Cultivating Plants

Aloe put on her clothes, her sorry state and dirty body be damned. Tomorrow she would bathe, but today she was too tired to even think about it. What she was not tired to do was investigate a bit more.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but let’s munch some grass.” Aloe walked to the oasis, now having footwear to protect her feet.

As the sun was beginning to set, the oasis looked calm. There weren’t any animals, which was surprising, but she had heard the sounds of bugs from time to time. Fikali was still sleeping under the date tree, so she left her alone. Aloe kneeled before a patch of grass and hesitatingly yanked a handful of blades of grass.

The vaguely, almost unnoticeable, blue grass looked no different from common grass. Aloe’s hand trembled as she pictured her eating grass, it was just so dumb...

“Vitality, Aloe. Think of the vitality...” She muttered to convince herself.

Though talking about vitality reminded her to sense the vitality of the grass. She had just learned the skill, but now it felt impossible to forget it. That didn’t mean it was easy to detect the vitality of the plant. As Karaim had stated, each individual blade didn’t contain a lot of vitality. And she was far from an expert on the subject.

“Alright, concentrate. You need to concentrate.” Aloe remembered how much easier was to feel her own vitality. 

Not only she had massive amounts of it compared to the Cure Grass, but it was also hers. Aloe took a deep breath, remembering the scorching sun and draining sands, the lack of life she had experienced in the desert.

When there was not a single hope of life around you, the measly seed was an expansive farmland.

A jolt of lighting traversed her arms, it was small, less than a jerk, but it was something. The blades of Cure Grass in her hand felt ever-so-warmer now.

“They have vitality. A grown blade has more vitality than a seed but still far less than what I spent on evolving a normal seed.” Aloe exhaled, the air coming out of her mouth unnaturally heavy. “Karaim was right, they don’t have a lot of vitality.” Then she led the blades to her mouth but stopped abruptly. “No, I can’t do this!” Aloe cringed. “It’s... it’s too much! I can get behind getting naked in the desert, but eating grass? There I draw the line.”

The absurdity of the situation wasn’t lost on Aloe, even she noticed the strange line she had set. Her banker’s mind whispered to her about the sunken-cost fallacy and how right now it didn’t look much like a fallacy. The gains outnumbered the losses by much.

“Ehm... he said I just needed to munch it, right?” Aloe convinced herself with trembling hands. “I’ll still have grass in my mouth though... But the vitality... Ugh, everything be damned!”

And the handful of grass became a mouthful.

Aloe’s visage contorted in repugnance. It was awful. She wanted to apologize with her stew and call it a feast of the heavens, the apotheosis of the sun. Because right now, she just wanted to puke.

But she pushed forward and chewed on the Cure Grass.

It got worse.

Bile rapidly gathered on her throat and Aloe spat the grass out.

“Oh my...” She spat multiple times on the ground, trying to get the taste out. “It tastes like acid!” Not that she ever had tasted any acid.

Aloe exhaled and inhaled rapidly, her chest heaving up and down harder than when she had to run after Fikali yesterday. It was a foul taste, but...

“Damn.” Aloe curled into a ball. “It does work...” She honestly hoped it didn’t, but her body didn’t feel as heavy as before. “It restores vitality, ugh.” Her eyes became watery at the notion of munching more Cure Grass. “How in the heavens did Karaim manage to do this?”

The taste still lingered on her palate; it just wouldn’t go away. But she knew the suffering wasn’t over yet. The vitality she had restored from munching once on that bunch of grass was not even close enough to restore the vitality she had lost on the Cure Grass evolution. And a quick check on the grass she had spat revealed that she hadn’t gotten all the vitality out of those blades.

“Oh no.” Aloe groaned. “I have to chew multiple times each batch.” And then groaned again.

After a while, Aloe had enough of facing her mortality, though others would call it “cry like a little whimper”. Others were far harsher, but we don’t talk about those.

The first thing she did was rinse her mouth. She knew that her amphora was running low on water and such misuse of water was stupid, but she preferred that to having her mouth taste like a monster’s den.

