Tulland didn’t have a way to disprove the System’s claim until the next morning, when he woke up with Necia’s arm on his chest, stretched from her bedroll a foot or so away. Ley was snoring loudly, which hardly mattered in that moment**.** Girl hand was a powerful force, one that he wouldn’t have escaped for almost any reason he could think of. The Infinite, in its wisdom, presented him with one he wouldn’t have thought of, something powerful enough that he sprung out of bed immediately, Necia’s hand forgotten.
Splicing Complete! Two out of the three active splicing chambers failed, providing the following information:
The third chamber, containing just Mass Hare flesh, was a success, producing a new seed. Grow the seed to learn more about the exact results of this experiment. |
“You look like a little kid on the day of their birth celebration.” Necia rolled over and stared at Tulland as he broke the seal on the jar, fished out the tiny seed, and shook the ash from the failed experiments. “Is it that exciting?”
“Oh yes. New seed. No idea what it does.” Tulland looked over the meat from the day before and his other few sources of fertilizer, finding that the seed didn’t seem to be very well attuned to any of them. Instead, he simply enriched the seed with every bit of magic he could safely cram in it, harvested some briars to make room for it, and shoved it deep into some moist, freshly tilled soil. “Wow. That took a lot of my magic stock. Sorry, rest-of-farm. You’ll have to wait for your next enhancement.”
“Should we wait for… whatever it is?” Ley pointed at the soil. “Would it help?”
“Not until it’s grown,” Tulland explained. “And that could take forever. We might as well go hunting in the meantime. If I can pick up some levels, it will happen that much faster.”
“About that. Shouldn’t we be scattering briar seeds as we go? Like we did in the slime dungeon?” Necia asked.“No, probably not. It’s a good idea, Necia, but only if the briars can kill the enemies around here. And I don’t think they can, at least not in anything but huge numbers. We’d be better off just hunting like we’ve been.”
“Well then. Let’s eat the leftovers from last night and get to it, then.” Necia stood. “I think it’s going to be a good day.”
—
Tulland’s farm was growing up, something he was glad for. Soon enough, he’d be transitioning off his temporary grace period where he was drawing power from the older, more developed garden in the safe zone. By then, he’d need as much power in this garden as he could manage. It wasn’t going to be a one-for-one exchange, and there was no way he’d draw as much power here as he had from there, but he was hoping the few levels he had picked up here since then would help.
Tulland had spent some time bolstering some of his physical stats and his little-used mind stat, going for a kind of well-roundedness just to make sure he didn’t get caught off-guard by a significant lack in one facet of his build or another. Now, he was going to dump his new points all into force. He needed the raw power. Everything he did on his farm ran off force, and every bit of that cycled out to how well his weapons and weaponized plants worked. It just couldn’t be too high.
Tulland Lowstreet Class: Chaos Farmer LV. 40 Strength: 40 (+5) Agility: 40 (+5) Vitality: 50 (+10) Spirit: 70 Mind: 45 (+5) Force: 90 Skills: Primal Growth LV. 14, Produce Armament LV. 11, Market Wagon LV. 5 Passives: Broadcast LV. 10, Botanical Engineer LV. 9, Strong Back LV. 6, Fruits of the Field LV. 3, Farmer’s Intuition LV. 5 |
Once they had eaten and walked around for a bit, they found their next group of enemies, this time heavy on the Stumpers with only a few Mass Hares mixed in.
“I’ll hit the hares,” Ley said. “Tulland, just use as many vines as you can on two of the Stumpers. Necia, focus on keeping the full-strength Stumpers occupied and mix in distraction to the other two until I can get there. Sound good?”
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“Good.” Tulland nodded. He was responsible for more of the fight than he had been before, but he was stronger than he had been before, too. “I’m okay with it.”
“Me too. Let’s go.”
As they rushed in, Tulland kept his pitchfork stowed, opting to follow up his applications of Giant’s Hairs and Lunger Briars with explosions from his Acheflowers, hitting each Stumper with a few of them in their ugly, hoggish faces. This didn’t work incredibly well, but it worked at least somewhat, and left them just disoriented enough for him to dodge their attacks while laying down some of his own.
“Almost done, Ley?” Necia called.
“Almost. Keep it up.” Ley stabbed down one of the rabbits, putting a permanent end to it. The other was bleeding and slashed, with little time left to go before it collapsed. “Okay, I’m on my way.”
Ley stopped to help Necia first, slashing at the Stumper’s tendons with his dagger. He was fast, still working off their initial long-distance observation of the enemies. Necia’s Stumper was hobbled almost immediately, and the pressure on Tulland suddenly lessened when the two of them dedicated themselves more fully to the larger enemies. Tulland took one of them on himself, while Ley and Necia took down the other three, ending the fight within a few minutes.
