In the swamp, the wolves were king. There were so animals that lived there that The Infinite didn't acknowledge as monsters, and not a single one of them could do anything about it when the wolves were on their trail. Today, one particular wolf was wandering through the swamp tracking one of the smaller rodents, slowly closing in on the burrow where it made its ho.
The wolf stopped in its tracks as a new sll crossed over the scent-trail the swamp rat had laid down. Whatever this sll was, it was new to the wolf. But it was a lot of sll, as odors went. It ca from a bigger animal, one that promised far more calories for the wolf's trouble than the rat could provide. Without much consideration, the wolf left the lucky rat to its own devices and started walking after its new quarry.
Tulland wasn't hard to track. The wolf made a beeline towards him without a single bit of hesitation, coming halfway to the tree he was crouching behind in just ten or fifteen seconds. Tulland checked his armor over one last ti, took a deep breath, then stepped out from behind the tree, hitting every single briar on his body with enhancents as he did.
Go. Get him.
The wolf shied back for just a split second as its prey ca into view, then pressed its feet into the ground as it sprung towards the promise of easy-pickings human at that Tulland represented. At the sa ti, six vines uncurled off Tulland's body and rose to et the wolf, who had committed far too much weight to the attack to get out of their way as they reached for its fur.
Tulland swayed to the side as the distracted wolf swished past him, barely catching his chest with one of its sharp, hooked claws. It hurt like hell, but wasn't anything Tulland couldn't take, and nothing that put him in any real danger.
As the wolf flew by, it picked up four of the six vines. From experience, Tulland knew the vines worked better when they had a bit of ti to orient themselves, to dig deep into an animal without having to worry about its active attempts to shake them off. If Tulland could give them that ti with his ineffectual attacks, then it hardly mattered that the attacks themselves sucked. The briars would make up for it.
Tulland pivoted, sending a few drops of blood flying as he spun in place and brought his club to bear in the general direction of the wolf. Like the Forest Duke, the wolf had no way of knowing just how slapped-together Tulland's arsenal was, and as a result had to respect anything that looked even sowhat like an attack. This gave the vines plenty of unattended ti in which to work. They contracted just as the wolf attempted to jump at Tulland again, sending it tumbling awkwardly along the muddy floor of the swamp.
Tulland took the opportunity to actually hit the wolf with his Ironbranch spear a few tis, then pulled back in caution to make sure he wasn't misreading the situation. He wasn't, that he could tell. As the last two vines wrapped around the wolf, it was almost imdiately clear that while two of the strong vines spelled serious trouble for one of these wolves, an all-out attack from a half dozen vines total was far more than they could handle.
It can hardly move. I can pretty much stab it at will now.
Tulland took rcy on the wolf, ending its life with several well-placed shots to its neck, letting his vines feed until it was gone. That was an eerie process. He used to avoid watching the grueso act, but these days he had taken to watching the consumption in hopes he might learn sothing.
It was a simple enough thing. The vines were infused with magic power, like almost every monster in this place was. They humd with it as they worked their thorns deeper and deeper into their prey. The wolf didn't dissolve, exactly. It looked a lot like how Tulland felt when the damage from an attack on a particular part of him attacked his body's overall health. The vines slowly broke the wolf down, making it less and less substantial until it finally began to look faint. What was left of the animal seeped into the vines at that point, leaving only a bit of blood and fur where the beast used to be.
No wonder I didn't find anything of the wolf that the farm took on by itself. That's just not how these things work.
Unlike the wolf his farm had killed, though, Tulland was awake for this one and fully in command of his plants. Where The Infinite had not counted his involvent before, it fully compensated him now, giving him a big burst of experience all at once that turned out to be a more than sufficient to move him to the next level.
Tulland had put five of his points into vitality to survive the first wolf attack before. With two more levels worth of stats on top of that, he was starting to feel that much better about his chances on this floor.
Tulland Lowstreet
Class: Farr LV. 19
Strength: 30
Agility: 25
Vitality: 35 ( 5)
Spirit: 30
Mind: 10
Force: 35
Skills: Enhance Plants LV. 5, Enrich Seed LV. 8, Command Plant LV. 1
Passives: Broadcast LV. 4, Botanical Engineer LV. 2, Strong Back LV. 4,
Smiling, Tulland turned back towards his farm. His magic power had barely been tapped by that last application of Enhance Plant. It had taken him quite a while to find the earlier wolf, and by the ti he got back ho to his farm, he'd have a full tank to dump into his agriculture. He wasn't going to be getting any more levels today anyway, not with how hard it was turning out to be to find ga in the area.
