Why does it seem like The Infinite is the one speaking there?" Tulland asked, out loud this time. "In my system messages, I mean."
Because it is. I'm not the System of this place. Why would you think I was?
"You gave me my class and my equipment. It seemed as if you were fulfilling your function."
I was. That much, at least, is my obligation towards anyone this dungeon considers to be a child of my world. But most of the functions of this place are its own. I can influence, in some ways. I can advise. But only as a visitor might.
"Should you be telling me this?"
Tulland felt the System communicating what could only be described as a kind of shrug.
Why wouldn't I? You'll be dead soon enough. And even if you managed to delay that event, I'll end up with your power eventually. So long as you die in The Infinite, I'll be on the winning side of things. And humans tend to die, over a long enough time frame.
Tulland stared at the plant as the System droned on. It was greener than the rest of the briars, and looked a little something else that was hard to define. He couldn't think of a plant that nasty as friendly, exactly. But it seemed less actively malicious, at least.
"Hard to see how this is going to help." Tulland glanced at his status screen. "It didn't even level the Enrich Seed skill."
It wouldn't. Attacks don't level attacking skills either, at least until they do damage to their targets. This plant is not yet grown.
"I could make it grow, I guess." Tulland considered what it would feel like to cast another agricultural spell from his already empty tanks of energy. "But it would be about the last thing I could do."
It doesn't seem like much of a risk. Without some level of miracle, you won't survive anyway. It might be a mercy, in some ways, if you used the last of your energy and hastened things along.
Tulland sighed and stretched out his hand. The System was a betrayer and a murderer, but that didn't mean it was wrong in all ways. This was the thing he could do. He thought of his Quickgrow skill, and used it.
As the energy flowed out of him, Tulland felt something go very wrong. If his soul could have made a cracking noise, he was confident it would have. A pain welled up from so deep inside him that he couldn't begin to identify the source.
Oh my. That's interesting in a way you don't see very often.
As the System said its piece, Tulland blacked out once again, fully expecting it to be the last time.
—
Level up!
Level up!
Skill level up!
Skill level up!
Skill level up!
Skill level up!
Tulland's eyes were hazy almost to the point of blindness when he blinked them open. In his cloudy vision, he could see a bit of green ahead of him, and a bit of red, mixed together into an indistinct painting that bore no meaning to him. He was dizzy, and far beyond being able to rouse himself to care about the mess of notifications waiting to be read.
Tulland.
He ignored the System as best he could. He was too tired to care.
Tulland, listen to me. Eat the damn fruit! Now. This moment.
No fruit. Sleep.
If you sleep, you will die, you fool.
Is ok. Don't mind. Sleep.
Then I will find your uncle first. On my return, he will be the first I will make pay.
Tulland barely remembered his uncle. To the extent Tulland did, his uncle was a source of stew. And scolding. But mostly stew. Tulland's stomach cramped at the very thought of food.
System said something about eating, Tulland thought to himself. Where's the food?
I already told you, you idiot! In front of you. The big red thing in front of your face.
He reached for the fruit then, missing it on his first three tries and barely catching it on his fourth. With an effort that almost killed him, Tulland managed to break it loose from whatever held it, bruising it in the process and wetting his fingers with juice. He flopped his arm back towards himself and, by some miracle, got the fruit close enough to his mouth to close his jaws around it.
It's sweet.
Chew, you twit.
Tulland chewed, flooding his mouth with sugar as he worked his jaw back and forth. He was too weak to swallow, but some of the juice found its way down his throat anyway. His stomach growled as the faint trickle of nutrition hit it, and Tulland's arms and legs became all pins and needles as the tiny bit of sugar hitting his bloodstream gave his circulation just enough oomph to wake them up.
"What in the hell is happening?" Tulland swallowed down the rest of the fruit and flexed his hands. They felt terrible, but they worked again. "I feel like I'm coming back from the dead."
Close to it. Can you see?
Tulland blinked a few times. Things were still a bit fuzzy, but they were coming into focus. Above him, stretching to the sky, was a deep green plant, one that had two more fruits growing from it. He wasted no time reaching out and grabbing them, shoving them into his mouth and mashing them down to pulp before swallowing the lot of available food in one go.
It seems you can. What does the Dungeon System say of the plants?
Tulland looked. The description had changed substantially.
Hades Briar (Cultivated)
The usual Hades Briar is a thing of death. It cuts like a sword, and its fruits burn beings who are foolish enough to try to eat them. It is an entirely evil plant, one designed to do nothing but bring sorrow to those who run across it.