“That was better. Now, quick. I want to do at least five of those today. Let’s get back and restock your vines, then go the other direction,” Ley said.
At the farm, Tulland learned something else he hadn’t noticed before, almost picking up the knowledge by accident as he shoved briars into his dimensional storage.
“Oh, wow.” Tulland sifted through his notifications until he found the ones he had missed, two Skill Level Up! messages that had both applied to his Market Wagon skill. His complement of Lunger Briars went up by five, which wasn’t honestly that big of a difference. The bigger deal was that he could now carry a whole two more Giant’s Hairs, which was going to be an incredible difference in the kind of fights they were having.
That assumption bore out when in the next fight he was able to completely incapacitate two of the four Stumpers completely, a group they were barely brave enough to try because they were pretty sure he could handle it. With Necia and Ley quickly picking up levels from the fights, they were able to hold their own against another two Stumpers and four Mass Hares as Tulland made the rounds, stabbed with his pitchfork, and loaded up every slow-moving enemy in the group with his more damaging briars.
“That was good work. You shouldn’t look so sad,” Necia said, once the battle was over. “You picked up a level, right?”
“I did. And a bunch of skill levels that either came through now or I missed before.”
Tulland Lowstreet Class: Chaos Farmer LV. 41 Strength: 40 (+5) Agility: 40 (+5) Vitality: 50 (+10) Spirit: 70 Mind: 45 (+5) Force: 95 Skills: Primal Growth LV. 15, Produce Armament LV. 13, Market Wagon LV. 7 Passives: Broadcast LV. 12, Botanical Engineer LV. 9, Strong Back LV. 8, Fruits of the Field LV. 5, Farmer’s Intuition LV. 8 |
“There’s a lot of them all at once. It’s weird,” Tulland said.
“Maybe not. Sometimes one skill moves, and a lot of others move with it. You’ve leveled your primary, right?” Necia asked.
“Right.”
“Then a growth spurt isn’t that weird. Just be glad for it. I’m just growing at the normal speed, and I’m not sure Ley had moved much at all.”
“Not as much, but it’s my second time through. Now come on. Let’s check out the open areas on the other side farm now, and see if we can’t do a little better.”
The other side of the farm was a direction they hadn’t spent much time in yet, and should have been relatively virgin territory. Even so, there were no groups of enemies there. They wasted time wandering before going back to where they had been before and immediately finding another two groups. These were about the size of the smaller group they had encountered when they first came in, and presented no challenge. Tulland picked up another level, dumping it into his force stat without a second thought.
After that, though, it was time for one of Ley’s enforced breaks. By the time that was over, the light was failing. Tulland cooked some food, then plopped on the ground.
“So how much longer until we are done here? I know there’s a time limit. Is it the same for everyone?” Tulland asked.
“A bit variable.” Ley accepted a plate of food. “I asked around before and after my first run. It seems like it varies somewhere between a few days and a week, judging by this place’s day and night cycles.”
“So any time now?”
“Or twice as much time as we’ve been here. We’ll see.” Ley spooned more food into his mouth greedily. Tulland got it. Walking and killing was hungry work. He had taken to cutting up some briar fruits into every meal whether the fruit suited it or not just to give them more nutritional load. It helped take the edge off, but he was almost always a little hungry. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you two about that. Do you feel like taking a risk?”
“Depends.” Necia was still prying off her shoes, “I don’t think it’s a problem so long as we can keep hunting.”
“We’ll have to if I’m right. Look here.” Ley drew his knife and started drawing on the ground. “This square is Tulland’s farm. We’ve seen groups here, here, here, and here. And nowhere else. Even when we went back to the same areas, the enemy groups were in the same half mile of territory. And do you see what shape they are making?”
“An open triangle.” Necia connected the dots with her finger, drawing a line that bent in the middle to double back. “It’s pointing at something.”
“Or it’s a coincidence. I’m not saying it’s not. It wouldn’t have to be much of one. But if you two are okay with it, I think it might be worth checking.”
“Absolutely. How did you even figure this out?”
“Spymaster, remember?” Ley tapped his head. “The skills don’t let me miss much. Now, let’s sleep. I want to get on this early. The days are short here, and we may not have enough of them left.”
The next day, Tulland would have forgotten to check his new vine, just as he had the night before. The Infinite wouldn’t let him.
| Clubber Vine LV. 1 (Cultivated, Subjugated, Dead-end) |
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