Infinite Farmer

"Dirt, Tulland. Real dirt. It's a miracle." Necia's voice was dry and flat. "I've never seen the like. The prophecy has been fulfilled."

"Haha. You have to know how big of a deal this could be, right?" Tulland asked.

"I do. It's just funny." Necia leaned over and gave him a squeeze around his shoulders. "Don't let me keep you here. Go look at your dirt. Let me know what you find."

Tulland immediately slurped down the last bit of his food, then walked to the newly filled soil pail. Even from a few paces away, he could tell it was good stuff. The normal soil in safe zones was a five on some one-to-ten soil scale and the worse soils he had seen in the swampier or more desert-like floors were a two.

"This stuff is like an eight." Tulland said, letting a loose handful of dirt flow between his fingers. "Maybe an eight and a half."

"That's nonsense."

"It's not. I'll explain what I mean later." Tulland took the soil directly over to his farm patch with a bemused Necia in tow. "I'm going to dig up all these briars. I need you to hold them."

"Sure."

Tulland took the bucket and set it on the ground, then took his Farmer's Tool shovel and portioned out a big lump of soil from a nearby pile. Carefully dumping his bucket so as not to lose any precious high-quality stuff, he started stirring them together with his shovel, thoroughly mixing in the magic soil with the only-slightly-less-magic corpses of his soil-based enemies.

"What are you up to?"

"Well, it's only one bucket, right? These briars are my highest value plants. I'd like to do a whole garden entirely made out of this soil, but there just isn't enough of it. So I'm mixing it with the soil that everyone brought back for me."

The army of dirt-men wasn't the best soil Tulland had ever seen, or even the best he had ever made for himself. But it was pretty good stuff, and the resultant mix was much better than the soil he had been using on this floor so far. The only question was what plants to give it to, but the clear winner was his briars of all different varieties. Overall, they contributed more points than anything else by far.

Tulland carefully uprooted each of his briars, leaving enough soil around the root structures to make sure they'd survive the process. He had tried this before, only to find that most of his plants had a maximum of a few minutes out of the soil before the System started considering them dead. He figured it was a stealthy limitation on his class, and usually, it didn't matter that much. Today, it put a hard time limit on what he was trying to do.

Handing each of the briars to Necia as he pulled them out, he then left her holding the huge pile of them as he carefully excised all the normal soil from the area then filled in the rectangular cavity with the new, bucket-juiced soil. He added the briars back as he went, pleased to see he only lost a couple members of the weaker varieties from uprooting them.

Once they were all back in the soil and re-watered, his farmer's intuition was happily informing him the vines were in a much, much better situation. Even the Chimera Sleeve vines he had replanted in the soil after their time hunting dirt monsters seemed to be thriving.

"Those seem livelier." Necia pointed at the chimeras. "The new ones. Any reason for that?"

"I've been trying to figure that out. The Infinite lets them live and level out of the soil. That was part of some class features it took away from me, once upon a time. I'm not sure why it gave them back now."

"Were they used to drink blood and level while they were fighting?"

"Something like that. Although these seem to level from killing, rather than eating. And they won't drop seeds even if they die out there. I have to be involved with the growing process. Probably to keep them from taking over the world."

"Is that that big of an advantage?"

"Right now? Yeah. Those Chimera Sleeve vines grew to level three already."

Experience tales at My Virtual Library Empire