Yet somehow, that has changed. Drawing on the influence of the skills of a farming class, the fundamental nature of the plant has been changed as it took the first step towards domestication. The thorns grow just as sharp as they ever did, but nestled among them is a fruit of actual value, something that provides good without a more than equal amount of ill.
The identity and characteristics of this new plant are still in flux, and may change substantially as the circumstances around their creation continue to evolve.
And with that new description came an explanation for the notifications Tulland had seen. A new screen's worth of information slipped into his mind and attempted to explain what had happened.
Cultivation Successful!
For the cultivation of a new plant unknown to this world's agriculture, you have been granted a substantial amount of experience. The skills related to the cultivation efforts also advanced significantly.
"Huh." Tulland looked dumbly at the notification. "What does that even mean?"
It means you live. And that you have, against expectations, managed to draw lightly on the power of The Infinite to fuel your own growth.
"Ah." Tulland tried to stand, then sat back down heavily as his head continued to swim. But it was at least clear enough to think. "Though I don't understand why you helped me get the fruit. You can't touch my uncle. He's much too far into Church territory. Why lie? You could have just left me to die. It would have come soon enough."
Perhaps. But a difference of a day or so is short, in the way I reckon time. And you've piqued my curiosity.
"Oh? You aren't afraid I'll survive?"
No. Why would I be?
"So long as I do, you're stuck here. I could make it to a safe zone. I could stay there."
Ha! Is that what you were thinking, all this time? I've waited centuries for smaller opportunities than this. A lifetime in a safe zone makes little difference to me. And you will find The Infinite has ways of dealing with those who stall and loiter. It always compels them towards their eventual end. No, Tulland. I'll have what I want. The only question is how much I'll gain.
Tulland's body was still recovering, but his mind had cleared substantially. After a day's danger, he was beginning to realize that he had been a fool, just as the System suggested. In the heat of the moment and the shock of the change, it had never occurred to him to question whether the proven liar with access to his mind and practice in deceiving him might still be doing just that.
It seemed likely enough that the System had something to gain from bringing him here, and that it couldn't have whatever prize it sought until later. Perhaps that was when he died, or perhaps it wasn't. And it was possible the System got more rewards the longer he survived, with no possible way to lose out and no escape for Tulland.
But it also might not be so. Tulland might be able to find another way, somehow. Although he almost certainly wouldn't with the System reading and poisoning every thought he had.
Just as he considered evicting the System, something new happened.
No, Tulland. I'm your only hope here. You can't survive, but…
Tulland ignored him as he brought up a new notification that came before his eyes. This was different from the information screens that slipped into his mind. The screen was something real, or real enough as it floated in the air in front of him. And it was more than he had hoped.
Deactivate System Communications?
As a delver into The Infinite, communications with your world's System is a voluntary thing. If it is your preference, you may choose to transfer all of the normal functions fulfilled by your world's System to the Dungeon System in charge of the dungeon itself.
This will not completely sever your relationship with the System of your world, as it has claims on certain rewards related to your progress through The Infinite. You can, however, choose to limit your world System's access to your thoughts and limit the amount it is allowed to speak to you.
Would you like to do so now?
You would be a fool to pass up what little help I'm willing to provide you, Tull…
The very moment Tulland gave The Infinite the go-ahead to cut off the System's power, it did. He waited a few minutes, half expecting that the System was playing some elaborate prank. When it failed to talk, he eased the limitations enough to allow it to talk, while still restricting its access to his mind.
That was foolish, Tulland. Do you really think you can do this alone? Have I not been helpful thus far?
The minimum amount, maybe. Don't you think? Tulland thought rather than spoke. After a ten-second wait, the System spoke into his mind again in a tone dripping with annoyance.
You know I can't hear you. You've won that little victory. Congratulations. I didn't think The Infinite would inform you of that little fact so easily.
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Royal Road
SomethingOtherThanRain
Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon Progression LitRPG by R.C. Joshua
Chapter 8: Razored Lunger
A note from R.C. Joshua
2 chapters to go before we are done for the day
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Tulland turned off the communication channel to the System again. That was as good of confirmation as he'd get that he really could cut the System off. If everything was as it appeared to be, the Dungeon System that governed The Infinite was not inherently aligned with the interests of the System from his world. He wasn't sure that the enemy of his enemy was really his friend, but there was no harm in treating it that way for now.
If it all ended up being a trick, there wasn't a whole lot he could do about it anyway. He wasn't any worse off than before and on the off chance that everything was how it appeared to be, he now had a small possibility that there might just be some way out of this.
