Chapter 8: Razored Lunger
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.”