Cultivating Plants

"I am tired of waiting." Those were the first words Zayn Gerges said as he materialized himself in the imperial gardens of the palace of Asina.

"No one is commanding you to wait," the Calipha off-handedly commented, her mind elsewhere.

"I suspect you aren't taking this issue with its due importance. It has been two years and what have you done since then, Naila-al-Ydaz?"

"Many things, amongst them, managing a country," the cultivator ignored the veiled threats hidden in the assassin's words. "Gerges, you know this was going to be a long-time investment. You cannot just train people in Nurture and Enlightenment in a question of months, even years are quite a short deadline. Gathering vitality is too narrow of a bottleneck. If you want to have a real chance at taking down Aloe, I would suggest at least five more years."

"I'm dying," Gerges taciturnly added.

"Oh," the cultivator blurted out by reflex. "That I did not expect."

"I am nearly eighty, an assassin, a drug addict, what did you expect?"

"Well, certainly that you managed your health better, for starters."

"You know that's not possible for my kind," the old man grunted.

"Ah yes, the hashashids. It must be difficult having to constantly intoxicate yourselves to keep your wits. I cannot say I envy you."

"Our status is not without its advantages."

"Premature death, yes, quite the advantage," the gorgeous monarch chuckled, a gesture that got a scowl out of the Grandmaster. "Whilst it is problematic that you might die, can you not just pass down the torch? A single lost Grandmaster will not affect the war effort significantly."

"You know I can't do that."

"Oh, you definitely can, it is just that you will not," Naila-al-Ydaz smiled at him. "You can stop trying to act as if this is nothing more than petty vengeance. But I will remind you of what we talked about years ago. Let me extend to you a bit of trust. I will not strike Aloe first, and I know that no matter how hard I crack on the assassins, your kind will slip from my clutches like the slippery snakes you are and you will attack her one way or another. All this preparation I have done is not an offensive, but a defensive maneuver. If Aloe hurts my country – and only then – I will assist you. Have that in mind."

Zayn took a deep breath, opened his mouth, refrained himself from talking, and unable to come up with the words he let out a mighty groan. The assassin tilted his head down and tipped his hat.

"Ayad is a danger. She will be the one to attack first. Be ready." Those were the words he spoke before he decomposed into smoky shadows.

As her enhanced passive senses informed her that she was alone, the Calipha let out a sigh of exhaustion and deflated.

"I hate being the adult." The impossibly beautiful woman closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose.

She felt so, so tired. Her body was youthful, but her mind and heart were old. And that age was taking a toll on her. It was becoming impossible to know where she ended and where her duties began. Should she be Naila or Naila-al-Ydaz? Should she be a human or should she be the Calipha of Ydaz?

Never before had she felt this lost in her life.

"What is the right decision?" The exhausted woman looked up to the skies for answers.

The heavens failed to answer her question.

In the end, she made the decision. She didn't know if it was the best one, it probably wasn't… but it was hers. She was Naila-al-Ydaz, ruler of the Qiraji, Calipha of Ydaz, but most regrettably, daughter of Aaliyah-al-Ydaz. Aloe might have listened to Naila Asina, maybe a Naila Ayad, but never Naila-al-Ydaz. But a nation needed the guiding embrace of a mother, and only she could keep this world clean from devastation.

Only Naila-al-Ydaz could leave the world a better place, a world that her Aya and her children might have loved to live in. There couldn't be an incompetent ruler after her. There couldn't be another Aaliyah-al-Ydaz after her. There couldn't be an 'after her'. Only the loveable touch of a tyrant mother.

A life for a better world, she told herself. Everything to not be like her.

A quiet sob escaped her lips.

As much as he hated it, Josephine had been right. His endeavors had required years. Replacing his body with Heartgrowths hadn't been as time-consuming as he originally thought, but the Prince of Flowers had decided to take his time to minimize the loss of vitality. The ten Haya he had lost in a single arm had weighed on him, and as he practiced more on how to control his flow of blood and vitality, he managed to practically nullify losses in his maximum deposit as he substituted his body.

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Aloe had spoken as if the Heartgrowths were some sort of problem, he would go as far as to say that she had classified them as something malevolent, but she was wrong.

It elated him thinking that.

That she could be wrong.

Yes, that was why he was doing all of this. To prove to her that she was wrong and he was right. To enlighten her twisted reality, to no longer be the one infused with ideals, but be the one infusing them.

Quantifying Mother Nature's vitality had been an impossible quest as her passive subterfuge hid it perfectly – he had reached that point himself, so he knew personally how hard it was to detect it – but Xochipilli had always had the feeling that something was wrong, that Aloe couldn't have had physical attributes as massive as the ones she boasted with the vitality he guessed she had.

