Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon -
Chapter 189: Mystery Seed
The chaos energy changed then. It began pulling wildly on Tulland’s magic, bottoming it out again and again as it drained everything he had out of him. Then it looked for more, and found it in its own prison.
Splicer Consumed! The rampant chaos energy has consumed your splicer artifact to sustain itself. The artifact is lost forever. |
Tulland could barely pay attention to the automatic notification, even with it injecting its own contents straight into his consciousness. He was too busy watching the splicer break apart bit by bit, sliding into the chaos energy with a loud crack every time a particle met with the small cloud of fundamental energy.
It took the rest of his buff for it to be eaten, and during that entire time the chaos was changing, morphing into something rounder and more cylindrical, something with a texture that was becoming more and more rough as it formed.
It’s a stick.
Kind of. There’s something odd happening with it, like it’s… watch out.
Tulland ducked just in time as the stick-like object jetted over his head, settling in the center of the room as it floated in place, spinning. Tulland felt something from it probing out towards him, then latching on to his magic and forcibly yanking it from him.
That hurts.Because it’s stealing your magic. You can give it freely and it won’t hurt, but…
If it wants it, I want it to have it.
The System didn’t argue the matter any further. It watched in silence as Tulland shoved the magic link with the branch out of the way with Primal Growth, latching onto the branch directly and feeding it enough energy in one burst that it let go of its forced claim on his power voluntarily. He fed it everything he could, finding he could just almost sate its needs.
This is going to work. I can keep up with it, which means I can let it be what it wants to be. And then…
Time’s up.
What?
The buff.
The effects of Angelic Rite have ended. |
Tulland felt his magic drain immediately, not quite to empty but enough in a chunk he thought it would get there soon. As soon as he restricted the flow, the stick vibrated ominously, radiating light and shaking as if enraged.
Is that as bad as it looks?
Possibly worse. There’s a vast instability in that seed which it’s actively trying to correct using your energy.
I don’t have much left.
There are two aspects to this process. Time and available power. Enough of either will make this work. You have to balance the two.
Without it exploding.
Correct.
And what if it does explode after all? What are the chances that turns out well for me?
Very low. Tulland, you have to do this. I don’t care how. Figure out a way, but get it done.
Tulland gritted his teeth and prepared to pull back even further on his energy.
And, Tulland? Please don’t die.
—
“Tulland? Everything all right?”
“It’s fine.” Tulland tried to keep his voice level as he worked at the energy equivalent of trying to feed a charging bull enough that it changed its mind about goring him. “Just the building might explode. And maybe the town.”
“What?”
“Sorry! I need to concentrate.”
Tulland didn’t really have a skill to help with this. Primal Growth was taking magic out of him and putting it in the plant as fast as he could shovel it, but it wasn’t the normal way the skill worked. Instead, it was like the seed was scooping the power out of the air, not caring about the skill one bit as it gobbled up the energy it carried and discarded all of the intent.
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Worse, putting too much or too little energy into the seed sent it right back into shaking-and-threatening mode, as if the power feeding into it was juggling the problem higher and higher into the air. As with throwing something higher up, he was also increasing the amount of energy the seed had to unleash once it finally blew up in his face.
He had no choice but to keep going. His farmer’s sense was reacting to the seed in weird ways, but everything it said about the seed had to with it doing a lot of farming at once. Here was a seed that could grow a thousand plants, plow a million fields. Here was soil that could nourish a tree that would reach the skies itself. Here was a wild flower that, if developed, would cure every illness.
All in all, it seemed he was dealing with a powerful thing. As Farmer’s Intuition continued to babble about how great the seed was for literally every task, Tulland found it growing more and more unstable. He was beginning to get the hang of calibrating his intent to feed a good amount of power through the skill, but that just meant he was able to keep on top of the seed’s erratic power needs. Sometimes he’d dump a huge section of power in, and other times he had to put in a bit of energy so small he could barely separate it out using the skill.
Finally, Tulland thought he just about had it handled. The seed rumbled violently, took a big hit from Tulland’s energy, then finally seemed sated. It was still floating in the air, but it stilled substantially and finally seemed to be winding down.
