Even though her calculations told her she was on track for greatness regardless of what she did, Aloe couldn't help but press herself forward. She had nothing to do now besides evolving and training, after all.
She couldn't wait to change her evolving habits from Cottonpulls to Radiating Undergrowths, so she wanted to get that optimal vitality as soon as possible.
Growth was paradoxically slow yet fast. Compared to any other type of growth, Aloe was ahead of the curve by leagues, ...
2024-11-26 12:03:34 +0000 UTC
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They were forced to mobilize. Loyata and their assassins had declared war on them before they were completely ready. Her half-sister utterly hated having her hand tipped, but Naila was thrilled.
There were a lot of things yet to be done, but as the northern frontier they shared with the Loyatan Coalition began to be chipped away from skirmishes, they had to dedicate a fraction of their gathered army to safekeeping operations. The assassins had chosen the most cowardly of ways to try...
2024-11-25 13:41:28 +0000 UTC
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Whilst it was unfortunate that Aloe was unable to find her much-desired sedative, she chose not to dwell on it. She had more things to do. Namely, keep evolving cotton plant seeds.
Now that she could evolve three seeds per day without harming her frail body, it only took her a bit more than a week to reach her much-awaited hundred-evolution milestone.
"It's taken a while, but I'm done!" The cultivator celebrated with the hundredth Cottonpull seed in her hands as she raised it in t...
2024-11-24 13:55:15 +0000 UTC
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The cultivator scratched her scalp at the headache of a problem before her. The Slowtide wasn't that expansive, only around the surface of an average person as it decided to grow on an oblong shape biased toward the ground. The highest part of the bright pink lichen reached a bit higher than Aloe's breasts, but it expanded beyond the point where the cavern wall met the bedrock and grew about a foot and a half on the ground.
Aloe's feet, not that unsettling unit that the assassins used t...
2024-11-23 12:28:07 +0000 UTC
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"Okay, there's a bit of a problem with the logistics first," she mused as she pondered about the 'absurd nutritional value' statement of the Radiating Undergrowth's description. "Hmm, I'm liking the lighting though, I can read the veritas without donning acuity or burning a Blossomflame. How weird to suddenly have access to free lighting. But that's beside the point. How am I going to harvest this mushroom if I can't get anywhere close to it?"
The answer was quite simple.
She had ...
2024-11-22 13:01:42 +0000 UTC
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"Nope, nope, nope. Fuck that shit." Aloe cursed as she hastily left the mountain's peak, not even bothering to climb it down and instead donning toughness and constantly jumping to her death.
If she wasn't nince as tough as any other person, that was.
Maybe even way more as she was a sturdy gal, and Nurture was all about boosting base values. And Aloe could physically sustain a lot of abuse.
She was well aware that the Loyatan army wasn't here for her, the conflict between L...
2024-11-21 15:31:41 +0000 UTC
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"We are running out of time," Grandmaster Nugar stated after barging inside the room.
"I'd prefer if you waited a bit before informing me," Hassan calmly responded as he stood up from bed, moving his arms gracefully to let the two Loyatan beauties next to him keep sleeping.
At first, he didn't like Loyatan women much, they were too pale for his taste. But with time, Hassan understood the truth of the world: all women should be appreciated. It also helped that this duo in particula...
2024-11-20 13:03:47 +0000 UTC
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Even if she now had permanent access to light, Aloe found herself aching for sunlight after all these months. But she knew going out just to experience sunlight was dangerous, so she prepared herself a shopping list to serve as an excuse.
"What do I need?" She asked with her pen-knife and veritas parchment in hand. "Some cooking utensils, more vegetable varieties, and perhaps some new clothing. Otherwise, I think I'm doing fine." She etched her need in the leaf even if she wouldn't be c...
2024-11-19 11:48:01 +0000 UTC
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Darkness was all she saw. All-consuming. Ever-present. An eternal mantle of coldness and hostile penumbra. In that absolute void, Aloe cried. She gagged for air and writhed on the cold stone floor.
This was reality.
Her awful and cold reality.
But it beat half of those sunlight apparitions.
"Ah," she groaned and without thinking it twice she donned potency and snapped her pinkie like a twig.
The Blossomflames instantly responded to her mistress' wounds and vanish...
2024-11-18 10:10:59 +0000 UTC
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Sunlight warmed her skin. The lovely touch of the sun's embrace made her drowsy. There was no better feeling than lying on a soft surface whilst at the mercy of the life-giving heavens. She knew she had to wake up, but it was so comfortable…
"Wake up, silly goose." A charming voice caressed her ears, but she chose to ignore it. "I see… so that is how you want to play?" Then she was softly booped on the nose.
