Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

The bath was as terribly cold as it had been before, and Tulland was horrified to find he was getting used to it. It couldn’t hurt him, and his body seemed to be in the beginning stages of realizing just that and losing all of its normal reaction to the cold. In any case, he was able to rinse his clothes, scrub them to acceptable cleanness with river sand, wash the worst of the stink out of his boots, and scour his skin and hair to almost the standard he had kept them back on Ouros within just several minutes, all while never really getting fully naked.

That was town-standard, according to Licht. Most people were respectful, and local customs differed, but it was essentially agreed that nobody would get too mad about an accidental glance from the safe zone as long as nobody put on too much of a show.

In the distance, he could see White minding his shop, which meant that White could see him. It was the only reason he felt safe enough to do it.

Tulland carried his gear back under his arm, determined to stay in the house for the next few days anyway. He might as well be comfortable, and his armor wasn’t all that compatible with that. It was something he was hoping to remedy.

“Hey, Necia. Could you do me a favor?” Tulland asked.

“Sure. So long as you make more food.”

“Deal. Could you crush some of these? I want to see how they break.” Tulland dropped a bunch of the orange-tree pits on the ground in front of her. “I’m hoping they shatter in a sort of clean way.”

“Yeah, I don’t know.” Necia turned one over in her hand, looking at it from several angles. “There are no real joints in these things. It’s like they are rocks.”

“Give it a shot anyway. Hit it with your sword or something.”

After setting the nut on a rock, she brought the helmet down on it, swung with her hand like an awkward hammer. The first hit didn’t do much, so she brought it down again and again until finally the pit broke. When it did, it basically detonated.

“Abysses of the damned!” Ley ducked his head as several tiny particles of metal-hard fruit pit pelted him. “What are you two even doing?”

“Trying to break apart these nuts. For Tulland.” Necia picked up the biggest remaining fragment, which was somewhat smaller than her thumbnail. “I might have gone a bit too hard.”

“I guess. Did you even etch it first?”

“Etch?”

“Look.” Ley came over and picked up one of the pits, took out his dagger, and dragged the point across it in a circle several times until a bright, scratched line became visible in the surface. “Hit it now. Try to keep roughly in line with the etch itself.”

Necia frowned, but picked up her helmet again anyway. This time, the nut not only broke on the first hit, but broke mostly on the line Ley had etched, Tulland picked up one of the halves, which was now the shape of a tiny, hollow bowl.

“That did it. Now I just need… damn. I wish I had ever paid attention to what crafters do.” Tulland pulled some string out of his bag, the thinnest rope he could make from his Wolfwood leather. It was tough stuff, or at least tough enough for what he had in mind, but there were problems actually making it do what he wanted. “Now, how am I going to tie these things? I want to make sort of a string of them.”

“Well, there are knots that do that.” Ley picked up one of the seeds and closed his fist around it. “They’d clasp it like this. Would that work?”

“Probably not. This is for armor, and my rope is much less good than my other plants. It would just get cut.”

“Then you are going to want to bore holes into things. Which is harder,” Ley said. “Actually, I might have something that can do that.”

Ley’s pack was a bit bigger than Tulland thought made sense for a hiding, sneaking type of warrior, but he was glad the Spymaster had it when Ley reached in and pulled out two or three entire Stumper tusks.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“We never broke one of these. Whatever they are made out of, it’s pretty durable stuff. And they are sharp. If you take the inside of that seed and move it back and forth, it will drill through eventually. Probably. But it’s gonna take time.”

Tulland felt like he was up for the challenge until the first seed took him twenty minutes to drill through on each end. His hands were already a little sore from doing it, though the tusk was holding up just fine.

“This is going to be a long week.” Tulland flopped back and groaned. “Is it worth it?”

“If it keeps you alive, almost anything can be worth time. Do you have anything better to do than that?” Necia asked.

“Besides farming? No.”

“Then do it, Tulland. And I’m going to sleep for an entire day. I’ll help you break more of those apart beforehand, though.”

A few minutes work left Tulland with a big pile of seed-halves and a whole lot of prep work to do, but as had been pointed out, it wasn’t like he wasn’t in wait-and-grow mode for a while anyway.

Five hours later, he was still working by the fire, a growing amount of newly bored seeds next to him. His hands were raw, which was nothing his regeneration wouldn’t take care of. The real bottleneck was his mind, which just wouldn’t let him continue on as he had been. With a sigh, he crawled to his bedroll and slipped off to sleep.

—

“That’s a weird one. Why didn’t you make it normal?”

“Normal?” Tulland’s uncle was busy tying off the last few knots of a big, circular net, not just circular on a flat plane but looking like it would be spherical if inflated. All the knots were wrong, somehow. All the openings in the weave were weird. Everything was off, at least to Tulland.. “Why isn’t this normal?”

“It’s like that sword from the book. It just looks weird. LIke, things should look like the things they are for,” Tulland claimed.

“Ah. So like when you were mad about my fishing knife.”

“It’s too thin. Too pointy and triangular.”

“Right. For once, I know what you mean.” His uncle wiped the sweat off his hands and started leafing through a shelf nearby. “If I still have it, I’ll show you why I understand what you’re talking about. Oh, here it is. Good.”

His uncle brought down an ancient, well-worn book on machinery from a shelf, and opened it directly to the page he seemed to want. “Here. Look at this bow.”n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

The bow in question was a crossbow, one that looked as wrong to Tulland as it seemed to look to his uncle.

“When I was a boy, I looked at this picture a lot. It has a crank instead of a pull. It has a trigger that doesn’t look like a trigger. I finally broke down, found some retired warrior in a pub I wasn’t supposed to be in, and asked him. You know what he said?”

“What?”

“He said the normal kind of crossbow is good and all, but this kind will put a bolt through a monster tortoise from a mile away. That longbows were for distance, that shortbows were for horsemen, that crossbows were for guards, and that this was for specialized use.”

“It still looks wrong.”

“So does this net, honestly. I understand. It doesn’t look like it should. But it’s for catching swimming snails. It can’t be like a normal net, or it wouldn’t catch them. Tools are tools. What’s important is that they do what they’re supposed to do well.”

“Even if you look like a fool?”

“A fool is a man who comes home without a fish when he could have come back with a full net. Remember that, Tulland. Whatever you do, don’t let your eyes tell you how it should go. Let your results teach you.”

—

Waking up, Tulland shook off the sleep and looked with disgust at the propped-up tusk he had been using to bore holes in his seed-halves. Last night, he had been too tired to calculate it out, but today he could do the rough math and know that he had literal days of work ahead of him to do everything he needed to do.

And that’s if Primal Growth can keep up with the pits I’ll need. Tulland threw an enhancement at the Stonefruit tree as well as a few choice plants in his farm he wanted to make sure were doing well. Luckily, the three he was most concerned with were doing just fine.

Tulland opened his farming screen to find his power level was now at a round 950, higher than he had expected to get on this trip home and still with nine days of growing to go. With some notifications left to look at, he was hoping to see some signs that he might push it even further. To his delight, he did.