Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon
Chapter 187: Preparations

“Feel better?” Necia asked. “It must have been a long week.”

Tulland shifted the blanket they had wrapped around him. He didn’t need it for warmth, and doubted there was any weather in the entire world of Aghli that could make him shiver in his full armor. It still helped, just as Necia had said it would. She was currently ignoring his insistence that he had just eaten stew to force him to eat more food, and was right about that too.

“Was it a week? It didn’t seem that long from my perspective.”

“A week and a day. Probably a reverse time sync, from what your System could tell me. It was hysterical, you know.”

I was not.

“You were too!” Necia said forcefully. “Every five minutes you’d ask if there had been any sign of him, like he was a lost pet.”

He’s close enough to that.

“What I don’t understand is where you went. Don’t you live in my head?” Tulland asked.

Not like you think I do. I am usually tethered to your vicinity in terms of what I can observe, but I don’t really exist anywhere in the same way a stone or vase would. While you were gone, I was just stuck to the entrance of that dungeon, like you were still standing there.

“Well, I’m sorry. To both of you. I never knew that could happen, or I would have stayed away from that dungeon forever.”

“That’s why we forgive you. Accidents happen.” Necia drank some of the tea Tulland had grown since he got back, picked directly from plants she had told him not to bother with until he felt better. “But I’m glad you went. You seem different now. Better, I think.”

“I should. The Infinite and my uncle said I was a man now.”

Necia almost spit out her tea.

“Wait, what?”

“A man. That’s what the dungeon was about. A sort of coming of age, I think. The Infinite thought I needed it.”

Necia waved her hands in front of her as she laughed. Tulland tried not to be offended.

“Tulland, I think of you as a man, I promise. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. It’s just the thought of the Infinite being an authority on the matter that makes me laugh.”

“Well, to be honest, it mattered a lot more coming from my uncle. Who says he loves you, by the way.”

“And he knows this how?”

“I told him about you.”

“Well. You need to tell me more about him, too. Everything. He sounds like he was quite the man.”

“He really was,” Tulland said. “He really was.”

—

After Tulland’s nerves had settled, Necia led him out to the town. The grass was miles further in growth than it had been the last time he had seen it, to the extent that he wasn’t entirely sure he could even see the end of the green from here.

“How did this happen?”

“This is what you get when a bunch of people distribute seeds as fast as they can for two weeks. There’s so much grass that the seeds are more or less unlimited now. And it’s growing faster in some places, for whatever reason.”

Ah, yes. Tulland, for some reason or another, your mini-stake network kept firing the entire time you were gone, at roughly the rate of your normal magical regeneration rate. It seems The Infinite didn’t want you to take a loss on that while you were in an involuntarily entered dungeon. The grass has grown much faster than it should have. After the grass near the staked areas grew fat off your magic power, the soil improved outwards from there.

“How do you know? You’ve been stuck here.”

Yuri said so. She did not know I was listening, but that woman talks quite a bit. It wouldn’t have been possible for me to miss it entirely.

“That’s good then, right? We should encircle the capital at some point, going like we are going.”

“Next week,” Necia said. “We’ve been taking trips out and planting the grass where we can. It seems to be interfering with the blight in some ways. The blight isn’t weaker, exactly, but when you look at it now it doesn’t seem to be getting stronger. Or something like that.”

“Then that’s great. We’ll keep growing grass and eventually choke it out.” Tulland beamed. “Right?”

“Not… quite,” Necia said. “There’s something you need to see.”

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Amrand and Yuri came with them, less for protection and more to explain what Tulland was going to witness better.

“When the grass finally started to close the loop around the capital, we saw this,” Yuri said. “It accumulated at a few spots where the grass was thinner, and then just… bashed through, I guess.”

“And nobody has ever seen this before?”

“Not that I’ve heard of. And it’s the kind of thing I think I would have heard about.”

On the ground, there was a flow of blight. It was shaped like a very small river, tracking the low points in the ground while not stopping for slight rises in the terrain. Where it flowed, it seemed to have no set direction, sometimes flowing out and other times reversing and running inwards towards the blight itself. Tulland could see a bit into the capital area under the dome, and for as far as he could see, the river continued.

“We figure it’s a reaction to being cut off. The blight seems to never do anything it doesn’t have to do. You force it to react sometimes, and we learn new things.” Amrand pointed a sword at the ground to either side of the little river. “It keeps anything from growing within a foot of it, your grass included.”

“What if you plant new grass on it?” Tulland asked. “Does it cut it off?”

“With enough grass, yes,” Necia said. “It was the first thing we tried. But the blight simply punched through at a new spot, after that. And it has hundreds of little inlets just like these.”

“So we won’t be able to starve it to death. Not with the grass, anyway.”

