Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

“That’s a big building.” Tulland gaped at the large, stone building in front of him. “Even from the outside. That’s huge.”

The smallish girl in polished armor next to him was visibly less impressed. If anything, he’d have to say the look on her face was more of confusion than awe, most of which was aimed directly at him rather than the building they had just spent the last few minutes walking to.

“Really?” She scrunched her face up before turning and taking a longer look at the building. “Were all the buildings on your planet tiny? I mean… how big was your house?”

“I don’t know. Maybe about as big as the place we had in the last safe zone? We had the downstairs room for cooking, eating, and my uncle’s work. And upstairs there was a room for each of us to sleep in. Why? How big was your house?” Tulland asked back.

One of the fun things about knowing a princess was that they didn’t actually go around advertising that fact. They certainly didn’t like to be treated like a princess. Or at least that was what Tulland assumed was the case, as evidenced by behavior from the only princess he knew. Tulland wasn’t sure how much variance there was in castle size country to country and world to world, but at the very least he understood that a meeting hall that was enormous to him here in this place might not be all that big judged by a lot of standards out there in the greater universe.

Luckily, communicating about house sizes wasn’t the kind of thing that came up a lot. Since being tricked into jumping into The Infinite, Tulland didn’t have a lot of reason to exchange world-information with the few other adventurers who had also jumped out of the difficult-but-manageable environment of their original worlds into The Infinite’s push-further-until-you-die, ultimately doomed path up increasingly difficult floors.

“Oh. You know. The normal size.” Necia shifted her weight with unconscious discomfort, rocking her center of gravity over one leg and then the other. “Like anybody’s.”

“Gotcha.” Tulland wondered if that meant her house was more like the size of several of these meeting halls or his entire island. It felt rude. “So should we go in?”

“Game plan first.” Necia nodded towards a bench, and used her still much higher than Tulland’s level of strength to nudge him towards it. “Before you go into a meeting like this one with all of the adventurers in The Infinite who have gotten to this point, you want everyone on your side to be on the same page.”

“Ideally, yeah. But more realistically, I’m not sure our side is more than you and me. I like White and Licht…”

“Me too,” Tulland interjected.

Necia paused, and then found a different track to restart her thought. “And they’ve done a lot for us. But that doesn’t help us much when we’ve spent less than two hours with each of them, total.”

Tulland raised his eyebrows.

“And you think that means they’ll betray us?” he asked.

“No.” Necia patted his hand. “It’s something you’ll have to take my word on, because you didn’t spend your entire childhood listening to my-father-the-king negotiating treaties and deals like I did. But people don’t have to betray you to have different goals. They can do that perfectly honestly.”

“Which is why it’s important for us to know what we want?”

“Yes. Because nobody else is sure to advocate for it. Now, I don’t need much. I could rest for a day or two then go into the the dungeon as-is. I’m not going to get any stronger out here unless there’s surprises in this safe zone I don’t know about. But you are a little different.”

He was. For Necia and most other classes Tulland knew about, stats and skill levels were pretty much the whole story. They could do a little better or worse depending on how they used them, but for the most part having a skill like Power Strike meant you got more powerful the more strength you could pour into it, and with every efficiency gain every new advancement in the skill brought.

Tulland wasn’t like that, or at least he wasn’t entirely like that.

“You mean the farm. I don’t know. It should be pretty save to grow long-term now. I don’t think we are going to have any problems like we had on the last floor, so long as we keep everyone out but you and me.” He lowered his eyes as he tried to do the math on how long it would take him to get every plant up to its tip top shape, then gave up. “As for having it ready, it’s harder than that.”

“How so?”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“When I use Primal Growth on the farm the first few times, everything grows very fast. Some of the worse plants grow to full size right then. I mean it. The cheap, worthless grasses and things like that top out like that.” He snapped his fingers. “The trees take longer. The really bad ones still top out within a few days, but the bigger better trees don’t. Which means I get a little stronger every day. It’s slow, but there’s no limit.” 𝘙Ἀℕ𝐨ᛒĚ𝒮

“That makes this hard. Because in a purely selfish way, we should be pushing for as much time as we can get.” Necia’s eyes squinted a little. She was thinking hard. “But if we push for too much time we not only won’t get it, but people will be annoyed with us.”

“So what’s the game plan? I mean, I could start the next floor in two days. It just wouldn’t be ideal.”

“Not on my life.” Necia scowled, not exactly at Tulland but in the general direction of the thought of him being hurt. “This is something I’m good at, Tulland. Or at least I should be, after spending so much time watching it. You can leave the actual negotiation to me. I just need to know more about your farm and what we are giving up when we give up any individual day.”

