Infinite Farmer

Hours and hours of filthy work later, Tulland was done mixing up his soil. It wasn't just a matter of the slop from the trench, even though that was a huge component of the work. Farmer's Intuition kept insisting something was missing, and eventually, Tulland figured out that the answer was bucket after bucket of sand from the river.

Once he was done with that, he could still tell there were several little components that were missing, all of which he had no clue how to get. He didn't even know what they were, besides a slight dream-like implication of the general feel of them. They'd have to wait until he had a better sense of how all this worked.

But he would have a better sense, eventually. So far, he had been growing entirely separate gardens on every floor, temporary things that he felt were good enough for the moment but that hadn't promoted developing strategies or experimentation as much as he would have liked. That was changing now. Now he could work from a long-term standpoint, at least as compared to his usual perspective. That was potentially a very good thing.

But for it to be a really good thing, he needed more seeds in his satchel than he already had. And that meant going shopping.

"No, don't come anywhere near me." Necia was in a far corner of the house, sitting on a rough stool someone had hacked out of a log. "The place already smells bad enough without you dragging the worst parts of it towards me. Did you look into having a bath?"

Necia had, a long time ago now, explained to Tulland that most people were buying their rations from the system store. More recently, Licht had explained that doing so was a trap of sorts. A really good hunting expedition could produce a lot of experience, but the cost of buying food went up a lot past the fifth-floor barrier. The alternative was to forage, which cost time and energy that could have otherwise gone toward experience gaining. These were the two options for food available until the tenth floor, which was the furthest anyone could climb while still retaining the ability to report back.

The merchant Licht had been talking with wasn't, in the end, a merchant. He was just someone who had gotten lucky enough to have an excess of food, which meant he was saving his own experience and also gaining points from other adventurers. Licht, on the other hand, was running afoul of the food-experience trap. He had been spending more and more time and experience to stay fed after entering the safe zone. If things kept up, he would have started shelling out more experience than he gained. Then, he'd be sunk, destined to get weaker and weaker for the sake of food until he became a meal for something else.

None of this had ever been a risk for Tulland, who had zero access to the food menus from The Infinite. But he had been able to get just a taste of the costs when the various windows related to housing popped up.

But it was only now, when he began to dream of a good bath, that he was finally able to confirm the existence of system-provided purchasable items for himself.