Infinite Farmer

The first stop was the trees. They were kind of everywhere except directly by the briars themselves, which seemed to compete with them for nutrients. Tulland had been somewhat in the forest since arriving at the briar patch, getting close enough to touch some trees and even to pump a Quickgrow into one or two.

It hadn't done anything visible, and had left him wondering why. His best guess was that either the trees were so slow-growing that Quickgrow couldn't affect them enough to be immediately visible, or else that they were so big already that the amount of magic he could output just wasn't enough, pound for pound, to matter.

This time, Tulland wanted to investigate that more closely. He headed to the closest tree, looking carefully for Razored Lungers as he did. It looked as if his briar-traps had cleared the nearby ones out for the moment, leaving him with a bit of room to work. His first move was to scatter several Lunger Briar seeds out, covering a broad area around the tree. One of his experiments had shown that even though Quickgrow wouldn't work until seeds were actually in contact with the soil, Enrich Seed was something that could be used beforehand as a sort of prep-work for eventual planting.

Tulland wasn't putting out any magical power on Quickgrow right now, since he could do it pretty quick if he needed to. But he knew that given enough time, the briars would root and grow on their own. For now, the seeds were sown into the ground plain as Tulland went straight to the trunk of the tree. In the few moments he had spent close enough to the trees to check them, he hadn't seen anything on them resembling a seed on any of them. No acorns, no pine cones, no fruits. He had not so much as a guess as to how these things actually reproduced.

And his worry was that they didn't at all. If other people had traveled through this zone, Tulland imagined that they were much stronger than him. But even while all of them would be tougher than him, some of them must have been weaker than others.

If they were very weak, they might spend more time in this zone. They might spend enough time to notice the briars growing, or changes in the prairie grass. If The Infinite was trying to maintain the illusion of realism, it would probably simulate things like seeds and pollination for quick-growing plants.

But in trees? It could probably ignore seeds and things for trees if it wanted to. Nobody would be around long enough to notice they weren't regrowing.

Of course, that was assuming this whole place wasn't real. And that the Dungeon System wasn't basing these trees on real plants somewhere. And that it cared about saving energy by being less than complete.

It was a whole host of questions and assumptions that Tulland didn't have answers for just yet. With no real way of knowing how fake this dungeon was or how completely it was simulated, Tulland was left with the task of painstakingly making sure he wasn't missing things he would need in the future. He started out by searching the ground near the base of the tree and a few others to make sure there weren't seeds that had been dropped, going as far as to rake the nearby ground by changing his Farmer's Tool to a hoe and seeing if he could turn something up.

That yielded just dirt, so he examined the branches again, turning up nothing on any of the trees. And by then, his time of easy, murder-free searching was over. Without much warning, a Razored Lunger burst from around a distant tree and ran at him.

Tulland grabbed for his club, which he placed leaning against a nearby tree, but badly fumbled the attempt and ended up with his club falling to the dirt as the enemy closed in. With his heart beating wildly in his chest, Tulland dived for the weapon and prayed he'd find enough time to dodge around the tree.

Before he could execute that plan, the briars on his arm jumped into action.

The briar vines weighed so little thanks to Tulland's newfound strength that he had almost forgotten they were there before both of them loosened from around his arms and more or less shot through the air at the enemy, keeping only a single loop tethered to Tulland's forearms for stability.

Nobody was more surprised than the Razored Lunger itself, which tried to abort jumping for its prey a moment too late and ended up in an awkward half jump, sliding across the forest dirt on its hind legs and looking a bit like a startled cat.

As Tulland jumped to the side to get out of its way, both vines swatted towards the animal. One missed outright, but the other caught the Lunger on its outstretched front leg and whipped it around towards Tulland. The Lunger panicked, clawing at the tree with its three free legs as it tried to right itself and get the leverage it needed to escape the briar.

It didn't work. The second briar came down and looped around its neck, before both of the plants detached from Tulland's body and began to worm around the Lunger's free limbs. A few moments later, the animal was pinned to the ground, growling and bleeding until Tulland had pity on it in the form of a strike to the skull with his club.

As the animal went limp, the vines continued to writhe and work on it. Tulland remembered what the description of the Hades Lunger Briars had said about regaining energy from prey, decided not to watch, and turned to examine the damage the Lunger had done to the tree.

I'm glad that wasn't aimed at me. It got pretty deep into the wood.

On the backside of a piece of bark that the Lunger had ripped loose, Tulland finally found what he was looking for. It was a small, round node, clearly separate from the bark despite being embedded in it. He pressed it out of the wood with his fingers, getting a system description when it finally broke free.