Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

“Oh, yes. That’s incredible.” Tulland immediately pulled a full complement of the Acheflowers off the tree, reloading their nodes and storing the new weapons in Market Wagon.

“And that means…” Tulland ran over to his Silver Star tree and took a closer look on the branch. On the far side from him, where he had missed it during his first once-over of the farm, was a brightly shining, dangerous sharp object. “It’s working.”

“How can you tell?”

“I just can. And The Infinite confirms it.”

It was then that the notifications started rolling in. Tulland saw the sheer mass of them and just dismissed the lot of Skill Level Up!

“You’ll have to go to bed without me tonight.” Tulland gripped the branch the Silver Sun was growing on, looking closer at the precious little fruit. “I have to stay up.”

“Good things?”

“Yes, especially if I can hurry them up enough to actually get the benefit before the next floor. But that means dumping every little bit of magic they can make use of, plus some. Just making sure it’s topped off at all times for the rest of the night.”

“And if you succeed?”

“A sharper weapon, maybe. Points at least.”

“Well worth it, then.” Necia moved to Tulland and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Go. Enjoy your midnight farming. I’ll see you in the morning. And Tulland?”

“Yeah?” Tulland asked.

“Just know that in any other situation, I’d expect to come before the plants.”

Tulland barked a laugh as he dumped a truly stupid amount of magic into a single fruit.

“And in any other situation you would. I’ll see you in the morning.”

—

The hardest part of the night wasn’t draining his magic again and again. It was just staying awake. Being up all night wasn’t going to be much of a burden on his overpowered body, but sleepiness that came as a part of boredom or simply sitting still in the dark was still a thing.

For a while, Tulland just sat examining the Chimera Sleeves, trying to figure out what secrets they held. They weren’t particularly forthcoming about whatever it was. They were high quality, probably the best individual plants he had. The autonomous nature of the vines alone was worth the price of admission, even if he hadn’t had much call for that function yet. They were stronger and faster than the Clubber Vines, so much so that if he was only able to carry more of them, they would have rendered the other vines obsolete already.

But they weren’t, at least that he could tell, world-breaking. If anything, they were a little weaker than what he had hoped to get in terms of keeping him in front of the dungeon’s power curve. Mainly, he was just seeing the limitations of the vine, not anything better than that.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

In the meantime, he was nearly nodding off every five or ten minutes of idleness, and that wouldn’t do. In between dumping loads of magic onto the fruit, he took to taking short walks around the neighborhood. This late at night, few people were out and about. The first three times Tulland took a five or ten minute jaunt, he saw nobody. The fourth time, he found Brist. Sitting on a chair in a yard that was empty during Tulland’s previous laps, the man was smoking a wooden pipe and humming a distinctly shanty-esque tune to himself.

“You’re up late,” Tulland said.

“I slept early. In my world. I got used to taking sleep where I could fit it in. Just now, I can’t sleep another hour,” Brist said.

“Where’d you get the tobacco?” Tulland gestured at the pipe. “I can see carving some wood for the pipe, but I wouldn’t think you could have found anything to smoke in it. Where did you?”

“Just here and there. Once your vitality and poison resistance get strong enough, anything smokes smooth. It lost its effect on me long ago. These days, I just like how it feels to breath something besides air.”

“Not good for your health.”

Brist barked a laugh.

“Oh, I won’t live to be a grandfather? Could have fooled me. I’ll have to break the news to the wife I don’t have.”

“Fair enough. If you find a leaf you particularly like, bring me some seeds. I’ll see what I can do for you.”

“Will do. Though your question goes both ways, you know. You aren’t usually up this late. I know because I am. What’s different?”

“I have a problem to figure out. Not sure if I can tell you. The Infinite doesn’t seem to like people talking to me about it.”

“Is it having to do with something you found out about this place, or with your class?”

“My class.”

“Just your class?” Brist poked the air with his curled hand. “Nothing that would apply to a puncher?”

“Not that I know of. I think this is completely unique to my class.”

“Then there shouldn’t be a problem. The Infinite is going to want to keep people from helping you out. It doesn’t care if I learn a little more about plants. Tell me what’s going on if you want. I might be able to give you some pointers.”

“Do you know much about plants?”

“No, but I know a whole lot about Systems. Mine, at least, and I haven’t found The Infinite to be that much different.” Brist tapped out his pipe, loaded it with more leaves, and lit it with a fragment of fire from a small blaze he had lit on the ground near him. “Lay it on me. I’ll do my best.”

Tulland did. Between trips back to his house every five or ten minutes, he gave Brist all the missing pieces he didn’t already understand about his class, edited a bit to leave out the facts that would leave him the most vulnerable. He didn’t suspect Brist had a betrayal in him, but it couldn’t hurt to be safe.

