Infinite Farmer

Tulland woke up on the ground, thankful to have just enough points bolstering his vitality that this was only uncomfortable as opposed to actually hurting his muscles and bones. He kept his eyes closed for just a moment, wishing he could talk with his tutor in some way or another right now. The old man might not have been young enough to help much with the fighting, but Tulland was eighty percent sure he knew about things like farming.

He knew about a lot of things.

When Tulland finally opened his eyes, he was in a weird jungle. Every one of the plants had sprouted, which wasn't surprising. He half suspected that once juiced with his farming powers, these briar weeds would have grown on a pane of glass. At least for a while anyway.

He stood and walked over to the least interesting of them. The briar seeds that were only enhanced by his skills were a bit bigger and a bit stronger. Something about how they looked rubbed him the right way, at least to the extent normal plants could. They were a little bit hardier and healthier. If they had been food, he would have assumed they would feed people better. As deadly spiked plants, they seemed like they might spike things a little more sharply and viciously.

Nothing amazing. Next.

Watering seemed to be generally good for the plants, and all the plants he had watered were doing a bit better than the ones without water. The ones he had planted in their own fruit pulp did even better than that, and kept improving with more pulp until they had access to two or more fruits worth of the stuff. More fertilization of that kind didn't seem to help. These vines were thicker and greener, and when Tulland reached out and touched them with his hand, they were also just a bit more flexible. It was almost to the point that he could have used them as a rope as-is, without cutting or twisting any strands together at all.

But it was the monster-fed vines that changed the game. Tulland had seen the moving things after he woke up, and verified that they couldn't actually move from their rooting spots before approaching them.

It is foolish for you not to have looked at this first. The others are just briars. These are something new.

"You think I don't know that? It's incredibly boring in here, System." Tulland was going to milk this entire experience for all it was worth, entertainment-wise. If that meant turning back on the System for a bit, so be it. It likely knew something Tulland didn't as well. "Now, what am I looking at here?"

I have no idea at all. This is not something that would have been possible on our world, I think. Over the centuries I was in control, farmers tried many things. They accomplished at least some marvels. None of them were… this.

"Give me something, at least."

I'm not your System anymore, remember? Check to see what The Infinite says about it.

"Fine. Be that way." Tulland had been putting off looking at The Infinite's notifications, but there was no reason to do that now. Annoyingly, The Infinite had yet to show the same preference for automatic, instant communication the System had. Every screen had be manually read and dismissed. He started at the boring end of things and worked his way up.

That was good enough to have justified this work all by itself. Even if all the farming meant his clubs were a little better, it would be a very big jump in his surviving-this-floor chances. But the inclusion of levels and the idea of improved crops in the description was something else.

Does that mean… Tulland began to think.

Likely. The System sounded surprised, annoyed, and impressed all at once. Just be quiet and look at the others.

Tulland nodded and turned to the notifications for the rest of his conventional vines. The best he had done with any of them was a level two variant, which came from one vine that had been fertilized with monster meat but not watered. It looked truly nasty to Tulland's not-entirely-untrained eye, and he immediately decided to upgrade his club with this new briar when he got a chance.

But then it was time to get down to the really weird stuff. He stood and walked towards the one very concerning, much more vine-like plant, standing a few full steps outside of its reach as it writhed and reached for him.

"That's not normal. It took the monster fertilizer's name," Tulland said.

Like a bride at some sort of perverse wedding. Keep reading your notifications, fool.

Tulland decided that while he would continue moving through the new information, the System had probably learned more than enough about his new capabilities for one day. He didn't believe that the lying betrayer was just taking everything at their word instead of making educated guesses about what was happening, and if it didn't want to share them, then there was a limited amount of knowledge he would let it have. The fact that it was defanged for the moment didn't mean it would be harmless forever, and keeping the System in the dark did Tulland no harm so long as it wasn't repaying him with knowledge.

He was immediately glad he did so. The next notification was a game-changer in a way the others weren't.

Tulland immediately willed the briar to ignore him, then stood open-mouthed as it went limp, slumped to the ground, and became indistinguishable from any other briar he had grown. Walking a tiny bit closer, he very gently moved his hand towards one of the thorns, putting just the slightest amount of pressure on it.

