Chapter 72: Risks
Cooking only a took a moment, which left some time for Tulland to take stock of the farm before Necia actually made it home. The first move was to plant the Clubber Vines, which would be a little burst of new strength just from farm quality. That took longer than Tulland liked, just because there was a deeper hole to dig than he was used to.
“Decent of you to give him a burial.” Ley watched as Tulland rolled the body of the archer he had killed into the hole, stripped of all of its equipment and most of its clothes. “Can’t say he deserves it.”
“I don’t think so either. But this is something different.” Tulland was doing his best to ignore the gravity of what he was up to, but he couldn’t afford to waste resources. If his Farmer’s Intuition had gained a full level just from telling him that basically all of his vines would enjoy human fertilizer, then it was an important thing. Subtly, and so Ley couldn’t see, he cut off a bit of flesh from his enemy to save in a bag and use later. It wouldn’t take much to run a couple of batches in the splicer and see what popped out, and he didn’t want to think more about how to store it until he could do just that. “This is for the farm. Don’t ask.”
“I won’t. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out why that might work. You can bury him all in one place like that?” Ley asked.
“The skill I use for farming says it would be better to… split him up. I don’t want to.” Tulland shook his head. “This will eventually work its way through all the soil. And I can plant briars right on top of it. It will be enough.”
“Can I be honest with you?”
“Sure.”
“You look like hell. You look like I did the first time I took someone down. If you think I’m judging you for not following that farming advice, I’m not. I’m impressed you even remembered to take the equipment off.”
“About that. Anything here you can use?”