The biggest point of interest to Brist seemed to be that Tulland had his class forcibly changed once before. The rest of everything was just odd to him. That one aspect of the story went beyond that, straight into territory Brist seemed to find out-and-out bizarre.

“I’ve heard of it happening. But you must have had one hell of a plan to make The Infinite step in that early in your class. What was it worried about?”

“I could have eventually turned entire floors into beds of thorns. Thorns that wouldn’t have hurt me, but would have bound anything else. An hour after I got to a new floor, I would have had hundreds of feet of them. An hour after that, it would have taken over everything and still have been growing. Each of them feeding power back to me.”

“Yeah, that would do it.” Brist puffed away at his pipe. “There’s a balance to these things. I;m stronger than most swordsmen, but that’s because I use what the System gives me better, and because I got to a higher level and learned more from the class than most. But most punchers are about as strong as most spearmen, who are about as strong as most archers. And all of those classes are balanced against the dungeons, which are rebalanced against them. No system likes it when people break that balance.”

“You think that’s what’s happening here?” It matched up with what Tulland’s System had told him, and Tulland was inclined to believe it. “I’m on the cusp of breaking something The Infinite doesn’t want broken?”

“Something like that.”

“Then why let me? It’s not like it had to give me those vines. Or whatever it is that will make them do whatever it’s trying to avoid.”

“Oh. You are one of those. Think of Systems as gods without limits.”

“I wouldn’t say that. It’s more that I don’t know much about them at all. It’s a long story.”

“In any case, it’s not like that. You’ve heard your class changes depending on what you try to do with it? That’s not something The Infinite is in control of. It’s not even something it can say no to.”

“It said no before.” Tulland summoned a vine from his storage. “Otherwise I’d have this whole place overgrown with these by now.”

“It altered something after the fact. For which it had to pay you, I’d guess. It has that power. But it certainly doesn’t want to keep giving you leg ups.” Brist stood up and clenched his hand. “I’m going to show you something. Watch.”

Walking over to a nearby stone wall, Brist threw a single jab at the wall. Smashing into the stone, it sounded like a sledgehammer.

“Strong,” Tulland commented.

“Not strong. Fast. Look.”

Tulland walked over and examined the wall where his fist had hit and saw not one, but instead three craters where the stone had been broken away.

“One time, just once, I pushed the limits of what my System would allow. I set up a punch combo that could loop stunning effects, sort of like when I used to juggle you in the air. It didn’t always work, and when it did, it wasn’t always worth it. But sometimes it would allow me to trap something. Keep it still and standing up on its own two feet until it was dead.”

“And that got taken?”

“It got taken, but in return I got something nobody else has. I can throw a punch that hits three times where it should only hit once. Minimal power cost. I can’t throw it that often, but if you use it right, that kind of thing is big.”

“Balance-breaking?”

“No. But good. As good as anything anybody gets to keep. Best I could have got.” Brist laughed. “You should have seen the notification. My System was salty as hell about it. Cost it something. I’d guess The Infinite wants to avoid the same thing with you.”

“I can’t imagine that anything The Infinite gave me would be enough to put a dent in its wallet. I’m just one person.”

“Maybe. But it’s scared of something. Now let me see that new vine of yours. Explain to me what it does, again. Everything it does.”

Tulland handed one over, and they went through every single thing he knew of that it could do. Brist was interested in the remote-control qualities of the vines, and had Tulland attack him with them in a couple different ways, even going so far as to stick his arm in the constrictive embrace of its thorns.

“It’s good. Neat weapon. Wish I had something like it. A bit of distraction you don’t have to directly control goes a long way,” Brist commented.

“You don’t seem that impressed, though,” Tulland said.

“I’m not. It’s not that it’s not good, but it’s not great. It’s another tool in your arsenal, not something that would worry The Infinite.”

“That’s about as far as I got too. There’s nothing that amazing about these, as much as I like them.”

“Which means whatever that woman was trying to tell you, it’s not obvious. Any time these vines show you something normal or that The Infinite helps them show you, ignore it. That’s gonna be a waste of time. Look for the things it’s not showing you. That’s my advice.”

Tulland walked by Brist’s house the next few times he made his staying-awake journey, and found him gone by the third. After that, it was back to his plants, working his hardest to make sure they got everything they needed.

It was dawn when it finally made it. Tulland ran to the tree and ripped off the single fruit, cutting his hand badly in the bargain. The Silver Stars had been sharp. This was an impossible thing, bigger and more lethal by far than the old one had been.