“Ha! How do you like that? Take that, The Infinite. You couldn’t get me, you old…”
The seed shook. Tulland quieted right down, appropriately cowed. It wasn’t enough. Cracks started to form on the weird wood sides of the thing as it shook more and more, radiating a pure white light from every imperfection on its surface. Tulland shoveled some power out at it, feeling a complete indifference from both the seed and the spell. They couldn’t care about each other less.
Suddenly freed of his responsibility to keep the seed from exploding, Tulland judged that he’d have approximately two seconds to enjoy that new freedom before everything went to shit. Kicking over the stone table of his makeshift workshop, he dove behind it and waited for the biggest, meanest explosion he had ever even heard of. He was pretty sure the table wouldn’t do him much good. He wasn’t sure ten miles of distance would.
Instead, he got a thwump. The seed suddenly stopped glowing and fell to the ground, something Tulland only learned about when he uncovered his ears, opened his eyes, and looked to see a perfectly conventional object laying in the dust like nothing had happened at all. He approached it cautiously, being careful not to let a single bit of mana or intent leak, even going so far as to suppress his own farmer’s sense.
The stick did nothing, and continued doing nothing until he bent down and carefully picked it up. Then, while it kept on with its new habit of inert non-behavior, the System of Aghli did its confused best to fill in the gaps.
Mystery Seed After a strange resonance improved your splicer’s power several times over, the device itself was consumed in the construction of this utterly bizarre seed. It is indeed a seed, if you were wondering. Systems see things by their categorical classifications for the most part, and it answers to every description seeds should. It’s a small object that, under certain circumstances, is guaranteed to grow into something different but related to it, something that will in turn produce seeds of its own and, possibly under another set of circumstances, continue the cycle of its species. But what is it really, you might ask. You reasonably want more details about what you have created, what its purpose is, and how it can be best used. As you might have guessed, that subject is a little harder to tackle. This is an object of enormous complexity made of an already-odd relic and a huge amount of power. All that was multiplied by the risk of creating it, which could have just as easily gone the other way and leveled a good portion of this continent. |
Tulland could just about hear the System sweating over what had almost happened. He felt for it. He still wasn’t sure if he would keep his lunch down, and his heart was pounding in his ears like a drum. It had been a close one.
The first thing we know for sure, then, is that this is an object of enormous potential. In the categorization system of items, there is a usually theoretical level of quality known as “special”. It is not necessarily better than legendary, but it often does things even a legendary item cannot. In all other cases, it is a superior class of item to anything else that exists, including the small handful of lesser legendaries this world knew before your arrival. Items also usually come with an appropriate level guidance, a wide range of ten or twenty levels of development during which the item would be useful and appropriately powered. This one has question marks where the numbers should be. That is not usual. It also comes with enormous restrictions. While the exact level range needed for this item is unknown, it gives off an aura of hunger, as if it is absolutely starving for energy in order to activate. At the same time, that hunger is both fragile and final. If you begin to feed it and are unable to sate its thirst sufficiently, it will simply disappear, crumbling to dust while creating no benefit at all. Or at least that’s probably what it will do. These are all educated guesses on the part of Aghli’s System. If this seems insufficient for your worries, consider that this is less a creation of this place than it is a collaboration between you at your most chaotic and The Infinite itself. One thing is sure. Only a farmer of your caliber and a similar background could hope to get one of these seeds to germinate. If The Infinite sending you here was an act of wisdom, the answers will be found in this seed. Which is, by the way, five seeds. Somehow. Don’t ask me. I’m just looking at the data. One last thing, delivered to me as a System to system message from The Infinite itself. It says you need to get pretty close for this to work. It said you’d ask how close, and he advised you to just guess. If the answer makes you happy, it says you should try guessing additional times until it doesn’t. |
“Point blank range, huh?” Tulland picked up the stick, which promptly split into five equally sized chunks of wood, each somehow about as big as the initial bit. He didn’t question it. “That’s not great.”
“What in the world, Tulland, do you think you are doing?” Necia appeared at the door, her hands on her hips. Her words were somehow not a question, but a condemning statement. “That caused earthquakes, you know. The wind was running away from this building. I don’t even know how that’s possible.”
Tulland looked sheepish. He held up the seed as way of explanation. It wasn’t a good one, but it was about all the explanation he had. Necia looked at it for a bit, blankly, then sighed.
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