80. Night (Patreon)

After having a simple lunch consisting of the leftovers of her previous lunch – because why cook for three days when you had imperial-level cooking that only needed to be reheated – and drinking her weight of water, Aloe was ready to continue working. She had barely two days and a half left and she hadn’t done anything beyond checking the growth of her newly evolved plants.

What followed were slow and mind-numbing hours of checking if the water pipes were all standing – which not all were – and seeing if the other plants were in a healthy state. After practically two months, the oasis was livelier than ever. Not only the pistachios and the bananas showed promising saplings, but the rest of the plants were basically fully grown.

Aloe was ecstatic at the medicinal plants’ growth. Sure, she couldn’t sell them, or at least it didn’t make sense doing so for the small margins, but that meant she would have a solid supply of medicine in the greenhouse if she ever fell ill.

“Though...” The woman sighed, her hands rubbing the medicinal plants' leaves to smell them. “Does this even make sense now?” No matter how fragrant their smell was, Aloe couldn’t bring herself to be enthusiastic. “I won’t be ever to spend much time here now; I doubt Rani will allow me to.”

She knew that was the price to pay for being the scribe of commoners. On the one hand, money and a luxurious life. On the other, doing what she loved but a simple life.

“You brought this on yourself, Aloe.” She whispered deflated. “You’ll have to deal with it.”

What made her even less enthusiastic though, was the prospect of having to harvest all of her crops. She had mostly forgotten about them once she set up all the Flourishing Springs and the irrigation system, but she now had the equivalent of multiple parcels of potatoes and beans.

“This is going to take a while.” Aloe sighed, a sack in hand.

Far from a farmer, Aloe wasn’t knowledgeable on how to harvest the crops. She decided to harvest them because who knows when she would have the next chance and wasn’t all that certain that they were even fully grown. Especially with the potatoes as they hid underground showing few leaves.

Her best attempt was to put her gloves on – for the first time using them for their intended purpose – because she would rather not touch the weeks-old excrements she used as fertilizer. With the potatoes it was easy, simple as unearthing them. With the beans, she found a bit more problems, but she believed she made it out fine. Not that she had any idea what fine meant in this context.

“Phew...” Aloe whipped her brow and stabbed a coconut, her back lying on a palm trunk. “That’s a lot of food though.” She gazed at the two sacks full of crops. “There’s still more in the pantry. What am I going to do with it? Should I just sell it?”

Aloe thought it for a while. She tried to think about all of the possible ramifications. A sack of potatoes and beans could be sold for a considerable amount, maybe a fajati if she got the haggling right, but that would require her to bring the sacks back to Sadina. Not only that would slow Fikali down, but she also doubted the food would survive the travel. Fikali was a menace with her current speed.

In the end, she decided to plant all the old potatoes and beans she had bought, which may or may not be already rotting. Or even growing, in the case of potatoes.

“Dunes,” She swore as she deposited the old contents of the sack on the oasis floor. “Flowers here need water, the sun, and perfect soil, and the nince-damned potatoes decided to sprout on a musty sack in a dark pantry. What’s wrong with them?”

Aloe began breaking the potatoes into pieces like the farmer who sold her the gloves told her a while ago. But that brought a question as she arrived at the more ‘sprouted’ potatoes.

“Should I plant them? Aren’t they toxic or something? I’m not sure I want them nowhere near my stomach...”

Taking the cautious route, Aloe threw them into the desert. She was so bored that shifted her internal infusion to ‘strength’, and from the middle of the oasis, quite literally threw them into the desert.

“Woah, that’s a new record!” Aloe said as the greenish potato disappeared from her line of sight as it left the valley. “What a shame that there are no more of them. I was getting quite good at it.”

She tried throwing the worse-looking beans, but it wasn’t the same as they were too small to throw them far. The scribe spent the rest of the day infusing the suitable potatoes and beans. Whilst before it took her days to do so, Aloe now could do so in hours, and without resting. It wasn’t that her vitality regeneration was good, she doubted that had increased with all this time, but her deposit was big enough that by the time she infused a handful of them, she recovered enough to infuse one more.

