Cultivating Plants

The first thing Aloe felt when she woke up was an impossible nausea. A jolt of dizziness assaulted her whole body into wakefulness.

"W-what?" She groggily woke up, but the moment she put her torso upright, her throat gagged.

The sensation was too sudden, and it didn't come alone. She barely had time to react and put her head to the side as she puked her guts out.

"Whuh?" Aloe groaned in confusion, her mind still numbed by sleep and her mouth covered in vomit. "Wha' happened?"

She looked around noticing no one. She truly was alone in her room. That dismissed her first thought of being poisoned. Then as she removed the sheets to stand up, she almost puked again by the sight alone.

"Oh heavens…" Her face instantly was drained of color.

Between her legs, a sea of red awaited.

"Ugh…" As the nausea came again, she became aware of the cramps assaulting her torso, and only then realized what the problem was.

Aloe shifted her internal infusion from recovery to toughness, and in a blink, most of the pain went away. Now that she was no longer assaulted by a maddening malaise, her head became clearer.

"Oh, the mortality…" She cursed. "Of course, how could I have forgotten about the curse that affects and taunts me every moon…"

The source of her problems was none other than menstruation.

She was already quite weak to the female body's monthly functions, basically becoming incapable that specific day of the month, but her usage of internal infusions only made it worse as without toughness, the pain of menstruation would be exacerbated.

"Oof…" Even after having recovered her breath, she was still panting from the sickness. "H-how much blood there's there?" Her mouth was foul with the taste of vomit and also dehydrated. "Or rather, why's there this much blood?"

The cultivator slowly blinked a few times to gather her thoughts before coming to a hypothesis.

"Is it recovery?" She wondered as she rested her head on the pillow and looked at the inn's wooden ceiling. "I mean… it does boost my body's healing… so perhaps…" her words were pained and hard to come by, "perhaps it has increased the blood in my body?"

She was aware that some sickness were caused by having too much on the body, or that was what the physicians said, so maybe her body healed on its own by expulsing that much blood during her period.

"I hate it," she nearly cried.

Even after switching to toughness, she still felt the itches and the cramps, no matter if they didn't hurt her. The only solution that came to mind was searching for the assistance of the Blossomflame. Aloe stood up from the bed, but she had forgotten about a little detail, wielding a stance that wasn't the sense one weakened her balance.

The bloody and pale woman crashed to the ground.

"Ugh…" Aloe groaned on the ground. The fall didn't hurt her, but it did expulse the air out of her lungs. She never did a good job keeping the air inside them.

She slowly crawled to the evolved flower on her backpack, but as some embers threatened to come out, Aloe realized where she was standing right now.

A wooden building.

If a Blossomflame had somehow set a mud shack ablaze, heavens knew what it would do to an inn made out of wood.

"Stop!" She shouted at the Blossomflame, even if she highly doubted the evolved plant could understand her. Nevertheless, the gathering embers did seem to calm down.

The outside of the inn, not so much.

Aloe heard heavy steps rushing toward her and a female voice that she recognized as the innkeeper shouted at her. "Is everything alright? I heard a thud and a scream!"

"Ugh…" The cultivator made an effort to stand up before deflecting the woman away, but her strength faltered and she crashed again into the ground, which made her head span around.

"I'm going in." The innkeeper said, apparently having run out of patience.

The mature woman opened the door and was welcomed by the picturesque sight of a bloodied bed with multiple vomit splashes and a half-naked girl lying on the floor.

"Oh, heavens! Is everything alright?" She rushed for Aloe.

"Ehm… yes," the petite woman responded with a hint of doubt as her thoughts were still sluggish from the nausea.

Slowly, the innkeeper passed an arm underneath Aloe's armpit, and she raised her upper body from the floor.

"What happened here? That's an awful lot of blood." The mature woman asked.

Now, Aloe was aware that she had bled too much to be considered humanly possible. She was already quite the bleeder and if her theory was correct, she had bled sice – or perhaps closer to sevice now – the expected amount. No sane person would think this was the byproduct of menstruation.

"I had a miscarriage."

So she panicked.

The innkeeper's eyes opened like plates and showered in worry. "Are you okay? Do you need me to call for a physician?"

"Uhh, no. It's not needed," having medical attention would only expose her to more people and make her more known. "This is not my first miscarriage."

So she panicked again.

"T-this is not your first miscarriage?" The innkeeper's visage of worry partially shifted to one of doubt, but very much still laden with concern.