Sitting there in the completely normal, comfortably average temperature of the safe zone, they went over all of it. Tulland’s stats contributed to his ability to move around and survive things like anyone else’s did, but to a much lesser extent. When he used one of his plants to attack or defend, it still involved his stats, but only in a secondary way where it drew from how well he had been able to grow it in the first place. When he swung his Farmer’s Tool at someone, how well he was able to make that happen was determined by the materials he had grown and integrated with it.

Of course it was more complex than that. His farm was a system-defined space, a limited plot of land whose location he determined. Any plant he grew there made any other plant he had control over better, whether he was carrying it with him, using it to build out armor or weapons, or leaving it growing in the ground to ambush unsuspecting monsters.

“So your priorities go garden, plants you use directly as plants or build into your weapons and armor, and then stats when you enhance the living plants,” Necia summarized.

“Something like that. When I regenerate, it draws from the overall health of the farm too. It can mitigate some of my damage. And some plants like being enhanced while in use more than others. And I can’t enhance my weapons and armor at all, except by making my farm better or building them better.”

“I’m going to be very honest with you, Tulland. Your class is dumb and shouldn’t exist.”

“I get it. I really do.” Tulland patted her hand sympathetically. He had a lot of time to get used to his weird build. “The point is that I get stronger when I can make my farm stronger. That happens a tiny bit when I level, a lot when I get new plants, and and a ton more when my farm gets bigger. Right now, I don’t have access to any of those. I think.”

Tulland cranked open his splice container, which was one of his few ways to get new plants. Unfortunately, the slim chance that this group of three mixtures of seeds and other organic material would produce a new plant had come to nothing. He shook the ash of the failed experiments out, then resealed the container. He’d figure out some new ways to load it up later.

“No luck,” Tulland sighed.

“Still. I think that’s just about enough understanding to go off. So say I could get you two weeks…”

“Can you?”

“No, of course not. But say I could. Where would that put you? Think of it like a percentage of your farm. How close would that get you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nine parts out of ten? It’s hard to say with the trees in the mix.”

“And if it was just a week?”

“Seven parts out of ten. Maybe eight if I can get some decent fertilizer.”

“I’ll see what I can do there. I doubt many people are carrying much forward from the five through ten floors, but I’ll try to get whatever they have. What kind of stuff do you need?”

“Bone is always good. Meat and blood for the monster plants. Really any materials or waste from living creatures has a chance of working.”

“Bones, meat, blood, other materials. A week is good, two weeks are better. I think I’ve just about got it.”

“Great.” Tulland stood, offered his hand, and pulled Necia to her feet. People had been passing by the entire time they talked, which made him suspicious that they might be the last people on the floor who weren’t actually in the meeting already. “I just wish we had some collateral to offer. Some way I was important, where they couldn’t say no. I feel like I’m sending you in there unarmed.”

“Is that what you think?” Necia barked out a laugh. “Tulland, it isn’t that at all. I swear you didn’t listen to that tutor you mention all the time. No, Tulland, you aren’t sending me in there empty-handed. If you were, we wouldn’t be spending this much time planning.”

“Then what?”

Tulland had done well in The Infinite so far, but mainly that just meant he had survived where he should have died. There had to be some heavy hitters in a group that had come this far, people who would put down Tulland with no difficulty even before they considered things like bad matchups and class counters. There was no reason to suspect that any of them would care about him in particular.

“It’s your food. I don’t think you understand how important it is.” Necia walked up to the door and rested her hand on the handle for a moment. “White and Licht made sure word got around about it. You don’t understand because you’ve always had it. You never had to watch experience you earned drain away to buy tasteless rations from The Infinite. You don’t get how much of a problem it is, especially when you hit a floor you can’t clear very quickly. The people who have made it this far have either been very lucky or have been exploiting every single opportunity they could find. If someone like you shows up and tells them they can save all the experience they are otherwise losing just to eat, what do you think they’ll do?”

“Give me more of what I want?”

“That or elect you king. Now let’s go in there. My guess is they’re waiting just for you.”

She wasn’t wrong. When the door creaked open, it revealed a whole room of people turning their heads and, as one, giving Tulland a very uncomfortable once-over.

“And here he is now,” Licht said. “The person who is going to make it possible for each of us to set new world records. Tulland, say hi.”@@novelbin@@

Tulland’s mouth was suddenly dry.

“Hi, everyone.” He craned his neck back and forth until he found a seat, then moved towards it. “Nice to meet you.”