NOVEL NEXT 29. Manure
Morning hadn’t been pleasurable to Aloe. Night had been gorgeous, she had slept soundly, not too cold yet not too hot. But as she woke up, she felt her body weigh down on her.
Not only her thighs were killing her from sitting on the sand for hours, or her back aching from her nap on the living room’s floor, but also her stomach. Oh, how much it hurt. It wasn’t anything her body had taken in, quite the opposite in fact.
“Ugh,” Aloe groaned on her way to the kitchen, laying a hand on her stomach. Her bowels and kidneys were stinging her. She knew the reason why. “I should have gone to the bathroom yesterday... two days already without evacuating...” She sat on the desk chair and tied her sandals.
Whilst she had survived her previous stay at the greenhouses without going to the bathroom for three days, those days hadn’t been as painful as yesterday had been. And she certainly had drunk more water in that span.
Aloe limped across the desert as she made her way to the outside latrine. The building was quite disheveled, and Aloe doubted how it was even standing up, but the alternatives weren’t that much better.
When she opened the wooden door of the latrine, Aloe was surprised to find no odor. She looked down into the hole and found it wasn’t very deep, but at least it was clean.
“Now I understand why the shovel in the greenhouse was that big. A bit stupid that he didn’t leave it on here.” While Aloe may be incredibly averse to eating grass, she had no problem with cleaning a latrine. She had mentalized herself a long time ago.
Inside the latrine, there was a bucket filled with sand and a sponge on a stick.
“Oh, nice.” Aloe sat on the throne, not before removing her nightgown, just in case things got messy. “He did have something to clean himself. I was worried I had to rely on sand.”
There was nothing wrong with sand, but depending on the grains, you may do more damage to yourself than it was worth it. Aloe groaned in pleasure as she was finally able to release all the load she had been carrying.
The lack of smell and the aspect of the stick told her that the old man had cleaned the latrine before he departed, which Aloe was immeasurably thankful for. She grabbed the sponge by the handle and inspected it.
“Yeah, it could have been really bad if this wasn’t clean.” She had heard that commoners, ones with lesser income than her family shared communal sticks, but she wasn’t willing to corroborate that. Sand sounded far more appealing than sharing a stick that had met another’s person bum.
She was still reticent to use the sponge, but it did look clean. But that wasn’t enough, so she rubbed the sponge along the sand in the bucket. She trusted the sand to be cleaner than the sponge. And besides, that was the exact function of the bucket.
After a few minutes of introspection and bliss, Aloe stood up from the latrine seat and cleaned herself.
“Ooh...” Evacuating had improved her mood, but the sponge quickly degraded it. “Still better than sand...” Aloe whispered to herself, squinting her eyes in pain.
Once she was over, she left the sponge on the bucket and donned her nightgown again.
“Yeah, it’s going to be tedious to clean that,” Aloe said looking down at the latrine hole. “But that’s free manure, isn’t it?”
She knew she couldn’t afford to let her waste... go to waste. She was absolutely repugned by the idea of using her feces to fertilize the plants. But the upsides were too many.
“If it only was animal fe...” Aloe stopped mid-sentence. “Oh right.” Then she remembered her dweller. She made her way out of the latrine not before giving a last look at the seat. “Bah, I’ll clean that later.” And she grabbed the bucket with the sponge.
Nothing going on in a latrine could be hygienic, but she was going to make her best effort to do so. She walked into the house to change clothes, not before leaving the sand bucket at the entrance.
It would have been easing to wear yesterday’s clothes, but nonetheless, Aloe chose a new set. She had a lot of clothing, and she intended to use it all. It wasn’t like they were new or stylish clothes either.
Before going out she had a short breakfast consisting of a single banana and a glass of water. The latrine had removed any hunger she may have.
Next, she made her way to the dweller with a cauldron and a bucket in each hand.
“Heya, Fikali. How are you doing?” Aloe waved at the monster after leaving the heavy bucket on the ground.
Lazily, Fikali turned to face her. “Huooooo...” She grunted weakly.
“Sorry, have I woken you up?” Aloe gazed at the sky, the sun had just come out and the skies weren’t completely blue yet.
“Wrooo!” The dweller confirmed with a mixture of annoyance.
“What?” Aloe retorted. “You sleep all day, it’s not like waking you up a bit earlier is going to do anything.”
