Infinite Farmer

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."

Tulland's farm had been growing strong, but had reached a point of diminishing returns. The individual briars were about as big as they could productively get, and the trees only grew slowly. Theoretically, he could spend as much time pouring magical power into them as he wanted, but he would only get the use of them for two days once he moved on to the next floor. That just wasn't worth it as a non-permanent buff.

Outside his farm was a slightly different story. There, he had planted briars using what meat he could from the Forest Duke, and some other materials he pulled from more digestive parts of its body. In addition to that, he had planted one more sapling. Ignoring his farm now, he sat for a few hours and dumped every bit of magical power he could make into that one smaller patch of growth.

At the end, he had a dozen Lunger Briars and one very healthy Ironwood sapling that was both thicker and heavier for its size than the last sapling had been.

He carefully harvested all of them, taking his time cutting through the sapling before refining the cut end down to a point that was, true to the name, almost as hard as iron.

That's more vines than you can carry. Do you plan on stowing them?

"No because I'm not stupid. Watch this."

Tulland's armor was trash, and there was little he could do about that. But his vines were pretty tough. The thorns made them unwieldy, but he had recently contemplated the fact that there was no law that vines had to have thorns literally everywhere. He trimmed them carefully on one side of a few of the vines with his Farmer's Tool, then wound them around his biceps. He tried it. The thorns that were left got in the way a little, but not enough that he would be seriously hampered.

Trimming in the same way, he wound one around his neck and head, leaving a bit of space around his mouth and eyes but mostly covering everywhere else. The helmet was much more restricting, but he had no illusions of truly bobbing and weaving through any expertly thrown attacks. He would deal with the feeling of wearing a neck brace if it meant a bit more survivability.

His chest was the most trimmed of the vines, since he still needed to be able to drop his arms to his sides and move them unencumbered. It took him a while to do, but in the end Tulland had the plants trimmed in such a way as to have spikes facing forwards and backwards from him, but nowhere else. And for his forearm vines, he left the spikes completely intact. Those were his attacking vines, as far as he was concerned. They would be off of him almost immediately whenever an actual combat kicked up.

Tulland's plan was to put a vine on his calves, thighs, ankles, hip, elbow, and any other body part he could fit. As Tulland started working on his legs, the Dungeon System told him it had other plans.