Infinite Farmer

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.

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.

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.