“Ruooooh!” But Fikali would have none of it and started jumping on the spot, her vicious movements pulling on the lead and the tree she was tied on.
“What’s wrong with you?” Aloe shouted as she faced the dweller, who was thrashing with her fins and claws at her back. “Oh...” The human mussitated in realization. “I didn’t take the saddle off you...”
“Hwrooooooooo!” Fikali screamed as if she was saying ‘Finally!’
“Alright, call down, I’ll remove it now.” Aloe slowly approached Fikali, not fully trusting the monster that weighed four times as her at minimum.
She didn’t have any knowledge on how to take off the saddle, and much less on how to put it back. But that was a problem for later as the dweller was incredibly irritable, and Aloe preferred a whole lot more to have to ride Fikali without a saddle than have her escape because she was unhappy.
Sleight of hand was not a skill Aloe could boast to have, but slowly she managed to undo the belts of the saddle. Which ended up being more of them than she imagined. The saddle was an old piece of leather, but it still looked quite expensive. A sane rider wouldn’t use it, but it was more than enough as a gift.
“Happy?” Aloe asked the dweller after she managed to take the saddle out of her. It was surprisingly heavy, maybe five kilos, or a tenth of what she weighed.
“Wuoooo!” And whilst Fikali’s tone seemed one of assertion, her face was still lingering with a frown. She jumped on the spot once more, bellyflopping the grass away.
“What’s the problem now?” Aloe groaned.
“Huo! Huo!” Fikali turned and flopped to a spot behind the date tree.
“Oh.” Aloe quickly noticed the black and smelly spots. “You too do your business, right...”
“Wroooooo!” That grunt felt like a ‘clean that now.’
Aloe sighed. “Give me a moment.”
She was well aware that Fikali would produce waste, but for some reason in her mind, she just processed it as free manure rather than having to clean her space. Oh, how naïve she had been.
The greenhouse was locked by its simple lever lock, a flick of a finger and it snapped open. Aloe grabbed the shovel inside and returned to the oasis. She left the greenhouse open to air it a bit more. The heavens knew that the place needed it.
“Alright, make room, I’ll shovel now,” Aloe told to the dweller, who didn’t understand at first. A slight kick made her realize the human’s intentions. “At least they are tightly packed and solid,” Aloe said as she faced elsewhere to not have the smell directly pointing at her.
She shoveled the dweller's feces into the sand bucket and took a few steps back.
“I guess I could already use this as manure.”
Her knowledge of fertilizer was non-existent. As far as Aloe was concerned, farmers just shoved shit on top of the plants, and she didn’t think she was that far off. Maybe there was a bit more nuance that she was unaware of, but overall, it sounded like a solid plan.
But before drowning the plants in manure, she had to do other things.
The first thing was to grab the watering can in the greenhouse. She knew that she had to water the plants each day. That much she could tell.
Then, instead of outright wetting the soil, Aloe walked on where she had planted the two banana seeds and knelt down. Karaim had mentioned a key piece of information whilst talking about infusion in his cultivation technique.
Aloe extended her hands on the soil, unbothered by the dirt as she had done far dirtier things this morning, she reached for the seeds. The idea wasn’t to unearth them, just to sense the vitality inside of the seeds.
It took her a few minutes to sense the seeds, there was grass and flowers everywhere messing with her perception. Aloe knew the weeds and others weren’t the seeds out of pure instinct, she couldn’t justify how she made the distinction.
The banana seeds emitted a pulse weaker than the Cure Grass blades, but not far from the common flowers around them. Once she had a target on an individual seed, Aloe took a deep breath and began channeling her vitality.
It was like pushing a closet upstairs, incredibly taxing and weighing on her body, even if her posture was comfortable.
As vitality escaped her fingertips, Aloe started growing dizzy and her breathing became rugged, but it was sustainable. The drain wasn’t as bad as when she had evolved the Cure Grass seed.
The process was slow, but after a few more minutes the banana seed didn’t take more of her vitality. Aloe could only be thankful that she could stand up after that and wasn’t that spent from the infusion, though her legs did tremble a bit.
She managed to repeat the same process with the other seed without passing away, then she watered both of the banana seeds and finally dumped the fresh manure on them.
What will come out of traditional farming combined with vital arts? Aloe asked herself as her sight became blurry.
