Broken Lands

The area beyond the tunnel was a bowl-shaped depression with a house to the left and a field to the right. The field was clearly prepared, with a series of lumps in a grid pattern that were a darker brown than the soul that surrounded them. Between the house and the field was a well with a winch at the top, but when they checked there was no bucket to carry the water.

Everything was clean and freshly taken care of, which told Leo that this was an area specifically prepared for them. The story here wasn’t going to be accessible from anywhere else; it was specifically tied to them finding the seeds.

Well, probably. He supposed it was possible that someone could fly up and around the edges of the valley and find the house then search and find the tunnel so that they could follow it to the seeds and then come back … but that seemed unlikely. Didn’t it?

It would have been unlikely back home, because the end of the tunnel with the seeds also led to a fake house, and there wasn’t anything interesting in the fake house, which meant it was an entry point. He wasn’t so sure it was unlikely here, and Reko and Arvinn were of no help. They did have stories about people sometimes finding Challenge chains in the middle of the chain, but when that happened they usually didn’t get the full credit that was needed to advance to the branches.

Leo didn’t want to hear that argument again, so he asked where they thought they should go. There were no other structures visible in the tiny bowl valley, which meant they needed to head to either the house or the fields, and there wasn’t much in the fields.

Arvinn headed towards the house without saying anything. Leo glanced at Reko and he could swear the flying fish shrugged at him. Leo nodded, then they both turned to follow. The house was also the place Leo thought was the most likely, and apparently Reko felt the same way. Arguing that Arvinn should have answered the question would just make him look stupid, even though it was the truth.

The house finally had the fight Leo wanted. It was a fun one, with dozens of tiny human-shaped plushies made of cloth ambushing them in every room. The plushies were really well made, too; each and every one of them looked like a different person. They also moved differently, even though they were only about five inches tall and could sort of fly … well, more like jump really, really well. They had different weapons and some had magic; others built barricades and a few even ordered the others around.

It was enough to push Leo into his dragon form, because it was kind of a pain to fight in tight quarters with a sword when your opponents didn’t have the same problem, but once he did it was easy enough. Arvinn and Reko took up positions behind him and Arvinn carefully stabbed things with her spear while Reko pelted them with telekinesis. They had to shelter behind his armored bulk whenever the cloth-people’s attacks came, but none of it could penetrate.

One of them did manage to hit his eye. That was uncomfortable; sure, it didn’t actually break his crystalline eyeball, but it was a heck of an irritant until he managed to remove the arrow. After that, they seemed to focus on his head, trying to hit his eyes again.

Or maybe they’d been doing that the whole time and he only noticed after the first hit? Leo wasn’t actually sure about that.

Well, either way, it was a fun series of fights. The house was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, as so many houses were in dungeons, so it almost felt like they’d completed a whole dungeon level by the end. Arvinn called it “a zone” and seemed relieved to have the fight.

It took Reko’s explanation for Leo to understand that the long series of fights when they hadn’t been fighting probably meant that “finding the tunnel” was a Challenge, “fighting in the House” was another Challenge, and “whatever they had to do with the seeds” was a third Challenge - they were all linked together but different enough to “count” as separate zones and therefore distinct Challenges. It sounded a little arbitrary to Leo; back home, the secret door and tunnel would have been a transition rather than a dungeon level, but he trusted the locals to know their World Tree better than he did. Dungeons had a lot of freedom for stuff like that back home, too, especially when they weren’t increasing the area’s difficulty.

Well, dungeons that had the room did, anyway. It was one of the reasons a lot of dungeons spread out; some dungeons were even large enough with enough areas that people thought they were multiple dungeons. That required a lot of people to visit the dungeon, though, so they were pretty unusual on most planets.

Once they finished dealing with the cloth people, they found a cloth cage hanging from the rafters at the back of the room that held another cloth plushie person. He looked old, with long white hair and wrinkles that Leo had no idea how the cloth could manage, but it definitely did. His clothing looked well-worn, as well, but the real clue was that he wore a pair of gloves identical to the ones they’d found in the tunnel.

He was The Gardener. He had to be.

Naturally, the bucket for the well was upside down under the cloth prison. There was no question that the house and the garden were linked together.

When they released the Gardener from the cage, he told them they were welcome to stay in the house while they were growing the Hearthtrees and that they could plant them now, but if they did, they’d have to be ready to defend them immediately. Leo half-expected the other two to want a rest, which they did, but half an hour was enough; they didn’t want to give up the rest of the day.

That was the key, apparently. They had to defend the Hearthtrees “during their growing periods” but not otherwise. The Hearthtrees wouldn’t grow at night and would only grow for a couple of hours after they were planted and each time they were watered. There were other instructions, a lot of them, but the Gardener was happy to repeat them.

The final instruction didn’t come until after the Gardener told them to add the magical soil they’d found to the water. It was fertilizer as well as soil, “everything the Hearthtrees need to grow.” Leo asked if that was what the note on the bag meant when it said to “give a gift of yourself.”