Or at least a way to keep the System from hurting his world. Even if there wasn't a way out of this situation for Tulland, and there probably wasn't, Tulland could try to keep the System from getting its payoff. To do that, he would have to survive long enough to see other people. To talk to them. The stories said The Infinite was an intersection between worlds, that people came to try themselves against the only challenge that never ended. Some of them had to know things he didn't. And maybe some of them knew how to beat the System.
At the least, he needed to know how the System sent him here. For all that the messages he had sent claimed he had been ordained for The Infinite, everything he had ever heard claimed that admission to this greatest of dungeons was a voluntary sort of thing. That, at least, was a mystery he'd need to work out.
But for now, Tulland needed to get to work. From what he had seen, there was no chance of him beating one of those Razored Lungers in normal combat. But he had some ideas of how he might take one in an unfair fight, given enough time. And being in the middle of one of these briar patches meant he might just have enough time.
After the better part of a day of cutting the briars, Tulland finally found water. He knew there must be some somewhere, given the size of the briar patch. The source of it ended up being an underground seep of sorts, a place where the water didn't make it to the surface in liquid form but merely dampened the ground.
Shifting his tool to a shovel, Tulland got to digging. Frequent applications of his Quickgrow talent kept his pet briar growing and producing fruits, and he was eating them as soon as they popped up. That gave him plenty of energy to dig at the seep until it was deep enough and wide enough that the water finally began to accumulate in the bottom.
Once that happened, he began to expand his operations a bit.
"All right, little seed. Get going." Tulland pushed one of a dozen cultivated Hades Briar fruit seeds into the ground, still wrapped in half-eaten fruit flesh. "Grow up big and strong. I need the experience."
For all his knowledge of classes, Tulland had never really learned much about being a farmer. Most farmers he knew of back home were unclassed, as the Church wasn't likely to use up one of their limited class slots on something that could be accomplished with fertilizer and muscle. But, it was hard to believe a farmer could advance his class in any other way besides farming. And with the pet briar's growth achievement rivaling the experience of defeating a couple thousand motes, Tulland saw that his class screen was backing up that idea as well.
Tulland Lowstreet
Class: Farmer LV. 3
Strength: 16
Agility: 16
Vitality: 13
Spirit: 10
Mind: 10
Force: 10
Skills: Quickgrow LV. 2, Enrich Seed LV. 2, Strong Back LV. 1
The new briars made true on Tulland's wish. After all, the original briars had covered about a square half mile here with very little resources. With a farmer class supporting the growth with magic, the cultivated briars were more or less springing out of the ground. They didn't grow very tall, bending over once they got to any substantial height, and spent of their growth invading each other's territories and becoming a tangle. But they did grow.
After a few days, Tulland was well-fed, well-hydrated, and going completely insane with boredom. His idea was simple enough. He was trying to grow briars in big enough numbers to force mass leveling. The stats he had added from the level-ups meant he could clear ground much faster, and every time he managed to push back the borders of his briar prison a little more, he'd plant more of the cultivated briars in that space.
But it was really, really dull work. Every briar granted him just a bit of experience, though just a trickle compared to what he had got for the first one.
But it's progress, and it's progress I can make without dying.
And then, finally, it happened. He made one last application of Quickgrow to a briar, waited until it matured, and found himself over the threshold of the next level.
Tulland Lowstreet
Class: Farmer LV. 4
Strength: 17
Agility: 17
Vitality: 16
Spirit: 10
Mind: 10
Force: 10
Skills: Quickgrow LV. 2, Enrich Seed LV. 2, Strong Back LV. 1
Most of Tulland's wounds had healed by now, and even his eye had stopped hurting. But his sight still stubbornly refused to mend. Now that he had an extra five stat points, he began putting them in vitality one by one, hoping that each point would make a difference but not wanting to waste a single one.
The first few points did nothing. But when he pushed from fifteen points to sixteen, he felt a slight itch in his eye socket. A couple moments later, vision started to return to his left eye. It wasn't much of a practical difference, since he could already see out of his right eye. But the feeling of wholeness he got from it was more than worth the cost.
The last two points went to strength and agility, which meant Tulland was about as strong as he'd be now, at least in terms of his body. There was no chance that he could get to the next level just by farming briars. The experience he got from the last few plants had slowed and he could feel the dungeon about to limit things soon. That meant he had to fight. A combat class, a real one, would have a sword in their hand, knowledge in their mind of how to use it, and a handful of support skills from their very first level to make sure they were ready for fights in The Infinite.
Instead, Tulland had a pitchfork. That was it. That setup was plenty for motes, but not for the challenges meant for the properly equipped. To have a chance in those, he had to cheat. Luckily, by now, he had a pile of cut briars that reached halfway to the stars. He started pulling them out one by one and sticking them, dry and hard, in the two rows of briars that extended away from the spot he had entered the patch. There was still a wall of briars between him and the outside world, and now he had extended a passageway from it, as tall as he was and stretching back 20 or 30 feet.