And now he knew why.

Stances were multipliers.

A truth he had heard since he was young, but only now after his body had become one of vegetable matter instead of flesh that he understood. Flora was way better at some attributes than fauna. Toughness and recovery for starters. But that also meant it was worse at others like dexterity and glamour.

If Heartgrowths were just vegetable matter.

He had always had that feeling of wrongness when interacting with dryads. They can't just be plants, he constantly told himself, and now he had the answer. Just like classifying a fungus as a plant, calling the Heartgrowths plants was wrong.

They were a half step not just between plant and animal, but also fungi.

Some sort of… biological apex.

They weren't perfect per se, but the sobriquet of Synergetic Symbiont was veritable. Combining all the features available, the Heartgrowth allowed for the best possible result. The glamour of a human, the toughness of a tree, the recovery of a fungi…

Whether she had been aware or not, Aloe had been using stances at their maximum potential multiplier.

Well, base potential.

She lived the sedentary life of a tree, but he had been training. His base values were greater than Mother Nature's, he was one hundred and one percent sure of it. The only difference between them now was the number of Haya.

A massive wall… but he wasn't without other options.

An expansive underground plantation lay before him. Just in case – though mostly paranoia – he had infused every single specimen with subterfuge to minimize Aloe's chance of detection, but that mattered not anymore.

He was close to the finish line.

No.

That was underplaying it.

The Prince of Flowers was ready.

Beyond him, no sentient life remained in the underground location. He had made all the dryads that had assisted with his experiments leave for this final one.

It had taken years and tens of thousands of generations of hybrids, but he had finally managed to create the evolutions. Nine specimens that lacked a single alignment each. He didn't know how he reached this point, everything was blurry after a couple of years without sleep and frantic experiments. The drugs constantly flowing in his system didn't help either. To stand a chance against Aloe he had trained with every single one of the vital arts, and that meant Enlightenment.

Right now, he was only high on hashish as he had an emergency shadow anchor set up, but he had trained with many drugs and their synergies. And unlike every other assassin in existence, he had access to arcane drugs.

"Ah," he exhaled after having taken a deep breath, his arms encircling the nine specimens. "I think I hear it."

Yes, that was how he had reached this far.

The assassins spoke of it in their muddy and obscure lore. It went by many names, the Thought of Cyan, the Forbidden Knowledge, or the plain Enlightenment; but here in Ydaz, it was known as the Greater Understanding. The voice of knowledge that whispered faint hints of answers. Much like the caresses of anxiety, the Greater Understanding guided those connected with the world of ideas with its voices. But unlike the hideous anxiety, this cacophony didn't come from one's truly faulty mind, but a greater else.

What that 'else' might be was beyond the assassins, but it definitely existed. Might it be the heavens or Oblivion, it mattered not. Only that it had led him to the path he needed to walk.

Pushing so much vitality outside of his body with the flowing stance, enough that it might have calcinated an unwary individual with its heat, Xochipilli started the final union.

For a perfect being.

Vitality thrummed in its tens of thousands of Haya in order to force hundreds of generations of hybrids to blossom and produce offspring. These sickly evolutions, product of the highest level of inbreeding, required far more vitality than most original specimens even if they weren't that different from normal plants and fungi by now. One just was plain-looking grass with its equal mundane qualities, for example, yet it boasted all alignments except Death.

The soil in the plantation quickly degraded and thousands of specimens died as it became unsustainable, tons of vegetable matter grown, discarded, and withered, but Xochipilli persevered.

He would save Aloe from herself at any cost.

Even though he was a demigod – or even an outright god – for what normal people, assassins, and cultivators respect, his sight became blurry and wavered as he poured more and more vitality.

Enough to turn a continent-wide desert into a jungle.

Life blossomed and withered in his fingertips. Some from the lack of nutrients, others because of their mystical inbreeding mutations, and some he did kill himself in order to make more room for others.

If he had used his own Heartgrowth flesh to grow them, he was well aware he would have died hundreds of times by now from all the organic matter generated and spoiled.

But alas, there it was.

A single black seed.

Perfectly spherical, and it only refracted white light. It was a dizzying impossible sight, even if the seed itself was plain-looking. But he knew he had achieved it. This was it, a living being that encapsulated every alignment. Every aspect of reality.

And even though he was clearly aware of his success, by pure muscle memory, Xochipilli took one Aloe Veritas leaf from his cape and rubbed the already dark seed against the cut overflowing with dark blue ink.

Yet the contents of the parchment leaf were something he had never seen before. Something he would never have expected. His blood curled and froze as he read the arcane words of the Aloe Veritas and found not an objective description, but a terrifying attempt at communication.

You should not have done that. She has noticed.

Then the whole world trembled.