time.

“Then the veritas and the ter’nar had to grow before he noticed. So at the very, very minimum, Karaim managed his first evolutions a couple of years ago to get a tree of this size, even when factoring in the ‘accelerated growth’ infusion. But two years is still a lot of time...”

The timeline didn’t line up.

“He was old, yes, but the moment he saw that white tree growing from what used to be a palm tree seed... why he didn’t push himself forward more?”

Aloe looked down at her empty cup and refilled it, the teapot was still boiling and so was the tea. She also picked a black seed from the jar.

“Am I the problem?” The steam filled her nostrils. “But why wouldn’t he push himself? It’s magic what we are talking about! Magic no one else in the world knows about! Karaim, you were the progenitor of magic in all Khaffat and this is all you did?”

For some reason, that angered Aloe a lot. Even more than the old man abandoning his family.

“Magic, for heaven’s sake!” Aloe scratched her head violently, almost spilling the tea in the process. “I... I don’t understand. You had years, grandpa. Years to make more, to create more, to cultivate more... and three plants is all you leave me behind? There’s gotta be something else...”

Aloe drank the magical infusion, ignoring the burning sensation on her tongue. Soon enough, the extraction stopped.

“You are done, huh.” Aloe sighed tiredly as she looked at the seed in her hand.

It was a Flourishing Spring seed.

No longer vomiting or collapsing, Aloe evolved a seed into magical status whilst she drank from her cup and looked at the twilight sky.