What made Aloe open her eyelids wasn't the soft touch, but the giggle...
2024-11-17 11:55:06 +0000 UTC
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It was tiresome to harvest her potatoes and mushrooms and then replant them, but that was what a woman had to do to eat. Even then, what was more tiresome was to re-infuse all the food from their respective internal infusions to better taste. Now, Aloe had gotten wise and re-infused all the liberty caps she had to better taste already as she had fields of them, and they didn't require the shade acclimation infusion.
That penultimate statement may be an exaggeration, but she had planted ...
2024-11-16 12:18:01 +0000 UTC
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With all her plants, fungi, lichens, and whatnot; Aloe had finally evolved all the living beings in her possession that could be evolved currently. Well, maybe except for herself, but Evolution could only affect non-developed, non-grown living beings.
Her main chore for the day was growing the cotton plants she had sowed so she could evolve more Cottonpulls in the following days. Blossomflames still worked just fine, but if she wanted to grow her reserves faster and without pushing hers...
2024-11-15 12:32:32 +0000 UTC
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Aloe almost collapsed into a puddle of vomit from exhaustion. Instead, she was able to catch herself, and only soak her hands in vomit.
"That's a new record," the cultivator said between pants. "I kinda lost count of the pills I took, and I don't know how many I had before starting, but I'd say that was around a twenty mansworth evolution cost. Nice."
She was delighted with the result; this was what she was searching for: a middle ground to work as an anchor point for the...
2024-11-14 15:10:09 +0000 UTC
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Aloe woke up as if she never went to sleep. She couldn't quite exactly put it into words, but even if she felt rested, her mind didn't share the same rest. From her perspective, she had closed her eyes and opened them a moment later. This had already happened before with the recovery internal infusion, so as of late, she was leaving burning patches of Cure Grass to work as some sort of time tracker. If they were burnt when she opened her eyes, then she would have fallen asleep. And that was t...
2024-11-13 12:55:31 +0000 UTC
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The walls of Asina lured the eyes of the beholder with their vibrant blue as always. Rani had made her go to the capital on a whim, and whilst she was an expert of the speed stance at this point, Naila didn't have a potent enough Nurture to match the emir's pace. Older sultanzade could make the round trip between Sadina and Asina in a single afternoon, Naila though, had needed a whole day for one way only.
"Quite pathetic, really," Rani taunted behind her.
"I… only… have… so...
2024-11-12 12:13:11 +0000 UTC
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Aloe had the bad trait of believing her spontaneous theories as the absolute truth, and that way of thinking punched her in the gut when she went through half of the seeds and all of the requirement conditions she had thought of and found no new evolutions.
"Not all plants have evolutions," she told herself and laughed it off.
If the normal evolution process didn't work, Aloe then went for the book method. If the book didn't work, it was time for the dead plant. If being in contac...
2024-11-11 15:34:59 +0000 UTC
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The next day, Aloe relaxed with the evolution experiments. She wasn't in any real haste, and she no longer had her sanity trickling out of her body thanks to the growing supply of Blossomflames and light, so she dedicated the day to unwind, draw a bit, and evolve more cumin seeds.
It may seem like a joke, but she was getting good with the knife. Aloe didn't have many references to draw, so she found herself drawing the same things over and over again, namely her plants. This contributed...
2024-11-10 12:02:41 +0000 UTC
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It would have been easy to go directly for the next evolution attempts, but Aloe had learned the need for a good rest. She had used thirty mansworth in a matter of hours, far more than she had ever consumed before, and even if she felt well at that moment, she knew she would face the consequences later.
And face them she did.
When she woke up the next 'day', she felt like an absolute pile of manure.
"Ugh, I knew it." She groaned her way out of bed, her body numb from the ext...
2024-11-09 12:35:21 +0000 UTC
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There were some things wrong with the description she had before her eyes namely, how it was highlighting both a Death alignment and a high nutritional value.
"I'm no scholar but these two words… they don't exactly merge together," she didn't know how to make heads or tails out of the situation. "I've only seen the Death alignment once before, and that plant gave me so many heebie-jeebies that I didn't plant it. At least this one isn't giving me instantaneous repulsion, so… maybe it...
2024-11-08 12:12:55 +0000 UTC
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To say that the near-death experience of drowning in the river had scared Aloe was an understatement. The pain induced by the Blossomflames' very healing wasn't forgotten either. She was already paranoid about the assassins being in every shadow, and her mistake didn't help her confidence and anxiety at all.
So she took the decision to play it safe.
Leisure time and wasteful use of vitality were cut to a minimum. Whilst she didn't remove the mushrooms from her diet after that fias...
