Infinite Farmer

The next day, Tulland woke up to a truly monumental number of notifications of remote kills he had done almost nothing to earn. He read through them just far enough to get to the experience cap notification, then lost interest.

"I think that's about it for me on this floor. No reason for me to stay here any longer. I'm capped and there aren't any interesting plants. Not that we can't stay as long as you need to," Tulland said when he noticed Necia stirring awake as well.

Necia yawned in her smaller form, which looked exactly like how Tulland imagined a princess would look like in the morning.

"Then I'll get the easy pickings. It's still weird to me that you cap out so soon, for the record."

"Well, that's the nature of the class, right? It was meant for Farmers. Killing vermin is part of that job, but it's not like they were ever supposed to level by fighting. They were supposed to farm."

"You don't do that much farming either."

"Yeah. Well. That's sort of the trouble. As near as I can tell, it was probably okay if farmers took forever to grow their levels. And they could grow huge fields of crops, sometimes. So they'd spend months and months growing thousands and thousands of plants, and eventually they'd get paid out in experience. One big harvest." Tulland threw his hands wide to indicate how big. "I can't do that here. Even when I overgrew a big portion of the whole first level, the experience I got from it wasn't much."

"I don't understand, then. How are you leveling so far?"

"It's a big combination of things." Tulland stuck up his hand. "Killing things, just normal grinding, is a big chunk of it. Growing matters, even if it only matters a little. And the rest of it is weird stuff. Growing stuff I'm not supposed to grow, mostly. I think inventing a new plant is a much bigger deal for a Farmer than you might imagine."

"So why not do more of that?"

"Because I can't. Or at least I can't do it on demand. The first time I did it, it was an accident. The second and third times, with the Giant's Toe and Giant's Hair, it was sort of on purpose. But I think I got lucky. Almost everything else has been from subjugating plants that don't really want to be cultivated."

"Seems to be working well enough." Necia patted his hand reassuringly. "You're carrying this floor, at least."

"Yeah. But this is about as good of a situation as we could ask for. I'm going to need more than what I have to keep fighting. I just don't know how to get it."

Necia looked down at her sword arm, and smiled weakly. "You and me both. But I think we at least know our first steps."

"Which are?"

"We get some of this grass." She patted the useless, bland ground cover underneath them. "And as much dead slime as we can carry home for your farm. And from now on, we keep an eye out for the weirdest stuff we can. Together."

They set out to do just that, but not before stopping to harvest hundreds of briar-fruit seeds, which Tulland enriched before they tossed them any place that wasn't already in near vicinity to a patch of the killer briars. Tulland's luck in finding living slimes wasn't any better that day then it had been the last. They did find a large amount of their remains, enough to fill both their packs, but it was only an hour or so into their day when Necia went to go look for slimes herself, leaving Tulland to his own devices.

What followed was one of the most mind-bendingly dull days he had lived through in The Infinite. He went back to work harvesting fruits for their seeds, then pushed in one direction planting them until he finally hit an invisible barrier that kept him from going any further.