Cultivating Plants

The cultivator had no pretensions of power or delusions of grandeur. The only reason why she hadn't fallen to the clutches of assassins was because of the Blossomflame.

In other words, luck.

The evolved flower was her weapon, yes, but its overwhelming lethality was none other than the product of luck. She had only managed to stay alive during both confrontations until the Blossomflame resolved them with a single conflagration.

It scared her to think what it would be to be at the receiving end of such agonizing flames. For her, the fire was warm and soothing. For the others, it was torment followed by inevitable death.

Just in case, Aloe checked the Blossomflame's pot as she had fallen on the ground multiple times during both confrontations, but because the backpack was tightly packed with food, clothes, and sleeping material, the ceramic was intact.

"I'm tired…" The cultivator groaned as she stood up and walked away from the corpse. It would have been easy to loot it, but she was so disgusted – not only with herself but with the world in general – that she couldn't lead to care. Some would say that even having such a thought passing through her mind in the first place was disgusting, and Aloe couldn't disagree.

But unfortunately, it was beyond her to run away with all her might. The Blossomflame had healed all her wounds, but she was as exhausted as if he had run for one whole hour without rest. She switched to the recovery stance and moved in a trot.

It wasn't the most intelligent thing as there were corpses behind her and she wasn't that far away from Selen, but it would be more dangerous to be detected again when she was mortally exhausted.

So she trotted as if there wasn't the dead body of two people near her.

Whilst moving couldn't exactly be considered rest, the regeneration stance made it so that she was slowly recovering her breath. Most of the damage from the fight had been mental rather than physical thanks to the Blossomflame, which meant she badly needed that moment to breathe.

It wasn't until an hour later that she grew confident enough to wield haste again. It was a bit… off-putting to use the stance just to run when she had been using it offensively not that long ago.

Her offense had been risible, but considering she had no previous fighting experience and that she had been dealing with trained assassins, she wanted to believe that she did a decent job. The Blossomflame had done most of it, but she had survived long enough, only having hit twice, for that to matter.

Aloe rubbed her forearm where she had been stabbed whilst she skidded through the mountainous terrain. Knowing that there had been exposed bone discomforted her, even if the wound was long gone. In a way, she was mostly concerned with the torn sleeve right now.

I don't have a needle or thread… Holding her need to groan, Aloe stepped to rest as she felt her concentration wavering, which could be dangerous while running with the speed stance. In a handful of seconds, she had already switched to recovery, which wasn't surprising as she had been using it nonstop these last weeks. Haste itself was entering the realm of the minute, singular, rather than minutes, but it still was a bit far away.

As far as breaks went, this wasn't the best of them all, but the Ridged Highlands provided her something that the desert hadn't done: shade.

Unless she found some big dunes, the shade had been hard to come by before, and impossible during the noon, but here it was more common. She used up the breathing room to gather some nearby living stone seeds as she had dropped the one she had been evolving before, and because the seed had accepted her vitality, she knew for a fact that they could evolve.

She wouldn't try just yet, as it had been the exact moment when she had been evolving the seed that she had been attacked, and she still wasn't out of danger. Until she was in Loyata, or better yet in the sea, she wouldn't evolve these seeds as she had no way of knowing how expensive they would be.

As far as evolutions went, Aloe had been rather lucky as the only one that took everything out of her was the Blossomflame and she was almost outgrowing the cumin seeds now with her ever-increasing vitality reserves.

The attack had shaken her so hard that she didn't bother evolving black seeds even if she had a surplus of vitality. The ambush showed her that would need every last grain of vitality she could muster until she left Ydaz.

Once the exhaustion had washed away from her body, which had been rather fast now that the rest factor of her regeneration stance was nearly sevice of her default state. Fifteen minutes were converted into an hour and a half with the regeneration stance.

In a few words, mindboggling.

It got even more absurd when taking into account sleep. Six measly hours which not everyone could live with were now forty-two virtual ones. Nearly two days with rather short sleep.

With a groan, she stood up and switched to haste. Even one hour and a half of rest wasn't enough.

As she got closer to Loyata, the landscape became more and more mountainous. It partially scared Aloe, not only her visibility was severely limited now, but any falls would be more worrisome now. It wasn't the same tripping in the desert as the worst that could happen was getting lodged into a dune than in a mountain as she could literally fall from a cliff.

With any luck, that would mean that any would-be-pursuers would have more difficulties than her navigating the terrain.

Aloe would have liked to say that the journey to Loyata was without any setbacks, but the ruggedness of the terrain played against her. Not only did she have to follow the existing paths as climbing mountains would only slow her down, but the dirt path she did take – taking the main road would have been moronic – was now cut off by a massive chasm.

"Nince-damned hells," she muttered as she saw the remains of a wooden bridge. Carefully, she loomed into the ravine to review the distance. "That's around, uhm… too much."

The spatial sense wasn't one of her strong suits, but the distance between the closest sides of the chasm was around ten meters apart. Technically speaking, she should be able to do the jump. If not with the speed stance, then with the strength one. She could trust herself to jump two meters without internal infusions, but ten meters – if not more – was too intimidating of a task, even if she had magic that boosted her physical capabilities far beyond the needed minimum to accomplish such a jump.

"I think I'll pass…" Suicidal wasn't one of her qualities.

Not yet.

Ever, if possible.

With the regeneration stance active, as she didn't trust herself with the speed stance this close to the chasm, Aloe continued looking for a way to cross. She hadn't bought a map – which now she considered a massive misplay – but seeing how deep, massive, and overall loud the chasm was, she guessed at the bottom of the ravine the Tehen River was flowing.

This meant that once she found a way around the rift, she would officially be at Loyata.

That made her giddy, she was practically there, but that meant her insecurity was at new time high. Loyata would be wholly uncharted territory for her, and communication alone would be difficult.

After a couple of hours, or a handful of evolved black seeds though that wasn't much of a precise way to measure time, she did find a narrow enough margin that she was confident enough to jump. Yes, she had been discussing just a few hours ago about how she shouldn't spend vitality, but being topped was making her giddy, so she thought she could spare a mansworth every once in a while.

"Oh heavens, this is scary." Aloe fanned herself with the speed stance active, which made her hands into a blur. But she couldn't go back now, this was the narrowest gap she had found in many hours. "Ready. Set. Go!"

Her plan was simple, she would gather a buttload of speed with haste and once she was close to the chasm itself, she would switch to potency to boost the strength of her legs. Momentum and jump force should be able to carry her over the five meters of the darkest void with ease.

Then, as she switched over to the strength stance at the narrowest margin between her and the chasm, something hit her in the back.

Aloe didn't have enough time to scream as her momentum carried her to the other side, but without the height of the jump, she collided with the face of the other side of the chasm, falling into it.