Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

Tulland suddenly stopped short. In all the reading he had ever done about the System, he was told two things about it. The first was that it had handled system-type things in his world long before he was born, before the Church seized control of the same responsibilities.

The second was, put plainly, that the System was bad. That it was skulking about, just outside the light, waiting to do harm. What harms it would do if it could was a pretty long list, at least in the claims of the Church. It would destabilize their world, destroying cities, starving countries, and opening the doors to violence both by turning humans on other humans and giving the beasts that lurked outside the defended, safe territory of humanity access to the inner parts of their lands.

But things it had actually done? Direct accusations, things that could be checked against historical records and accounts that might pop here and there? Tulland was realizing, for the first time in his life, that those accusations were fairly thin in terms of specifics. The System was going to do massacres, they said, but didn’t actually list any it had caused. The System led era was a time of violence and war, they said, without exactly saying how this was promoted by the System’s actions.

Which, of course, didn’t mean that the Church was necessarily hiding anything. He was talking about near pre-history here. Facts would have gotten lost over time. It was possible the Church wasn’t lying. It was also possible that the System wasn’t such a horrible thing, as disturbing a thought as that seemed.

There. You’ve found the right questions to be asking.

It’s going to be hard to convince me of that.

I have no doubt it would be if I were to try. But I won’t.

No interest?

No use. We are here. No amount of belief or disbelief will change that.

Disengaging, Tulland was left with the horrifying realization that he was going to have to pick up the flesh-stone thing somehow or another. He couldn’t put it in his dimensional storage, since that rendered everything inside useless for purposes besides food and combat. He had no idea how far that restriction went, but he wasn’t going to test it.

Getting out his shovel, Tulland spent some time rolling the object through the door, having real trouble maneuvering it until Necia had pity on him.

“Oh, for the love of good, Tulland. There are grosser things than this. You’ve done them. This week.” She reached down and picked up the stone with her bare hands, sending shivers of disgust through Tulland’s psyche. “Now where do you want this?”

That’s a good question. Tulland looked around the farm, trying to understand the correct way to use his new acquisition. It wasn’t until he looked at Necia’s sad, unhealthy little orange tree that he finally got a big enough ping to move forward.

“Uproot that tree. Carefully. Try not to hurt it,” Tulland said.

“Shouldn’t be hard. Poor thing never really got a grip. What are you going to do?” Necia asked.

“Dig out a little space underneath it.” Tulland took out his shovel and did just that, moving five or ten shovelfuls of dirt, dropping the stone in, using his pitchfork to get it situated, then packing it in with earth. “Now put the tree back. I’ll handle the soil.”

Five or ten minutes later, they were done. The meatrock was covered, the tree felt a bit shell-shocked to Tulland’s farmer senses, and otherwise the farm looked much as it had before. Things were right again.

“So that’s it? Today’s excitement?” Necia flopped back onto her back in the dirt. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m looking forward to a bit of action on the sixth floor. Tomorrow can’t come soon enough.”

“About that. We might have a change of plans. If you want.” Tulland was just now taking a closer look at the information he had picked up from Ley, and was beginning to see implications that Ley had no way of knowing.

Sixth Floor Report (Ley Raditz)

As understood by Ley Raditz, based on the reports of those that came before him, each of sixth to tenth floors has a particular focus and objectives that are more easily accomplished by some classes than others. In the case of Ley’s ancestors, there were several references to plans to delve into the ninth, yet no reports from those same individuals after that.

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Given the fact that the information in question was provided by speed-base Spymaster class holders, Ley hypothesizes that the ninth floor focuses on something besides mere speed. Though this is not certain, it’s as good of a guess as he can make given the information available.

The sixth floor, however, is known more specifically due to firsthand accounts from multiple Spymasters who returned to make notes on their success there. The floor, according to them, is focused on the idea of a regenerating monster force, one that consumes, splits, and grows over time.

Each individual threat in the sixth floor is trivial, just dangerous enough to have to be taken seriously and no more than that. Even their numbers do not present a direct threat, since the beasts there are thought to not be intelligent rough to cooperate with each other.

The danger of the floor, such as it is, comes from the fact that it does not offer a significant source of food and cannot be left before each and every beast in it is defeated. Since strength beyond a certain point is useless there, success is primarily based on an individual’s ability to move quickly from target to target. Insufficient talent in this one respect will result in a slow descent into defenselessness due to starvation.

One ancestor reports that the floor may be tackled cooperatively with two or more delvers, but that this offered him more trouble than help, due to the fact that the number of total enemies scales with the number of total participants. His own capability to finish the floor was partially suppressed by having to cover for his slower ally through the process.

Tulland related all this to Necia, who mulled it over.

“I don’t know about that,” Necia said. “You aren’t fast, and I’m positively slow compared to almost anyone but you. Why does this seem like a good idea?”

“Because, Necia, you don’t have to do anything besides go out and hunt until you hit whatever experience cap you can. I’ll handle the rest. If it’s just about killing weak things fast, I’m pretty good at that these days.”

—

The next morning, the orange tree had revealed itself to be something else entirely, at least after it consumed some amount of the meatrock.

Stonefruit Tree Each Stonefruit Tree is in and of itself unremarkable. It produces a fairly mundane, standard wood. The leaves are neither edible nor magically dense. The roots contain no alchemical properties. The fruits are similarly dull things, tasty enough but with little value beyond a fragile, perishable food source. The pit that each fruit contains, however, is an entirely different story. The Stonefruit Tree, which cares little for its own survival, gives a massive amount on energy for its own propagation. Every bit of magic these trees take in from their environment is packed into the seeds for the express purpose of increasing their hardness. They are simply inedible by all but the very most powerful beasts, able to pass uninjured through even the most vigorous of digestive tracts to flourish in the outside world.

“Oh, gods. Tulland, you have to try this.” Necia tossed him one of the fruits, which he bit into. Objectively, it wasn’t the best fruit he had ever had. But in a world where four or five food sources comprised the entirety of his diet, anything new and even kind of good was a treasure.

And the effect on my garden was huge. That’s like another ten percent to my plants all by itself. Tulland brought out a briar, which jumped back and forth with a strength entirely different than it had before. The difference in his farming screen was similar, if a little more dry and data-based.

Farm Status Total Plant Power: 648 Trees: Stonefruit Tree x1 Ironbranch x4 Giant’s Toe x2 Achewood x4 (Parasite load: 58 plants) Wolfwood x2 ...

The list felt almost bottomless.

“The power of agriculture.” Tulland walked over to his secondary garden, which benefited from the power of his farm without actually adding to it. The briars, Ironbranch trees, and Jewel Mosses growing there were all ready to go. “I’m going to rebuild my Farmer’s Tool before we go.”

“Not your armor?”

Tulland shook his head. “Not yet. The weapon is damaged, but the armor is still pretty good. If I can give these trees a little more time to grow, or maybe even get them some better fertilizer, maybe then I can do something better than what I already have.”

“Your call.”

Necia watched as Tulland harvested the necessary materials, holding them up to his Farmer’s Tool for absorption. Right at that moment, the jeweled moss was the hardest substance he could make in anything like big quantities, shiny and as strong as steel. The Ironbranch wood was the most overall durable, taking shocks like a champ and refusing to break under all but the heaviest of forces. Of course, neither were very good compared to real weapons used by real combat classes, but anything that contributed just a bit to his multifaceted way of doing battle was just fine.**

After a bit more harvesting to make sure his seed stock was ready, so was Tulland. Putting on his best harmless demeanor, he and the princess marched towards the next floor.

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