ALL NOVEL Book 3: 53. Fleeting
Aloe woke up to an empty stomach, which wasn't surprising as she had only had a few strips of jerky and not much else the previous day. She ate her breakfast, but she was satiated fast.
"I know this isn't healthy, I'm aware I should eat more than this, but I'm not really hungry…"
After being done with her meal, she crawled her way out of the shack and called for Fikali. It took a few minutes of shouting until the dweller made her appearance as she was seemingly sleeping at these hours.
"Carry me to the greenhouse, will you?"
"Wroo!" Fikali grunted in acknowledgment, but that didn't stop Aloe from bribing her with a few pistachios.
Perhaps she was healed enough to walk already, but Aloe didn't want to push her body in the slightest. She didn't forget how much it had tired her standing still yesterday. Once Fikali carried her to the greenhouse, she crawled to the Blossomflame.
"No luck, huh." The cultivator sighed at the flower which had yet to recover its normal luster. "Today's the third day, half the vacation already. Please be ready on the morn of the sixth if you can, I need that healing. I really do." She doubted that whispering those words to the Blossomflame would do anything, but she did so, nonetheless. At least it calmed her aching heart.
Her business in the greenhouse was far from over though. Now she crawled to the Grace's Exaltation, which had already recovered from the cut she had made yesterday.
"I've never extracted so much nectar from the grace, but considering its stem is still glowing, I guess it's fine?"
The Grace's Exaltation glowed like many other evolved plants, though the glow came only from the nectar flowing inside the plant much like blood. After having removed a flask's worth of sap, the stem had lost part of its glow, but it wasn't depleted like how the Blossomflame lost its luster after having healed Aloe.
This time, it took longer for the nectar to be gathered, but there didn't seem to be much issue even after removing so much sap from the plant.
"Blossomflame, checked. Grace, checked." Aloe pulled her hair backward and wiped her sweat. "Now that I'm here I should check the other plants in the greenhouse."
She was nowhere strong enough to check all the crops around the oasis, but she supposed she could at least do a round in the greenhouse.
"There doesn't seem to be any issues here, the parterres are irrigated by a single Flourishing Spring each, and unlike the oasis, there are no water pipes that could be broken."
Still, she took the time to inspect every single one of her evolved plants. The ter'nar and the veritas remained as always, exactly like she had found them when she first arrived here. The blue tree didn't have a dedicated Flourishing Spring, so it survived with the drops that made it to the ground. The Blossomflame and the grace had lost their luster because of her antics, but the springs and the single Moonlight's Tooth were healthy. Only one thing had changed.
"Hmm, definitely bigger." Aloe scratched her chin as she peered at the Nature's Bounty. "I know the veritas description said something about a stump, but I'd never expected the plant to be a tree."
Whilst the magnitude of the evolved plant was yet to be seen, it was clear enough to her that she wasn't dealing with a flower or an herb. Neither it looked like a common tree sapling, as those tended to grow tall and the Nature's Bounty was wider than anything else, but she could recognize wood when she saw it.
"How many months has it been since I planted it? Three? Four? I'm not sure." She crawled inside the parterre to have a better look at the sapling. "Considering it has accelerated growth and the very description of the veritas said that it boosted the growth of nearby plants… shouldn't you have grown more?"
Quick estimations told her the plant should have undergone a year of growth since she was gone. Aloe lay for a few more minutes on the soil, mostly out of exhaustion from all the crawling, but she pondered during that time on how long trees took to grow. A few years for sure, but we are already halving that number with the infusion, so I should have seen some more progress than this.
With a groan, she made her way out of the greenhouse and called for Fikali. She wasn't ready yet to tend the crops on the oasis, but she took a detour to check the pistachio trees.
"Yup, tall saplings, that's how a tree should work." It was also obvious that she had planted the pistachios more than a month earlier than the Nature's Bounty and they had grown significantly more. "I can't imagine waiting for double the time to see a result. How do farmers do it?"
The following hours were composed of rest, lunch, and looking for a place to store the aphrodisiac. She ended up going with a jug, but considering it was a jug and not an actual container meant to be displaced over long distances, she knew she would have to find a better method.
What she actually spent the hours was separating the many seeds that Lulu had bought her. There were two of each, so she put them together orderly and also threw away the ones she knew Evolution wouldn't work on or those she already knew Evolution would work like black seeds or cumin.
"Damn, once trimmed the numbers look a lot less intimidating." The maid had brought her many seeds during her forced outings from their charade, but few of those seeds were unrecognizable to Aloe at first sight. "Time to use a bit of vitality, I've been uselessly hoarding it since I got here."