“No.” Yuri shook her head. “And it means the blight can learn new ways to counter what’s here. I don’t know how far it can push that countering, but it’s not good.”

“The grass won’t kill it, and might not even work after a long enough time. Got it.” Tulland looked into the distance, where a spinning mass of blight dominated the city, protecting whatever evil life inside of it had nearly exterminated this planet. “I wonder…”

Somewhere in Tulland’s mind, a barrier broke down. He had been looking for ways to do a specific thing the entire time he was on this planet, something he had never really put into words but amounted to holding the blight off. Now, for the first time, he looked at the blight and didn’t see an unstoppable force to be resisted and hidden from. Instead of that, he found that he was angry at it.

There was no reason something as weak and worthless as the blight should be the predator of the world, except that it was cheating the System in both figurative and literal ways. It was like someone at a party harassing a better person, using social niceties as a shield to ruin everyone else’s time. Except here, that kind of behavior meant life and death.

What it needed was someone bigger, stronger, and smarter to sweep in and show it its place. For the first time, Tulland found himself able to subconsciously believe it just might be him. He had known he was sent here to do something like that, but until now that had been dry Potter-facts. Now it was something he could feel and believe in.

More importantly, it was something only he could accomplish.

“Necia. We have to do some dungeons. Lots of them.”

“Why?”

Yes, why?

“Because I need potions. Anything that can enhance me. System, how many of them can I take?”

As many as you’d like, although they stop working at some point.

“Then tell me when we get to that point. None of us is sleeping until it happens.”

“I can lead some teams,” Amrand said. “Yuri and I. The townsfolk will be glad to chip in.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to weaken them.”

“Tulland, normal people don’t get strong enough or fast enough in a few days to make a difference like you do,” Necia said. “Besides, if they could have made a difference that way, someone would have. Nobody on this world has a chance of doing that but you.”

Amrand and Yuri nodded along.

“She’s not wrong. Just leave it to us. But you clear as many as you can by yourself. If what Necia tells us is true, you’ll want your System on this, changing the rewards in your favor. The rest of us will just have to rely on luck.”

“Great. Now, Tulland, when are we leaving?”

“Go get your things. I’ll stock up on seeds.” Tulland felt some invisible clock start ticking in his mind. “Something tells me we don’t have forever to try ideas out. I want to get this done as soon as possible.”

Fifteen minutes later, Tulland and Necia were running through the wasteland, putting more distance between themselves and the town than anyone else could have managed in so short a time. Once they had left a big enough perimeter for the others to hunt in, they got to work themselves.

Tulland had forgotten what a big advantage it was to have Necia there. She blocked and neutralized any attack that had a snowball’s chance of giving him trouble, which left him clear to destroy everything at maximum, unhindered speeds.

The gulls were gone now, which Tulland was glad of. Even if he could kill them now, they were still frightening to him. They represented the fact that when pushed, the blight could adapt. Tulland’s very presence had been making it stronger up until now, and every foot of ground he had carved out for the humans in this world would one day be at risk if he didn’t stop new developments like the gulls in their tracks decisively and soon.

Necia stayed by his side as they slaughtered every dungeon within a reasonable distance, pulling dozens of potions and pills as rewards as they went. Not all of them were impressive and some of the more important potions took several dungeons to save up for, but after a few weeks of continuous travel they were so laden with the things that it seemed like it was more dangerous to keep carrying them than to get them home.

“Did you do well?” Amrand had met them at the gate, eyeballing their overflowing pouches of treasure. “We did, too, if in a more realistic way. There’s about ten potions here, the best we could do. Tulland, you also got your wish. Everyone who hunted is a great deal stronger, and we only took minimal losses.”

Tulland accepted the potions and tried not to think about what minimal losses they might have encountered. Then he turned to his garden once again.

With the old gardener woman’s lessons in mind, he refined his garden even further, pruning and adding to the soil in ways that he just hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t a huge increase in the value of his farm, but every little bit helped and it also gave him the opportunity to make sure his arsenal of cluster bombs was replenished to the maximum his storage would hold.

Then he rested. Brist had taught him the importance of that, and in his own way the rogue had taught him how to resist something like fear preventing him from making the decisions he knew he should make. He ate, bathed, slept, and then repeated it, spending two days on nothing but getting into his absolute best, tip-top condition.

As the blight burrowed through wider and wider swaths of grass, he fed his grasses through his stake network. There was a stalemate between them, a kind of shifting balance that for now was stable enough. Soon, it would break, one way or the other.

Tulland evacuated the town, gave Necia very specific instructions on how long to keep them away, and walked to his stone building. He had everything in place he could prepare. He had now reached the point of taking risks.

Somehow, he still knew he was the right person to be making them.

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