76. Fake (Patreon)

“Uh...” Aloe didn’t know what to make out of the leaf. “Rani... She’s... not human?” Air cycled in and out of her mouth in a fast motion. Her head turned dizzy.

She was hyperventilating.

A myriad of voices whispered in her mind. Some asked how, others reaffirmed themselves saying such a person couldn’t be human, then others were plainly terrified. But there was one voice that overshadowed every other.

“Do they know Evolution?”

It was a voice of fear. A voice of confusion. A voice of despair.

“No...” Evolution was the only thing that made her different, the only thing that made her carry forward. The thing that was conferred to her by a mostly unknown yet unequivocally grandfather. The thing that... allowed her to distract herself. “I...”

She didn’t know what to do if Evolution wasn’t her secret. That it was something the imperials long possessed. It shouldn’t have affected her as much as it did, she knew it, yet as she sat on the chair, her body slumped down without any strength.

The imperials knew some vital arts, she had known that since the beginning, but not Evolution. Evolution was hers.

Aloe didn’t know why, but she downed a Cure Grass pellet. The motion was meaningless, a waste as she wouldn’t recover any vitality from it, but it calmed her down. And that was all she needed.

“I...” It was hard to come up with words. “I cannot talk about this with anyone...”

Hardly a revelation, she had no one to speak with about the vital arts. If the imperials were not human... she couldn’t do anything about it.

“But... to evolve a plant it needs to be a seed, and Karaim theorized that was also the case with animals...” She distracted herself with other questions. “So how have they evolved? Someone has had to evolve every imperial when...”

The answer was so obvious that she didn’t have to speak it.

She shoved that matter in the corners of her mind. Regardless of what she did, she would get closure soon.

Her current status was too scatterbrained for her liking, so Aloe doubled down on her lack of concentration. If I have to be a scatterbrain naturally, I prefer to be it willingly. She prepared herself a tea of Na’mul Ter’nar leaves. The infusion difficulted her concentration and acted as a soothing agent, just exactly what she wanted.

Aloe rested on the house’s entrance, sitting on the sandstone step taking a sip every few seconds. She didn’t know how much time she had been there, but her tea had grown cold and she could see Fikali sleeping under a palm tree from her position. If she could see herself, Aloe would see a pair of dilated irises.

“Enough rest.” Aloe groaned as she stood up. “The clock is ticking and there’s a lot of things to do.”

Her first objective was, of course, the greenhouse.

Aloe walked to the glass house and warily unlatched the door, a blade of grass falling with the movement.

“Alright, no one seems to have entered...” It was mainly paranoia speaking, but Aloe didn’t want anyone to discover the plants she had in the greenhouse. Even though there were a handful of Flourishing Springs spread across the oasis. “That’s goo...”

Her words died as she was struck by the color of the greenhouse. She had expected some of the newly planted evolved plants to grow, but...

“All of them?” She mussed awestruck.

The woman pranced forward, almost scarily. The description of the Blossomflame flared back into her consciousness. It can burn ‘enemies’...

Her eyes were focused on the vibrant red flower because of that. She couldn’t know which plant was which, but the warm color was a dead giveaway. Well, or she was focusing on the Blossomflame. That all changed when she shot a glance at the neighboring parterre.

“Wait...” That parterre was supposed to be empty except for the newly evolved plants she had seeded. “Wait a moment...” There only it was supposed to be the Nature’s Bounty and the Chlorotrophy, plus the Flourishing Spring to water them. “Why in the hells there are two nince-damned springs?”

Aloe rubbed her eyes, fearing the ter’nar tea had made her hallucinate a bit too hard. But no. There were, in fact, two Flourishing Springs in that parterre.

“Uhm...” Aloe circled around the Flourishing Springs, mostly ignoring the sapling next to them. “What’s happening here?” She looked at their bowls of water. “One has an open bowl, I did that, but the other one is just accumulating water...”

She walked backward, not taking her eyes away from the shadow copy of the Flourishing Spring, and approached the Aloe Veritas. She could have grabbed the leaves already on the jar back at the house, but the whole sultanzade revelation made foresight impossible. Plus her high from the tea. That also influenced a bit.

