Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

The conversation itself took forever, but practical upshot of the conversation was pretty easy to condense. Tulland realized that as he plowed a few new fields near the village. If there was one thing besides safety he longed for, it was simplicity. Here, he kind of had it, in a backwards, not all that simple way.

The whole situation was complex in the sense that there wasn’t any clear pathway to victory he could point to. There were no clear-cut roads to follow. According to both Systems, most problems of this size were things you could solve by risking your life, jumping into the jaws of danger, and cutting them in half with a sword. That obviously wasn’t the case here. In his System’s estimation based off all the data it had gleaned, Tulland had about as much chance of surviving the trip to melee range with the blight as he did diving head-first into a volcano, and even less of actually hurting it.

That was true right now, at least. There was also some simplicity to be had, though. Right now, the world was facing a problem that was mostly to do with the soil. When a dungeon opened in any particular patch of ground, it would strip some minerals and nutrients from the soil as the energy of life itself, the intangible energy of health and growth that plants needed to survive. It wasn’t a plague that could spread through the air, and it wasn’t a giant monster that could rip people apart.

It fought its battles in the soil. And so, Tulland realized, he could meet it there. The first step in that would be to plant a single field, producing a single kind of food to sustain as many mouths as he could as he figured other things out. He needed something hardy in a down and dirty dungeon sort of way, something that would grow fast, hold its own once it was established, and didn’t take much magical power to speed along.

That meant Hades Briars, modified to provide nutritious fruits. Once he had his main, new plot set up just the way he wanted it and his huge field of conventional food looked after, he started to plant. There was only so much he could do the first few hours, but once the first batch of briars had grown, he had many, many more fruits to plant.

The Infinite had once limited the growth of his plants, making sure none of his skills really helped them propagate themselves. These briars would spread, but only slowly. He himself could only work so fast. He was stuck on how to make everything go as fast as he wanted until he remembered he had a trainer on staff now.

“Oh. Huh.” Amrand rubbed his temples. “That actually hurts to think about. I’ve never had to train a gardener before. My skill is having real trouble with it.”

“It won’t do it?” Tulland asked.

“No, it is, it’s just… there it is. It takes a little work for the skill to push out an answer, and the way it does that is by sending my brain into overdrive mode. A hard enough problem might kill me, I think.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. Anyway, what you are missing is that you have to plant the seeds or they won’t grow, right? You need to pick them and plant them in the dirt, manually?”

“Yes.”

“And here you are with only two hands. What you are missing is that you have dozens of hands. Hundreds, once the word gets out that you have food. Use them. They can get the seeds in the ground for you.”

“Which is nice, but I still have to grow them up. That takes power.”

“Start small, then. Just get them sprouting. Rooted. Figure out the minimum viable power you can apply to one plant, then figure out how to spread that out efficiently over multiple plants. The rest of it we can figure out later, if it doesn’t figure itself out.”

Some of it did figure itself out, at that. The townspeople were just as eager to help as Amrand had said they’d be. It wasn’t just out of thankfulness, even though they were plenty thankful for the food. For a lot of them, it seemed to be just as much out of boredom. They were mostly stuck here in town, with little reason to go anywhere else. Other towns were just as starved, just as desperate, and none nearby had anything like a working dungeon that was still resisting the blight. They had no reason to travel, and doing so came with a great deal of danger. Most of them had been within the town’s walls for months.

Under Tulland’s direction, they plowed land, they hauled water, and they planted seeds at carefully defined intervals. He took Amrand’s suggestion for finding the minimum outlay of power he could get away with, a level of growth just an inch or so above the surface of the soil that indicated enough root establishment to keep the plant going. He refined it a little further from there with intent, letting the vines know to focus more on establishing themselves downward than stretching upward.

It didn’t feel like much, but by the end of the week he had increased his briar-growing pace several times over. That pace only increased as word got out about the food and a more specialized type of class started to filter into town.

“Tulland. Sir.” One of Amrand’s flunkies gave Tulland an awkward salute he didn’t want and motioned towards a small woman at his side. “This lady says she can help you.”

“Oh? Glad to have anything I can get.”

Tulland dusted off his hand and held it out for a shake. The woman shook back, hard, and Tulland felt a small spark of something happen between their hands. He pulled his hand back sharply, resisting the urge to go for his farmer’s tool.

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“Relax. Pay attention to your magic levels,” the girl said. “Can I have one of those fruits?”

“Sure, but they are gross.”

“Doesn’t matter. Anything besides rodent meat would help right now.”

“Then help yourself.” Tulland turned his attention to his magic levels, which should have been just about empty at that point in his plant-enhancement schedule. Instead, they were about half-full, enough for acres of low-grade enhancement. “What in the hell did you do? What even are you?”

“A sparker.” The girl lowered her eyebrows. “How do you not know that?”

“There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know. Just explain it.”

“I can temporarily influence someone’s magic pool with mine. All my stats are focused towards magic regeneration and sharing it.”

“You can do that more times? How many more?” Tulland asked.

“I’m built to keep a team going through a dungeon. I’m not sure what your normal magic regeneration is, but if you were a high-level adventurer, I’d just about double what you could do over the course of a day.”

