Infinite Farmer

In the swamp, the wolves were king. There were some animals that lived there that The Infinite didn't acknowledge as monsters, and not a single one of them could do anything about it when the wolves were on their trail. Today, one particular wolf was wandering through the swamp tracking one of the smaller rodents, slowly closing in on the burrow where it made its home.

The wolf stopped in its tracks as a new smell crossed over the scent-trail the swamp rat had laid down. Whatever this smell was, it was new to the wolf. But it was a lot of smell, as odors went. It came from a bigger animal, one that promised far more calories for the wolf's trouble than the rat could provide. Without much consideration, the wolf left the lucky rat to its own devices and started walking after its new quarry.

Tulland wasn't hard to track. The wolf made a beeline towards him without a single bit of hesitation, coming halfway to the tree he was crouching behind in just ten or fifteen seconds. Tulland checked his armor over one last time, took a deep breath, then stepped out from behind the tree, hitting every single briar on his body with enhancements as he did.

Go. Get him.

The wolf shied back for just a split second as its prey came into view, then pressed its feet into the ground as it sprung towards the promise of easy-pickings human meat that Tulland represented. At the same time, six vines uncurled off Tulland's body and rose to meet the wolf, who had committed far too much weight to the attack to get out of their way as they reached for its fur.

Tulland swayed to the side as the distracted wolf swished past him, barely catching his chest with one of its sharp, hooked claws. It hurt like hell, but wasn't anything Tulland couldn't take, and nothing that put him in any real danger.

As the wolf flew by, it picked up four of the six vines. From experience, Tulland knew the vines worked better when they had a bit of time to orient themselves, to dig deep into an animal without having to worry about its active attempts to shake them off. If Tulland could give them that time with his ineffectual attacks, then it hardly mattered that the attacks themselves sucked. The briars would make up for it.

Tulland pivoted, sending a few drops of blood flying as he spun in place and brought his club to bear in the general direction of the wolf. Like the Forest Duke, the wolf had no way of knowing just how slapped-together Tulland's arsenal was, and as a result had to respect anything that looked even somewhat like an attack. This gave the vines plenty of unattended time in which to work. They contracted just as the wolf attempted to jump at Tulland again, sending it tumbling awkwardly along the muddy floor of the swamp.

Tulland took the opportunity to actually hit the wolf with his Ironbranch spear a few times, then pulled back in caution to make sure he wasn't misreading the situation. He wasn't, that he could tell. As the last two vines wrapped around the wolf, it was almost immediately clear that while two of the strong vines spelled serious trouble for one of these wolves, an all-out attack from a half dozen vines total was far more than they could handle.

It can hardly move. I can pretty much stab it at will now.

Tulland took mercy on the wolf, ending its life with several well-placed shots to its neck, letting his vines feed until it was gone. That was an eerie process. He used to avoid watching the gruesome act, but these days he had taken to watching the consumption in hopes he might learn something.

It was a simple enough thing. The vines were infused with magic power, like almost every monster in this place was. They hummed with it as they worked their thorns deeper and deeper into their prey. The wolf didn't dissolve, exactly. It looked a lot like how Tulland felt when the damage from an attack on a particular part of him attacked his body's overall health. The vines slowly broke the wolf down, making it less and less substantial until it finally began to look faint. What was left of the animal seeped into the vines at that point, leaving only a bit of blood and fur where the beast used to be.

No wonder I didn't find anything of the wolf that the farm took on by itself. That's just not how these things work.

Unlike the wolf his farm had killed, though, Tulland was awake for this one and fully in command of his plants. Where The Infinite had not counted his involvement before, it fully compensated him now, giving him a big burst of experience all at once that turned out to be a more than sufficient to move him to the next level.

Tulland had put five of his points into vitality to survive the first wolf attack before. With two more levels worth of stats on top of that, he was starting to feel that much better about his chances on this floor.

Smiling, Tulland turned back towards his farm. His magic power had barely been tapped by that last application of Enhance Plant. It had taken him quite a while to find the earlier wolf, and by the time he got back home to his farm, he'd have a full tank to dump into his agriculture. He wasn't going to be getting any more levels today anyway, not with how hard it was turning out to be to find game in the area.

