Chapter 11: Hades Lunger Briar
Tulland woke up on the ground, thankful to have just enough points bolstering his vitality that this was only uncomfortable as opposed to actually hurting his muscles and bones. He kept his eyes closed for just a moment, wishing he could talk with his tutor in some way or another right now. The old man might not have been young enough to help much with the fighting, but Tulland was eighty percent sure he knew about things like farming.
He knew about a lot of things.
When Tulland finally opened his eyes, he was in a weird jungle. Every one of the plants had sprouted, which wasn’t surprising. He half suspected that once juiced with his farming powers, these briar weeds would have grown on a pane of glass. At least for a while anyway.
He stood and walked over to the least interesting of them. The briar seeds that were only enhanced by his skills were a bit bigger and a bit stronger. Something about how they looked rubbed him the right way, at least to the extent normal plants could. They were a little bit hardier and healthier. If they had been food, he would have assumed they would feed people better. As deadly spiked plants, they seemed like they might spike things a little more sharply and viciously.
Nothing amazing. Next.
Watering seemed to be generally good for the plants, and all the plants he had watered were doing a bit better than the ones without water. The ones he had planted in their own fruit pulp did even better than that, and kept improving with more pulp until they had access to two or more fruits worth of the stuff. More fertilization of that kind didn’t seem to help. These vines were thicker and greener, and when Tulland reached out and touched them with his hand, they were also just a bit more flexible. It was almost to the point that he could have used them as a rope as-is, without cutting or twisting any strands together at all.
But it was the monster-fed vines that changed the game. Tulland had seen the moving things after he woke up, and verified that they couldn’t actually move from their rooting spots before approaching them.
It is foolish for you not to have looked at this first. The others are just briars. These are something new.
“You think I don’t know that? It’s incredibly boring in here, System.” Tulland was going to milk this entire experience for all it was worth, entertainment-wise. If that meant turning back on the System for a bit, so be it. It likely knew something Tulland didn’t as well. “Now, what am I looking at here?”