Aloe cut two Aloe Veritas leaves. She was careful to not let a single drop of ink either touch her or another plant and made it back to the parterre.

“Alright, first you.” She rubbed the tip of the spring at the center with thick ink. “You should be the real Flourishing Spring.”

The recently cut and bleeding leaf began shifting, the surface turning nonsense into coherent information.

Species: Flourishing Spring

Sobriquet: Eversource

Description: An evolved member of the Nigella Sativa species, a species known for its ability to survive with mana alone and sprout streams of water.

Alignment: Life, Arcane

Infusion: Accelerated Growth

“So far so good...” She dropped the leaf on her right. “Now for you.” Aloe drenched the second spring with the other leaf. The parchment surface creating order out of chaos.

Species: Pilgrim of Mutations

Sobriquet: Chlorotrophy

Description: An evolved member of the Fabaceae family, a species known for its ability to change into its surroundings or unrelated flora.

Alignment: Life, Chaos

Infusion: Accelerated Growth

“I knew it...” The words silently flew out of her mouth. “This plant truly changes into its surroundings...” Even though she cultivated magical plants here, it was difficult to understand it. “How can a totally different plant, being evolved from a totally different plant, transform into a totally different plant? Totally different?”

Aloe blinked thrice – at inequal speeds between each eyelid – and blamed her grammatical lapse on the ter’nar tea.

“I... I’ll never cease to be surprised by these plants.” Aloe sighed in disbelief. “So how does it work? Does it change constantly or is it a fixed change? Once has it become a different plant does it stay that way? And is it a perfect copy?”

Discovering new plants always did that to her, asking questions that she probably wouldn't get an outright answer, or never. It was mildly stressful to have that many doubts, but also entertaining. The sense of discovery was one of liberating dread.

“I have ‘toughness’ on so... taste test?”

Aloe knelt and put her hands on the bowl of the fake Flourishing Spring, filling her hands with water. She brought her hands to her mouth, not before losing most of the water on the way there. In a mixture of dread and expectation, Aloe drank the mysterious water.

“Hm.” She grunted. “Yup, tastes exactly like Flourishing Spring water. I don’t know if that’s good or bad...” She wanted to run more experiments first but the evolved plants in the other parterre called for her. “Mental note, transplant the Chlorotrophy elsewhere to check if it does change into another plant.”

If that was indeed the case, then... Well, it didn’t have many uses. Why would one want to duplicate a plant instead of growing a second...

“Wait...” An idea blossomed in her mind. “Can it copy trees?” Aloe gazed at the adaptive plant with predatory eyes. “A grown tree? A tree that takes years to grow?”

The sheer absurdity of the question yet the undeniable advantages that it implied made her forget about everything else.

“Dunes...” Aloe salivated with possibilities. “I have to try it.” She added with determination.

It seemed appropriate to hold her desire to check on the newly evolved plants to do some manual labor instead. She had been sitting around for more than an hour on her limited time because she couldn't cope with not being unique, after all. An appropriate punishment.

Aloe grabbed a shovel and an empty potato sack – not hers, but an old one from Karaim – and uprooted the Chlorotrophy. She wasn’t savage enough to uproot the flower with a shovel, instead clearing the space with her hands and then pulling the butt of the plant up with the shovel.

“This is the real one, right?” She asked with sudden anxiety. “Right?”

She hoped so, she had the idea that it was the right one, but both plants were identical, making her doubt.

“I...” The woman exhaled. “I can uproot it again if not, I guess.”

The oasis was open, and every spot seemed as good as any other, so selected a spot between a coconut and a date palm tree to plant the Chlorotrophy. With enough distance for a possible future tree to grow, of course.

She dropped the sack on the ground and dug a hole big enough for the fake Flourishing Spring. Aloe removed the plant from the sack – she didn’t have many spare sacks lying around – and patted the earth on the foot of the Chlorotrophy.

“Well, that’s done.” She wiped a bead of sweat with her forearm. “You better meet my expectations, have you heard me?”

The evolved plant made no motion how having done so.

Aloe stretched her arms, grunted, sighed, and finally cleaned her dirty hand in the oasis. She had more plants to check.