Two mouthfuls of water seemed enough to wash most of the grass' taste away.

“Alright, I need to find a better way to take the vitality out of the Cure Grass.” Aloe sat in front of the desk; her dusty clothes substituted by a nightgown. “Nothing actually forces me to munch it, and by the looks of it, I just need to get the juices out, so what can I do?”

This seemed like an apothecary question, but it wasn’t like she could ask Umar right now for ideas.

“The obvious option is to make tea, but that won’t solve anything, it will taste like shit, even if I try to hide it with other plants.” Aloe played with her curls, deep in thought. “Washing the grass isn’t a bad idea, though. It was kinda dumb on my part to munch grass right out of the oasis. It was probably covered in dust, even if I didn’t notice.” That thought made her tongue itch now.

Aloe read the cultivation technique for ideas, but that led nowhere. Karaim had jumped to another subject, and it was worrying how thin the diary was becoming. He truly didn’t know a lot about Evolution and that troubled Aloe.

“I could grind the grass, maybe dust would be easier... but I still would consume outright dust... Well... I could but that sounds even worse than the tea. Far worse.” She tapped on the desktop repeatedly, hoping for any idea to strike her. “Hmm... How about pills?” She said aloud. “That I could consume with a gulp, and I wouldn’t even need to taste the grass... and dust is far denser than singular blades so I could concentrate a lot of grass in a single pill.”

The idea sounded quite solid, but she still had a problem. Aloe didn’t know how to make pills. She had a vague idea, but that required some ingredients.

“Okay, I need something to keep the dust together. Something sticky. Honey would work perfectly but I don’t have that. Same with gelatin. Hmm, something sticky...” She continued tapping, searching for substitutes. “Aloe sap is kinda sticky... will that work?”

Aloe made a mental note, that idea seemed to have some future, but it’s not like she could try today. She also needed to look for a mortar and pestle, she was sure she saw one somewhere, but she couldn’t quite remember where.

A quick look through the window showed her that the sun had already hidden away, but the sky had yet to darken. And thanks to her nap, she wasn’t exactly sleepy. Aloe continued reading the open journal.

“Vitality is quite interesting, I have heard that nobles use it for their nurturing, but I am unaware of their methods. But thanks to my research on Evolution I have found another method to apply vitality, I call it Infusion. I won’t say it’s a separate field, more like another branch of Evolution, or a neutral one of the vital arts, but it’s quite simple. Instead of evolving the plant by infusing it with your vitality, you just don’t.”

Aloe sighed. “I don’t know why I keep reading, honestly.”

“I know it sounds quite counteractive, but trust me, intent is key when dealing with the vital arts. In Evolution, you purposely think of a change. If you failed to evolve the Cure Grass, that’s probably the reason, you lacked intent. Emphasis on intent and not thoughts, my bad. An empty head with no thoughts is useful in these fields.”

“I did not fail, but it’s interesting to hear, nonetheless.” She mussitated, her chin resting on her palm as she read.

“Infusion lacks any intent,” Karaim explained. “By simply infusing a plant with vitality, it will grow faster. I cannot tell exact numbers as they vary from plant to plant, but a single infusion may be enough to cut the growing period by half.”

“Oh, now that’s interesting.

” Aloe’s main problem with cultivation currently was that plants took a lot of time to grow. A time that she rather save up. She technically had a deadline with Fikali’s death, but that was still years away.

“Another factor to take into consideration is that Infusion is way cheaper than Evolution, so it makes sense to at least infuse any given plant once to at least half its growth time. That’s what I did with all the palm trees on the oasis.”

Aloe almost choked on her spit upon reading that. “Damn, Karaim certainly likes his plot twists. Is even the oasis natural? Next thing I’m gonna read is that he made a hole in the ground and nince-damned water just spurted out.”

And whilst she was reading, her mind was on the Infusion. Halving a plant’s growth was a significant advantage. Nonetheless, a yawn escaped her. A peek in the window showed her a starry sky.

“Damn, I read slow.” Aloe stretched her arms with a cute groan and stood up from her chair.

The bed’s call was potent.