2024-11-07 15:30:32 +0000 UTC
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A war council was the last thing Naila expected to come out of Rani's mouth. Though at the same time, it wasn't like it came directly from her.
"As you may have noticed or heard," Rani announced to her council, "assassin attacks have intensified as of late, alongside the growing dissent and starvation."
The good women ruling Sadina had been gathered in Rani's barely used office. Everyone was here, the two princesses of Sadina, Tamara, Ruhena, Nuha, and that new scribe of commoners...
2024-11-06 13:02:54 +0000 UTC
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Cold.
That was the first thing Aloe felt. The second was breathlessness. Water poured inside her nostrils and mouth, filling her lungs with the frigid liquid.
Her thoughts were sluggish but primal. If she remained here, she would die. But her mind was not that of an animal but a cultivator. She shifted her internal infusion to recovery. Perhaps she was no longer able to breathe, but as her body assimilated this new flow of vitality, it needed way less oxygen to sustain itself.
...
2024-11-05 12:02:21 +0000 UTC
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There were no words to describe how much Aloe had needed to draw. Not just as an activity to pass up the time, but as an outlet for her stress and frustration. Her skills were crude – even if she had good calligraphy from her previous profession – as she was working with a knife instead of a quill, but she promised herself to get better. She wanted to stay here at least until she evolved all the plants she had gathered so far, so she still had a while to get good at 'veritas etching'.
...
2024-11-04 12:17:14 +0000 UTC
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Hello there,
For those who haven't heard, I'll be participating in Royal Road's Writathon. This means I'll be writing 55k words in 5 weeks, though I can't say for sure if I'm going to publish them as editing takes a long time. Time that I'm not writing.
That would be all.
-Epsilon Twilight
2024-11-03 12:34:14 +0000 UTC
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In the following days, Aloe dedicated all her blood infusions to the Aloe Veritas. She went easy on her body and just performed one per sleep cycle as exhaustion kept accumulating no matter how much she rested. Even if she was rested for the first time in her life, Aloe felt the pains of her menstruation last for more than a couple of days.
Her poor state of living amplified every pain she was subjected to.
Once she had to skip the veritas to drop some blood on her potatoes. She h...
2024-11-03 12:32:20 +0000 UTC
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Aloe woke up in pain and blood. Fortunately, she had enough foresight to wield toughness before going to sleep, meaning her cramps didn't jolt her into wakefulness and insanity. Any other internal infusion amplified her sensation of pain, which was already abnormally high during menstruation, but toughness had severely numbed her.
There were occasions where being this numb to pain could be detrimental, but right now it was a heavensent.
"This is not much blood, that recovery-boost...
2024-11-02 12:30:03 +0000 UTC
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A sweet perfume, a soft caress, the warm rays of sunlight, the feeling of skin meeting skin by a partner on the other side of the bed, the pleasure of fingers seeking more pleasure eagerly, the exchange of kisses that didn't necessarily need to be lip to lip... Individually they were gorgeous things, but when put together… it felt wrong to enjoy them.
"Ah!" Aloe woke up from her sleep with a jump. "I-it was just a dream. I think so?"
It was hard to distinguish between what a dre...
2024-11-01 13:00:36 +0000 UTC
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"You need to explain yourself," Rani stated authoritatively as she crossed her legs, looking at her over the shoulder from her seat.
"There is not much to be explained, truth be told," Naila nonchalantly added.
"It would seem that actually performing your duties has made you less suited for your position," the emir scowled. "Why have you given that child that surname?"
"Law states that if a knighted family were to be without heirs and their inheritance muddled, a sultanzade ...
2024-10-30 12:15:09 +0000 UTC
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Using up twice as much vitality as she was used to certainly took a toll on her body. Which infuriated Aloe to no end. If Aaliyah could spend hundreds of mansworth in a single blood infusion, she wouldn't allow herself to fall behind, even if her total reserves weren't anywhere near close to a hundred to begin with and the woman had half a century of head start.
It was a matter of principles.
Unfortunately, practicing and augmenting her reserves wasn't something she could speed up...
2024-10-29 11:38:23 +0000 UTC
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Aloe started the day with the most tedious and exhausting activity: evolving a cumin seed. She barely tethered on the edge of being able to evolve them without external assistance, so not evolving a Blossomflame when her reserves were topped was a great misuse of her time and resources.
As painful as using up ninety-nine percent of her vitality in one go, because she wasn't restoring any vitality with Cure Grass pellets, she didn't suffer from any strong nausea or vomits.
By all m...
2024-10-26 14:06:29 +0000 UTC
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