Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

That left one final plant to deal with. Tulland sat for a few minutes examining one of his Silver Star trees. There was a way to make them more point-efficient, a way not entirely unlike what he had done with most of his other trees. He started with that, trimming down one of the trees to the instructions of his skill, reducing the shade canopy until it allowed for more plants to be grown under it and a healthier, more energy-loaded plant overall.

The cutting away of things made the plant make more sense too. With every snip, he learned a little bit more about the structure of the plant, the way that it grew, and what the potential of it was. Having spent very little time intentionally injuring his trees, Tulland had never really thought about how they kept themselves fed. His time with Kelsa had fleshed some of that knowledge out. Not all plants had what he’d call sap, but all had some kind of liquid moving through them, pushing nutrients here and there.

As he clipped away at the first tree, he watched as each small cut dripped a small amount of shining, almost metallic sap before some combination of that sap and the magic of the skill sealed them. All those nutrients were now concentrated in a smaller area, feeding fewer things.

The other inspiration circling around Tulland’s psych as he worked on the Silver Star tree was what he had done to the Achewood trees. That had been a better result than he had expected.

The flower had yet to do anything interesting except adhere to the tree, but the concept of giving each individual flower access to more sustenance was interesting. It was the kind of thing he should have thought of weeks or months ago, but just hadn’t had the time and inspiration to realize. Now, he had a similar idea for the Silver Stars. It wouldn’t work exactly the same way, but it might work anyway.

“I see you finally finished.” Necia tossed Tulland a fruit from one of his non-farm stonefruit trees. He had yet to optimize any of them for quality like he had the Silver Stars, but he’d get to that tomorrow. “Any luck?”

“Kind of. Right now, I’m not feeling great about it. The farm took a pretty good hit.”

“I’m hoping it will have recovered a bit by tomorrow. If what you said is true, there should be a bit of time before we end up in the next floor. I want every bit of that time I can get.”

“And I’ll do my best to help you get it.” Necia swatted Tulland’s hand as he reached for the ladle to take some of the still steaming-hot food she had made. “No. For one, you haven’t washed your hands. I’m also pretty sure you forgot about what time it is.”

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“Dinnertime. I remember.”

“No, Tulland. It’s the time your pail resets. I’d rather you were done with farming for today, but I figured I couldn’t be a very good paramour without telling you.”

Tulland sighed. “All right. In fact, I’ll do that, and go take a bath. That way I won’t get you dusty, later.”

“Well thank you, sir.” Necia reached out from her seat and stirred the food a bit. “I’ll keep this hot for you. See you in a bit.”

Tulland tossed his dirt as evenly as he could around the plot, then carried the watering barrel around until the soil was well wetted. Then, after bathing, eating, and spending some quality time with his girl, it was finally time to lay down.

The practical upshot of a weeks-long day, Tulland found, was that you had very little trouble falling asleep. He was out like a light, seconds after settling down on his bedroll.

—

“Iron Pillar!” Potter yelled, then watched as everyone got to their places more or less efficiently. Even Tretine seemed to get it. Tulland wasn’t sure if the man even knew what a wall was, but the big man managed to get into place as fast as anyone. “Good! Razor Spearhead!”

Again, everyone succeeded in getting into place. Over the course of the next two hours, they made very few mistakes at all. In one sense, that was fantastic. Tulland’s neck wouldn’t hurt for hours later from the tension of it all, for one. There was a certain sense of pride that came with not being a complete failure, and he was reveling in it.

Now he had other worries, though. Potter seemed to sense that, and walked over while they were on break between rounds of formation change after formation change.

“You are doing fine, you know. Better than most. And frankly, your role might not even be in the formation. Depending on what we end up facing, you might be more useful as a makeshift artillery,” Potter said when they were out of earshot from the others.

“I know. It’s not that. It’s just that I beat the hell out of my farm last night. I’m down quite a bit of strength,” Tulland said.

Potter gave a sympathetic look. It seemed he could do the math on just how much strength Tulland might be down.

“You won’t get first place again, it looks like.”

“No. That’s fine, though. The bigger problem would be dying, or letting someone else get hurt.”

“I understand. That’s an admirable stance.” Potter turned towards the crowd of adventurers milling around and lifted his chin at them. “Tell me this. Besides you, who do you think the next most important piece is? The adventurer who, if they fail, the whole formation falls apart.”

Tulland examined everyone. The tanks were important, but there were plenty of them. The damage dealers, ranged fighters, and spring-fighters were all formidable, but each one of them was just a portion of the damage they could do. Out of everyone, he was probably the weirdest, but there were only so many situations where even his weirdness would matter much. Everyone else was just a block used in the construction of a single brick wall.

“I don’t know. I was never that good at this kind of thing.”

“Whether you are or aren’t, you wouldn’t have been able to come up with much of an answer for that question. The point I’m making is that it’s none of them. Any one person could fall and the formation would stay together. Even if White fell, I could quit fighting and move in as commander.”

“That reminds me.” Tulland’s eyes dropped to Potter’s conspicuous lack of weapons. “I don’t think I saw you fighting last time around. I’m not even sure what your weapons are.”

“Ha. His weapons.” White walked up and threw his arm around Tulland. “If you want to know what his weapons are, just look at him. That’s how he looks when he fights, and it’s scary as hell.”

”He just stands there and scholars at them?” Necia had wandered up as well. “Teaches them to death?”

“It’s not that far off, believe it or not. I don’t teach them anything, of course. But my class is what was known on my world as a pure mage. My power is keyed to the total amount of things I know. That power is expressed evenly on enemies I can see.”

“On all the enemies he can see. And it’s unblockable.” White shivered. “It scares the hell out of me. It’s a power you can’t block.”

“And at the same time, a strong hit from a large, classless man would knock me out. The number of odd of things I had to do to keep anything from hitting me this long is truly astounding. I do have some tricks, of course, that help with that. But I’d just as soon keep them to myself,” Potter said.

“Keyed to what you know?” Tulland had talked to the man about plants for an entire evening, and hadn’t understood half of what he said. From what he could tell, Potter wasn’t even especially interested in plants. The breadth of his knowledge had to have been staggering, if the bit Tulland saw had only been a small part of it. “That seems like a lot.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it.” White laughed. “I asked him about that, because it seemed to me he could have stayed in his world and just kept getting stronger. You know what he told me? That he had learned everything. Every single thing.”

“Not everything.” Potter looked slightly embarrassed. “Just all the major components of all the major theories of my world, and most of their accessory fields. The remaining details would have hardly made a dent in my progress. But here? I’ve learned so much in so little time. Facts nobody else knew, or noticed. Now, we should probably get back to work. White? Would you care to do the honors? I feel we might have only a limited number of tries left at this.”

The remaining hours went as well as the previous ones had. The time flew by until they were let out, at which point Tulland sprinted to his farm with a complaining Necia in tow.

“What are you doing?” Necia asked.

“Watering. Dumping magic into the farm to help it recover. Everything I can do. There’s not a lot of time left. Not enough time at all,” Tulland said.

“I don’t know. Besides the different shape, you can barely tell you cut them, Tulland. What are your farm points even at now?”

Tulland hadn’t thought to check.

<+

Farm Status:

Total Points: 9545

+>

“Sort of high, actually. Higher than I thought.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Yes, but there has to be a reason why.” Tulland put his hand to his modified Silver Star tree, the one that had been altered to maximize his points gain. “This isn’t quite healed yet. Something else happened.”

It took a few laps of the farm to be sure why. The first reason was the easier of the two to find, bright yellow as it was.