Chapter 21: Second Floor
I don’t understand what you hope to accomplish here. You are burning time. You’ve lost a week of your month already.
“Yeah, well, you aren’t really all that trustworthy, are you?” Tulland asked back.
Tulland leaned on his shovel and looked at his work in satisfaction. After some short experimentation, he had confirmed that he could sense the distance limits of his farm, and had painstakingly traced out the circle in the open field before beginning his planting. Mostly it was just briars, grown from his normal Hades Lunger Briar stock. He had enhanced each seed as much as his skills would allow, and had planted each in a combination of its own fruit and the meat of Razored Lungers.
At the center and edges in each of the four directions, he had planted an Ironbranch seed. Tulland still couldn’t do anything to manipulate these seeds, including enhancing them, but he took that as a good sign for their overall quality as far as his Broadcast skill was concerned. He did what he could for them with fertilizer and water, then left them in the soil.
And then came the hard, boring part. After hunting up enough fertilizer and planting all his seeds, Tulland spent a full two days using Enhance Plant again and again, hitting his entire farm and a handful of plants just outside it. Between uses, he would go hunt more meat to feed to his Lunger Briars, which they greedily accepted.
You will run out of time.
“Maybe, but it really doesn’t matter how fast I go if I die. See, that’s the trick here. I need to not die. And any time I spend not running for my life or almost bleeding out on the other side of that exit is time gained.”
Still. You must be bored. Nervous.
“Sure. But guess what? That’s fine. I’m almost done anyway. I just wanted you to see this next part. Because that’s the part you really aren’t going to like.”