“So less than that. Maybe a quarter.”

“Blessed ancestors! How high is your level?”

“High enough. I hope. What’s your name?”

“Yuri.”

“Tulland. Nice to meet you. Now go tell someone I said to feed you until you pop.”

“So I can produce more magic?”

“So you don’t eat my damn briars. After that, we’ll get to work.”

It took some days to completely ring the town with briars, which Tulland thought looked monstrous. The rest of the townsfolk seemed to find it beautiful, especially when they realized it meant more and more people migrating in to take advantage of the almost limitless food it presented. After that, Tulland began to expand the ring, surprised how much more work it was to do each larger layer than the last. Necia spent her time training with whatever warriors she could find and organizing labor.

A few weeks later, they lived in a new world. All around them, the town was encircled by protective thorns, carved away a little here and there to allow for the tents of the families that had arrived seeking shelter and food.

“You’ve done good work here,” Amrand said.

“Not nearly as much as I had hoped.” Tulland looked in the distance. “I mean, it’s nice.”

“Nice? This town is unassailable and fed, Tulland.” Amrand clapped him hard on the back, hard enough that it would have hurt if Tulland wasn’t functionally invincible compared to the man’s offensive capabilities. “That’s no small thing.”

“Not as unassailable as you think. Those thorns will give enemies trouble. Maybe. They aren’t very strong. Enough of an attack, and they’d fall.”

“The blight monsters don’t do attacks like that, though. They have no reason to.”

“I don’t know that.” Tulland shook his head. “I really don’t. My experience with the world is that whenever you start to get ahead, the forces that run the universe tend to stomp you back down into your hole. Although I don’t know if this is getting ahead.”

Yuri looked up from her work, just then.

“You’re crazy. You haven’t been paying attention to the soil? At all?”

Tulland took a look at the soil. It was about as bad as it had always been, besides the places the town had been dumping biological fertilizer they had sourced from various places. He had known better than to ask where exactly it came from.

“Looks about the same to me.”

“Right. Nearly what it was a week ago, maybe a little better. But you can’t see what’s happened with the energy in it?”

“That’s a little beyond me.”

“Not me. I see the movement of energy really well. And it’s stopped. Right in its tracks.”

Amrand’s head snapped over to Yuri.

“No.”

“Yes!” Yuri motioned at the soil. “It’s not getting worse anymore.”

“How is that possible? We tried everything. Everything. I was there.”

“No idea!” Yuri threw up her hands cheerfully. “But I can see the energy flows and they’ve stopped.”

Necia had taken to spending her free time lounging somewhere near Tulland, using a moveable hammock and poles he had put together for her for maximum laziness. She seemed to be thriving in it, taking a break for the first time in a long time that extended from their arrival on this planet almost unbroken until now.

“It’s Tulland doing something weird.” She said. “You get used to it.”

“You don’t understand. This is more progress than we’ve ever had. It’s not fixing anything, of course, but… a standstill is so much better than what we’ve had.” Rand’s arms parted as if he was going to hug Tulland before he thought better of it. “This is good.”

It stayed good for a few days. Tulland walked the fields, thinking. This was something that could be fixed. As much as he wished he could pretend it was fixed already, it just wasn’t. He was about the only person on the planet who could grow anything, and that was only by merit of incredibly high levels and cutting his teeth on more hostile soils.

For all Tulland knew, he might die tomorrow. As the only person who could grow his own plants, all this was a stop-gap at best. Even if he somehow managed to expand his domain, even if he had ten sparkers, he wouldn’t be able to save a fraction of what was left of this world. And eventually, he’d die and it would all be dust anyway.

Any bright ideas?

You could stop stalling and get ready to use that potion. Everything is stable here now. You have the time.

Well, look who’s in a hurry all the sudden. Aren’t you an immortal being?

I can still recognize when something is moving much slower than it needs to. What is the exact hang up here?

I don’t know enough. I don’t have enough ideas for how to fix this.

And how do you plan on learning more?

It was a good question. There was no clear way to force himself to understand the entirety of how the blight worked, or the best way to fight it. Smarter people than him had understood it all better and failed.

I don’t know. And I guess now is as good as a time as any.

That’s right. Just make sure you have everything you need.

Tulland had seeds for all his plants. He had his genetic splicer, which appeared to run off a weird combination of combining genetic material with what it considered fertilizer and intent. He had an awful lot of levels backing him, and now a potion that would push that even further. Even with a weak idea of what he was trying to accomplish, it might have been enough.

Here, he’d need a miracle. This world’s System couldn’t help much, and neither could his. Neither knew more than he did about the nature of the problem they were facing. But he could still bet on a miracle, that the process would teach him something and of itself or lead him to a realization that he otherwise couldn’t have got to. At the moment, it was the best he could do.

He had just started to lay out all his potential ingredients when he was interrupted. He would have felt blessed beyond belief at the reprieve if it wasn’t for the exact form it came in.

“Tulland. Attack coming in.” Necia looked worried in a way he wouldn’t have expected. “There’s kind of a lot of them.”