"I… I was a prostitute." The worst part was that it wasn't a lie. Her position hadn't been that different from a lady of the night.

"I see." And with that single statement, the innkeeper's expression shifted into understanding. After all, you didn't ask a young woman why or how she was a prostitute, you just accepted it.

All in all, the excuse wasn't half-bad. Not that she had been present in any birth or anything, but with her limited knowledge of anatomy, she expected a miscarriage to look an awful lot like this.

"So," the innkeeper continued, still holding to her armpit, "will you need something else."

"If I could get some water and warm food, I'd appreciate it."

"Let's add a bath to that, do we?" The mature woman offered with a smile.

"Thanks." Aloe nodded weakly.

Carefully, the innkeeper guided her to the bed, which had been a more daunting task than Aloe had expected as her legs behaved like wet noodles. Once she was back on the bed, the innkeeper went for the door.

"I'll get you some food and the bath ready," she said with her hand on the doorframe. "Faruq!" She shouted into the inn. "Get some fresh water for this girl!" Then she closed the door behind her.

Not before long, the door opened again and a young man close to Aloe's age entered the room. His eyes shot wide open at the sight, but he continued forward without raising his voice.

"Here's the water." Faruq, who looked like he was the son of the innkeeper, placed a tray with a jug of water and a glass on the nightstand and promptly left.

They still have glass glasses here, huh? Aloe had almost expected them to bring her a wooden cup because wood was so plentiful that she thought they would prefer them to glass. Strangely, it brought her comfort that this was still Ydaz and they were drinking from glass.

Even if she hated everything the country stood for.

Wiggling through the dirty bed, Aloe moved her torso upwards and sat upright to pour herself some water.

"Ah, back to life." The cold water brought clarity to her clouded mind. "At least I'm not fainting from blood loss. That could have been… problematic."

Whilst she waited for either the food or the bath to arrive, the cultivator picked up some black seeds and started evolving them to Flourishing Springs. Her vitality was slowly getting closer to sice of an adult, but by donning toughness to soothe the pain, her vitality regeneration was quite gutted. She only managed to evolve two seeds before the innkeeper came back.

The first course would be the bath, as it would seem. The innkeeper said that this way she could clean the room whilst she was in the bath, and offered to help her in the tub, but Aloe turned down the offer. She was in a poor condition, but she wasn't a cripple anymore.

The thought of needing help to bathe brought awful memories back to her.

Aloe remained in the bathtub for a long while, mostly because she didn't have the strength to get out and the water did calm her. By the time she got out, her skin was all wrinkly, which looked quite sickly between her recent paleness and her bony extremities from starvation.

No matter how much she had eaten these days, the damage of running for days without end without an appropriate intake of food had severely affected her body. She was recovering some fat, yes, but the recovery was slow because weight gain wasn't affected by the regeneration stance.

It became all the clearer of her pathetic appearance when she asked for help to get out and the innkeeper paled at her naked body. Aloe was more bone than flesh by now. The motherly woman quickly dried her and sent her to her room and soon after that bought her porridge and a sizeable steak.

"This is too much; I can't pay for it." She definitely could.

"Nonsense, consider it on the house." And with a simple sentence, she had gotten a free steak.

She was veritably feeling horrible, but not taking advantage of her poor looks was idiotic. Free stuff was free stuff. And besides she was kind of getting stolen from already with the exorbitantly high prices of the inn. Two drupnari per night was nothing to scoff at.

It was unfortunate to spend another day at Selen, but she couldn't go out in her current state, so Aloe spent the rest of the day pouring vitality into the Blossomflame through her Forced Growth technique of the flowing stance.

"Heavens, these names are getting long." She mussed to herself, the pot between her legs. "That reminds me that I still have to give a name to the value of vitality of an adult's worth…"

The petite cultivator ruminated in bed as she continued using vitality up. By the afternoon, the pain had soothed enough that she no longer needed to wield toughness, accelerating her progress sice with recovery.

Because the Blossomflame had already been quite grown, and she basically dedicated a full day to nurturing it even if she didn't use recovery for most of it, she was able to fully grow it even without Cure Grass pellets.

"Also need to make more of them…" Aloe groaned, but it wasn't a problem. Grass was everywhere and with her new technique, evolving Cure Grass and growing a patch of it would take less than an afternoon.

It was oddly comforting to be able to dedicate a full day to herself. Even when she was 'free' at the palace back in Sadina, she had to watch out for the attentive gaze of the sultanzade, so there wasn't much time for her experiments or new discoveries.

And the vital arts were very much uncharted territory.