He was barely on his way home when the next happy little change in his life hit him.

Tulland was moving home pretty quick before the message, but now he hustled. Getting back to his farm, he quickly dumped all his power into the plants while he did some quick calculations on the increase in his farm. Going from ten meters to twelve meters per side didn't sound like much, but that was only if one hadn't paid any attention at all during their tutor's geometry classes.

I paid almost no attention, true, but I think I remember this.

Tulland worked out the math in the dirt with his finger. The old plot was a hundred square meters, which was already a pretty good size. The new plot would not simply be 20% bigger. It would be nearly half again as big, at 144 square meters. It was a massive increase, almost making up for the fact that the skill hadn't improved much at all until this point.

"I love you, little Swamp Aches." Tulland glanced fondly at the trashy little trees, which had somehow grown another six or seven inches while he was out. "If nothing else, this earns you a home with me."

The next few hours was a frenzy of finding enough briar seeds and Swamp Ache pods to plant on the new land, as well as breaking his back to till and mix the soil for them. Without Necia's overpowered help, it was a big undertaking, but eventually, Tulland had the mixture of swamp soil and badlands dirt just about right.

After getting his new seeds planted, Tulland went to check on another group of members in his growing plant family. The flowers hadn't been planted in the farm, but they also weren't far. It didn't take him long to find that five of the yellow things had taken to the trees and were already full-sized, bright-yellow blooms that looked ready to pick.

"Moment of truth. System, if this goes badly, could you remind me to go hide in my farm, please?"

No promises.

"Fair enough."

Tulland reached out mentally to the flowers, commanding them to not explode with every bit of authority he could muster. Covering his mouth and nose with one hand, he gingerly reached out with the other, barely brushing the petals of the flower with his fingertips.

It didn't explode. I guess it's time for the truth.

In some sort of freak miracle, the flowers not only tolerated Tulland touching them, but also picking them and putting them in his pack, where they sat inert. If he was right about how they worked, he would have an entirely new kind of weapon to play with, one that The Infinite would hopefully allow to go un-adjudicated as he learned how to best make use of it.

For now, he was going to very, very carefully replant what seeds he could get out of the flowers in his farm, then go take a nap. Soon, he would be experimenting with these flowers in live conditions, and probably on a kind of enemy he hadn't faced before. It was impossible to be too rested up for that kind of risk.

—

"This might work. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't."

If the ants are stronger than you, it won't. If the ants pay special attention to the briars, it won't. If you make any one of the dozens of mistakes you could be reasonably expected to make…

"It won't. I got it. But there's a lot of reason this should work too. If it doesn't, I can just set up a cordon further back from the hole. It'll probably be fine."

After a quick patrol to make sure there weren't any handy wolves to take down, Tulland had set off in search of one of the ant pits Necia had mentioned. According to her, they shouldn't have been that hard to find. Whether Tulland was unlucky or just missing something, he spent an hour making larger and larger half-circle walks away from his base without actually finding anything.

And, bored as he was, that meant company was once again at a high enough premium for him to talk to his betrayer. It was, without a doubt, the weirdest Tulland he had ever had in a lot of ways. It mostly ran off Tulland pretending there wasn't really any problem with talking to the thing who had condemned him to a painful death, and everyone avoiding any mention of that specific subject to keep the conversation going.

"The point is that I have a chance, and if it works, it's going to be very easy to farm these ants up to the cap."

And if it doesn't work?

"Then I do whatever I can do to not die. I hardly want to point out how bad of manners it is for you to make a big deal out of this, by the way. Given that you are the one who benefits most from my death. Any magistrate would point his finger at you as a suspect if they found out I had died."

I apologize for my rudeness, then, I suppose. And I must point out that there isn't anything like a magistrate for what amounts to an infinite distance in any direction.

"Yeah, tell me about it." Tulland bobbled one of the flowers in his hand. He had accidentally dropped one earlier, which confirmed that they just wouldn't explode unless he gave them the go-ahead to. Since then, he had been using them to fidget away the sheer dullness of the walk. "Now if I could just find a pit."

You have. Look ahead.