The thorns were very sharp, and that should have been enough to immediately puncture his skin. In this case, it simply failed to do so. He pressed even harder, and found he was still safe. Pressing as hard as he could and rubbing his hand back and forth on the blade of the briar showed he was still safe. The Infinite's system hadn't been lying. Tulland couldn't be hurt by these plants.

None of his more conventional briars could hurt him either, though he verified through some substantial pain that any briars he hadn't cultivated were still dangerous.

Which brought him to the last of his notifications, ones he had sensed at the beginning of this process but kept back until he knew exactly what he had done to earn them.

Tulland took a deep breath. This seemed like a truly shocking number of levels to get at once. He immediately dedicated just a few of the newly gained points to each of his body stats. Plants or no, he still had to survive out in a very hostile world, and he had no idea what he would be facing as he pressed out from the safety of his base.

The rest he applied to his magical abilities, adding five points to his force stat and also spirit to speed up his regeneration a little bit. His mind stat was the only one that got no love, seeing that Razored Lungers didn't exactly do mental damage outside of his earlier traumatic memories with them.

The new passives section interested him. It apparently needed some minimum level of entries to show, and had immediately moved Strong Back once it did. Eventually, he'd have to work on leveling both passive skills, although Tulland hated the thought of what he would have to do to convince his regeneration skill to grow.

He ran in place and jumped a few times, then found his club and gave it some experimental swings. He wasn't much stronger or faster from the extra stat points, but each little addition was a noticeable help. At the same time, he reminded himself that as strong as he might feel, he was infinitely weaker than what a real combat class would be in the same situation.

If I'm going to live through this, I need more plants.

Tulland sighed and began gathering fruits from his new hybrid vine. He was almost to the point where he would have to go explore the greater space around him, leaving more than a few steps from his terrible, thorn-based home. But if he didn't want to die the moment a new threat popped up, he was going to have a couple days worth of farming ahead of him.

It was going to be boring. There was no way around that.

—

Two days later, Tulland was out of breath and swinging his club like a maniac. He had retrofitted the old club with new, improved vines, and it was much deadlier now in a way he had yet to really test on prey. He was a bit deadlier now too, if not much. If he couldn't improve his fighting through actual skills, he could at least improve it through practice. He had been working on that every moment his vitality allowed, filling the hours between infusions of Enrich Seed and Quickgrow with sweating, grunting, and general incompetent training.

Fully winded now, he slowly jogged a circuit of all his new plants. The Hades Lunger Briars, it turned out, grew just fine from just seeds. He had slowly replaced the big, tangled plug of briars that served as his door with two closely planted rows of the Lunger Briars. At rest, they outlined what looked like a safe and open hallway that led directly to delicious, monster-nourishing human meat.

Over the course of the last several hours, they proved that they were anything but safe. Every few hours, a Razored Lunger had wandered by, seen Tulland through the entryway, and charged. The moment they entered that hallway, the briars woke up, tangling the invaders with deadly constrictor strengths, binding them to the ground, and sapping their life force to supplement their own.

To his surprise, the Lunger Briars could apparently level by doing this. The one closest to the outside world had benefited the most from the trap, reaching level three and being able to demolish the average beast that wandered in all by itself now.

Tulland rested for a while, then turned on the System.

"Hey, System. I was thinking about walking around a bit."

Oh? About time, I'd say.

"Well, yes, but you want me dead."

I do not deny it. What is your question?

"Do you think I'm ready?" Tulland asked. The System responded with silence for a long time.

No. I think you will likely die. But you are at least as ready as you'll ever be.

Tulland nodded. Grabbing his scythe-form Farmer's Tool and thorn-and-vines club, he went to the front of his enclosure, planted some new vines, and leveled the blade of his tool at the strongest few vines of the Lunger Briars. The Infinite's Dungeon System had claimed they would retain some of their function for a while after they were cut, using their remaining energy when they moved and attacked.

Tulland wasn't sure they'd work like he hoped they would, but he wrapped them both around an arm each anyway. Any help out there would be worthwhile, but even if they didn't work, having a couple loops of thorny vines on his body wouldn't exactly hurt.

He took a deep breath and stepped away from his prison. It was time to learn more about this new world.