After that, he went to work on his own plants, the ones he had grown with his own hands and powers. He cut five or ten of them apart, then spent a while figuring out the best way to knot them together until he had a rope of sorts that he tied to the loose thorns in the walls. Then he was ready.
Walking down his aisle of thorns, he started cutting away the protection between him and the outside world. It was easy work, especially compared to what he had to work with before. Within a few minutes of cutting and shoving the debris of that work aside, he had a pathway to the outside.
Tulland had almost forgotten what the forest past his little prison cell looked like. The trees were an awful lot like trees on the outside, with branches, leaves, and bark. There was nothing bizarre about them, minus the purple light they were bathed in. Yet, that change was enough for them to look foreign, just different enough to grate on his psychology, letting him know he was in a place he shouldn't be without really giving his mind anything to grab onto as a solid why.
The beast that had chased him was nowhere to be seen. Gripping his pitchfork with both hands, Tulland crept forward a bit from the thorn hedge, looking left and right as he went and trying his hardest not to make much noise. And after a minute of looking, staying close to his enclosure but making more and more noise as he went, he didn't just find one Razored Lunger.
He found two. There were two of them this time.
Tulland turned and ran without a second thought, working his way back to the hallway he had built in the briars. The Lungers stayed on his heels, biting and yipping as they caught up. The extra points in agility and strength helped Tulland maintain a bit of his lead, but by the time he got halfway through the corridor of thorns, they were close.
That was just how he wanted it. Careful not to miss his chance, he stooped down to the ground where his makeshift rope sat, hooked it on his pitchfork, and pulled.
He had stacked the thorns into walls, but he had never claimed to have done a good job at it. With his makeshift ropes tangled up in the construction, a yank was all it took to shake them loose on the Lungers. Startled by the crack of the sticks as they broke, the Lungers tried to spring out of the way of the raining thorns. An unlucky one got tangled right near the middle while the other sprinted forward in vain, getting caught in the rope tangle less than a foot from the "room" Tulland had made in the patch. Tulland wheeled around to where it was tangled in the thorns, yowling like an injured cat, and started stabbing with his pitchfork. If these things could break out of the thorns, he didn't want to find out about it the hard way. That left him with limited time to make sure of things before they were down.
And he'd be damned if they weren't tough little things. Tulland could barely break the surface of their hide with the tines of the pitchfork, even with them holding still and waiting for him to try. After a few stabs that didn't do the job, he switched tactics, morphed the weapon into a shovel, and started clubbing them.
Even that didn't do much, but it did alert him to something that did. The normal briars were scratching the monsters, and even jabbing into them in a way that seemed to hurt. But his own briars, some of which had worked into the hedge or part of the rope in which the monsters were caught, were a different kind of thing. The monsters screamed whenever they touched those. The thorns cut through them like hot butter, and Tulland suddenly found himself glad that he had never accidentally poked himself with his pet briars.
Eventually, he made headway. Between the briars, his shovel, and plenty of time, he finally managed to put both of the animals down, wearing himself out in the process. When it was finally over, he was a bit sick seeing what he had done. But he was alive and after rebuilding the entrance wall with more cut briars, he found himself newly leveled.
It wasn't enough to celebrate. However good it was at its intended job, the Farmer's Tool wasn't much of a weapon. Five more stat points weren't to suddenly make him strong enough to kill off the little wolverine-like beasts that seemed to fill this forest.
They weren't meant to be taken care of without a class. That's clear now. Tulland laid on his back as he caught his breath, looking towards his little plot of thorn plants contemplatively. But I have a class. And it looks like that just might make a difference.
—
A few hours later, a Razored Lunger lifted its head and sniffed the air. Something smelled new. In its experience, that wasn't a thing that happened much. Recently, there had been a bit of stink around the area, some kind of new animal whose odor it instinctively reviled. This was different. This smelled good.
It crept cautiously closer. As curious as it was, the forest was not a place to be careless. There were threats even for his kind, and not all of them were obvious.
The new smell turned out to be coming from a plant, of sorts, one he hadn't seen before. It was sitting flat on a bit of ground, oozing juice that looked sweet and delicious. Glancing around for danger, it crept cautiously closer. There was a faint smell of the new animal around. The food might have been his, maybe it was dropped. The Razored Lunger had seen that kind of thing before. But the animal wasn't here now. Nothing was. The food was free for the taking, and safe in that confidence, it sprung forward.
Then the ground went away.
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