Unlike Evolution or infusing trees, potatoes and beans were trivial to deal with. A single one of them was almost a fiftieth of her maximum vitality. She did take rests though, mainly because she was still tired with... the Grace’s Exaltation business. From time to time, she would get a cramp-like itch urging her to be appeased. But as more time passed, and the more coconuts and dates she had to eat through the temptation, the lower the urge became until finally disappeared.

A part of her hoped she fell into it.

Be as it may, the day quickly gave in to the night and Aloe was unable to plant all the infused plants.

“This is also going to take a while.” She commented as she hugged her arms. The night was far from frigid, but it was getting cold by the minute. Her eyes were drawn to the starry blanket of the heavens. A myriad of luminosity and darkness. “I should check on the Moonlight’s Tooth. Now that I have a chance.”

Slowly, Aloe made her way to the greenhouse. She had been sitting all day long, no matter if it was on Fikali, her chair, or the oasis’ ground; yet she felt uncomfortably tired. She had ignored it, but without noticing, she had consumed multiple times her vitality deposit over the day. No matter how much rest she got, Aloe felt like she had finished a marathon every single waking moment. She groaned her way to the oasis, almost tripping more than once because she didn’t have a source of light.

“Wait, why it was so lit on the oasis?” Aloe turned back to look at the oasis and noticed the place was a bit brighter than the rest of the desert. Not by much – only twice as bright as the moonlight allowed – and the light mainly concentrated on the water. “Oh, right.” She sigh-groaned. “I keep forgetting about the Myriad.”

Without giving it a second thought, she opened the door to the greenhouse.

“Oh...” Aloe wouldn’t dare to call herself an art lover, not even someone who could appreciate it, but the sight revealed to her was inspiring, to say the least.

The greenhouse was never dark. The ter’nar had a fairly low glow on its leaves, though most days it was overpowered by the moonlight. But now, there was another competitor. On the right parterre at the back, lights danced. A waltz of perfect movements, calculated down to the smallest decimal, as the glowing seeds orbited their plant.

She had been right, the Moonlight’s Tooth did indeed shine under moonlight.

Hesitantly, the scribe approached the plant. The light emitted by every source was far from blinding, but a comfortable glow that soothed her. Her mind divagated, thinking how comfortable it would be to sleep under this light.

After looking at the movements of the luminous gliders, almost bewitched by the perfect movements, Aloe extended her arm and captured one of the seeds. It didn’t do anything. Like the seed of a lion tooth, it remained inert on her hand, albeit an infinitely tad more radiant.

But there was also something different about the seed. It wasn’t the properties of the Moonlight’s Tooth, but something she did to the plant. She focused on the white and blue seed, channeling her vitality on her hand, and sure enough, the Moonlight’s Tooth seed refused her vitality. It was, of course, already infused with ‘accelerated growth’.

“I guessed that an infused plant would result in infused fruits, but this has a lot of potential, doesn’t it? If it wasn’t because the other potatoes and beans would expire, I could have replanted the newly harvested ones, meaning I would never need to reinfuse them. Crops that are passively faster to grow...”

The potential, whilst not limitless, was incredible. Civilization-shattering even. How much the world would change if crops took half the time to grow? Would hunger be eradicated? Or the surplus would result in more people therefore in a net zero gain? Population, very much like inflation and markets, tended to regulate itself in some way or another.

Those were big questions she was not ready to tackle. Not yet. She needed more time to plan.

In a passing thought, she released the seed in her hand above the Moonlight’s Tooth, and sure enough, it started orbiting it. But instead of around it, over it. In a smaller orbit, forever locked on top in a horizontal spin.

Tired but excited for the future, Aloe walked back to the entrance, only to turn around and look back at the dimly lit but cozy greenhouse.

“If the Myriad is a second sun during the day...” Aloe muttered, her mind distracted by the sight. “Then the Moonlight’s Tooth is a second moon during the night.”