Evolution was without a doubt the gambling den of the vital arts. Perhaps you would hit gold with seeds like cumin which would result in plants that could heal one's body in seconds, but most of the time you would walk back home with your hands empty.
Between failed attempts – which didn't chip her vitality in the slightest – Aloe started making the second batch of aphrodisiacs. Unlike the first attempt, now she used water straight from the oasis, an endeavor that was as hard as it sounded because holding a pot and its lid on top of a bellyflopping dweller was as hard as not encountering a lascivious sultanzade.
Nighttime encroached on them by the time she managed to bring the water.
"Sleep time, I guess," Aloe muttered herself to sleep.
Aloe didn't fare much better in any subject during the fourth day of her vacation. The first thing she did in the morning was to visit the Blossomflame, and whilst it had recovered some color, the evolved flower was still depleted. Next, she used the hard-gained oasis water and started the second batch of aphrodisiacs. Her luck remained spirited across the sand as she continued with the evolutions, and even after having gone through all of the seeds, she hadn't found a single evolution.
"Did I just luck out at the beginning, or is there something I am overlooking?" She wasn't sure, and her mind wasn't in her best game. Maybe she had already recovered from the journey, but now she realized how many luxuries she had been enjoying in the palace. Warm food, a soft bed, a personal maid, and the baths.
Oh, the baths. Because of her limited mobility, she was reticent about washing herself on the oasis, meaning she hadn't washed herself for four days. And those days hadn't been light ones like being sat all day behind a desk, but she had sweated. Oh, she had sweated. Perhaps not a fair maiden she was not, but she was beginning to crave a warm bath with fervor if it just to escape her oily body.
During the fourth day, she finished all the aphrodisiacs and still looked for a way to store them that wasn't in the waterskins – which was looking more and more like an impossible task – and evolved black seeds freely, away from the watchful eyes of the sultanzade.
Using vitality – especially in such frequent repetition – was exhausting, but it was somewhat liberating. As if she had been unshackled.
The days were fleeting, but finally on the fifth day and the last one before she had to march again for Sadina, Aloe decided to do some damage control on the oasis.
A single gust of wind with temper could be able to sweep down the water pipes, so she wasn't surprised to find them all collapsed. Neither the pistachios, the bananas, the medicinal plants, and even less the potato and bean plantations survived. Their infrastructure, that was.
"Huh, nothing's dead." She expected to find a graveyard of plants, and instead just found… plants. "I guessed that if palm trees and grass can survive without being watered, the rest of the plants could, but it was just that, a guess. I didn't actually hope the crops would be alright."
They didn't look as healthy as when she had been watering daily with the Flourishing Springs, but what mattered was that they were healthy at all. In the end, Aloe opted for not reconstructing the watering infrastructure as most leaf pipes had been lost to the wind and she didn't have the energy nor time to make more.
"I've been having the sensation all day that I'm forgetting something…" She pondered under the shadow of a palm tree after having inspected all the plants. "But what may that be…" Swift, sudden, and enlightening providence came to her. "The Chlorotrophy!"
Out of all the evolved plants, that had been the only one she hadn't inspected because – besides the many Flourishing Springs – it was the only one planted outside.
"Damn, where did I leave it?" Now she found herself unable to find it.
The initial reason why she had planted the evolved plant outside was because it originally took the shape of a Flourishing Spring, so she wanted to see if it could take the form of a palm tree if given the chance.
"It was here… maybe?" She could only see trees and her memory was faulty at best. "Considering I am only seeing coconuts palm trees… mission successful? Did I make a note of where I planted the Chlorotrophy? I can't even remember that."
After a few minutes, she became too tired to continue looking for the lost evolved plant but considered her experiment a rotund success in spite of her failure at the search.
Day five ended with an infrastructure inspection, an amphora full of aphrodisiac, and a jar filled to the brim with Cure Grass pellets. Her grass pots in the palace provided her with minute amounts of Cure Grass, but she wasn't able to produce pellets, only dried mush at best. So during her free time, Aloe crafted as many vitality pills as she was able to. She doubted the opportunity to use them would ever appear whilst in the palace, but she preferred to be ready and able at any moment.
As much as she hated it, stances were her only weapon and vitality was the resource to use them.
Today she dropped in bed satisfied after having completed all of her objectives. Tomorrow, she would return to her gilded cage.
As you may have already noticed, the title of the fiction has returned to its original form of Cultivating Plants after popular demand.
It makes one wonder that this whole story was born in a Discord VC because I was discussing with another author on how funny it would be to make a Xianxia novel where the cultivators actually worked the field.
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