The Gardener grinned, but all he would say was that if they wanted to add something to the trees, adding it to the water was a good idea - but that they should only add each thing to the water for one tree. This was Test Plot Three, and Test Plot Three could not grow two of the same tree at the same time. The magical soil wouldn’t influence the trees the same way a “gift” could; it was simply necessary for the trees to grow at all.

It took some more questions, but the final answer was that if they hadn’t asked, they would have been able to successfully grow only one Hearthtree, even if more than that survived the assault. The fruit of that Hearthtree would be no different from the fruit of a Hearthtree grown outside; it was valuable simply because Hearthtree fruit was valuable and difficult to grow in quantity. The seeds, similarly, were valuable because they were perfectly gathered and ready to plant and would remain in that state for a couple of years. Since only one in a hundred Hearthtree seeds would sprout normally, and at least half of those would not live to grow fruit, having seeds that were two or three times more likely to sprout in the first place was useful.

The magical fertilizing soil could not be removed from the World Tree. It would lose its magical properties within hours if they tried, long before a Hearthtree could be grown with its help. Leo couldn’t say he was surprised; it sounded like dungeon magic, where the dungeon simply created whatever it needed to make the scenario work. Dungeon magic didn’t work without the dungeon actively managing it. If he was right, the soil wasn’t actually special in the first place, other than being a sort of a “key” to making the dungeon do its thing and have the trees grow much, much faster than they should.

The Gardener admitted that losing all of the trees to the assault wasn’t all that rare, but most groups managed to save one or two by abandoning the others so it was not often that people noticed the limitation. Those who did usually assumed that the survivor was empowered by the others’ deaths, which was not true but was also something the Gardener didn’t argue about.

He refused to answer questions about what they should give as gifts, whether there were actually other test plots, or really anything other than how to make this particular Test Plot grow Hearthtrees. There was one additional trick he told them: the watering can was not nearly as simple as it looked. It had compartments for the magical soil and each “gift” that could be triggered as the plants were watered. It was pretty easy to use, but Leo was convinced they wouldn’t have figured it out without asking.

The only other thing the Gardener was willing to tell them was what monsters they would face.

And that was how Leo found himself watering trees instead of fighting monsters. Well, okay, he was also killing monsters when they arrived, but that was easy. He just had to notice them digging their way out of the ground and stab them. Any of the three of them could have done that.

Well, Arvinn could. Reko had more trouble with the ground-monsters; his telekinesis was good but he couldn’t quite put the same sort of force behind it and that made it hard for him to crack the chitin. He was much better at taking on the swarms of fist-sized bugs; he could lift clouds of dirt that completely confused them and then direct Arvinn to their locations. He couldn’t coordinate that way with Leo, which meant Leo was on the ground dealing with the ones that dug their way out of the dirt. It worked, but watering trees. Really.

Leo sighed and watched as the trees gained another two feet in height in only a couple of hours. It was impressive how quickly they grew. If Leo had to guess, they were aging a year or so with each watering session. In the end, it took only a couple of days of regular watering with short breaks for rest between the sessions to get the trees to where they had not only fruit but ripe fruit.

They each picked things to add for a third of the trees. It was actually pretty hard to come up with five different choices each; it was pretty obvious the “gifts” should be magical, but what?

Leo’s gifts were his mana, his blood, a toxin resistance potion Ci’an insisted on giving him, a fragment from one of his draconic horns (which was magical and would grow back, even if Arvinn said it made him look “unbalanced”), and a few of his feathers. The horn and feathers had to be ground up, of course, which was a pain, but he was pretty sure they’d work.

Arvinn and Reko both called it “unfair” that so many of his “gifts” came from his body. They weren’t magical, or at least they claimed they weren’t. He pointed out that there was no reason they couldn’t also do the mana, blood, and feathers … though he did have to teach them how to infuse something solid with mana, since they couldn’t turn their mana into granules the way he could. All of those things were naturally magical, with sympathetic magic if nothing else. Once that was settled, they were each able to find a couple of things in the gear they’d packed that they could add as “gifts.”

All fifteen of the trees survived. Most of them had dozens of fruit, but it was the one Leo fed his blood to that grabbed most of his attention. It had only three “fruits,” and they weren’t fruit at all. They were crystals - one mostly blue, one a varied green, and one purple, at least mostly. They were also three different shapes, but that didn’t matter. He knew exactly what he was looking at.

Those three fruits were dungeon cores. Dungeon cores didn’t grow on trees … usually, at least. The fact that they talked to him when he picked them only confirmed the truth.

The dungeon cores didn’t feel like much of a reward, if he was honest. He was going to have to find homes for them now; they were a responsibility, not a reward.

The other Hearthtree fruits were probably good; they wouldn’t know for sure until they were examined by someone who knew more about them. It was quite a haul, at least, which partly made up for having to find homes for dungeon cores.

The Gardener was happy and promised to take care of the Hearthtrees they’d grown. He even said that they might well find the grove in the future, if they looked for it. Leo was pretty sure he wouldn’t, but Arvinn and Reko didn’t seem surprised. It was apparently entirely possible for Challenge chains to continue on later branches. It didn’t quite sound like that to Leo, but what did he know?

It was enough that they had a doorway out of the roots. Leo was completely ready for some time off from watering trees.