He was barely on his way ho when the next happy little change in his life hit him.
Skill Level Up!
Broadcast LV. 5 (Simplified Description)
Broadcast has experienced the following threshold changes:
The ratio of power expenditure to effect in larger groups of plants has improved. You now gain an even greater premium on power used when you spread it out as opposed to focusing it on one particular plant or sapling.
The maximum number of plants you can affect with a farming skill at one ti increases from 15 to 20.
The maximum length of your farm plot's sides increases from ten to twelve ters.
Tulland was moving ho pretty quick before the ssage, but now he hustled. Getting back to his farm, he quickly dumped all his power into the plants while he did so quick calculations on the increase in his farm. Going from ten ters to twelve ters per side didn't sound like much, but that was only if one hadn't paid any attention at all during their tutor's geotry classes.
I paid almost no attention, true, but I think I rember this.
Tulland worked out the math in the dirt with his finger. The old plot was a hundred square ters, which was already a pretty good size. The new plot would not simply be 20% bigger. It would be nearly half again as big, at 144 square ters. It was a massive increase, almost making up for the fact that the skill hadn't improved much at all until this point.
"I love you, little Swamp Aches." Tulland glanced fondly at the trashy little trees, which had sohow grown another six or seven inches while he was out. "If nothing else, this earns you a ho with ."
The next few hours was a frenzy of finding enough briar seeds and Swamp Ache pods to plant on the new land, as well as breaking his back to till and mix the soil for them. Without Necia's overpowered help, it was a big undertaking, but eventually, Tulland had the mixture of swamp soil and badlands dirt just about right.
After getting his new seeds planted, Tulland went to check on another group of mbers in his growing plant family. The flowers hadn't been planted in the farm, but they also weren't far. It didn't take him long to find that five of the yellow things had taken to the trees and were already full-sized, bright-yellow blooms that looked ready to pick.
"Mont of truth. System, if this goes badly, could you remind to go hide in my farm, please?"
No promises.
"Fair enough."
Tulland reached out ntally to the flowers, commanding them to not explode with every bit of authority he could muster. Covering his mouth and nose with one hand, he gingerly reached out with the other, barely brushing the petals of the flower with his fingertips.
It didn't explode. I guess it's ti for the truth.
In so sort of freak miracle, the flowers not only tolerated Tulland touching them, but also picking them and putting them in his pack, where they sat inert. If he was right about how they worked, he would have an entirely new kind of weapon to play with, one that The Infinite would hopefully allow to go un-adjudicated as he learned how to best make use of it.
For now, he was going to very, very carefully replant what seeds he could get out of the flowers in his farm, then go take a nap. Soon, he would be experinting with these flowers in live conditions, and probably on a kind of enemy he hadn't faced before. It was impossible to be too rested up for that kind of risk.
—
"This might work. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't."
If the ants are stronger than you, it won't. If the ants pay special attention to the briars, it won't. If you make any one of the dozens of mistakes you could be reasonably expected to make…
"It won't. I got it. But there's a lot of reason this should work too. If it doesn't, I can just set up a cordon further back from the hole. It'll probably be fine."
After a quick patrol to make sure there weren't any handy wolves to take down, Tulland had set off in search of one of the ant pits Necia had ntioned. According to her, they shouldn't have been that hard to find. Whether Tulland was unlucky or just missing sothing, he spent an hour making larger and larger half-circle walks away from his base without actually finding anything.
And, bored as he was, that ant company was once again at a high enough premium for him to talk to his betrayer. It was, without a doubt, the weirdest Tulland he had ever had in a lot of ways. It mostly ran off Tulland pretending there wasn't really any problem with talking to the thing who had condemned him to a painful death, and everyone avoiding any ntion of that specific subject to keep the conversation going.
"The point is that I have a chance, and if it works, it's going to be very easy to farm these ants up to the cap."
And if it doesn't work?
"Then I do whatever I can do to not die. I hardly want to point out how bad of manners it is for you to make a big deal out of this, by the way. Given that you are the one who benefits most from my death. Any magistrate would point his finger at you as a suspect if they found out I had died."
I apologize for my rudeness, then, I suppose. And I must point out that there isn't anything like a magistrate for what amounts to an infinite distance in any direction.
"Yeah, tell about it." Tulland bobbled one of the flowers in his hand. He had accidentally dropped one earlier, which confird that they just wouldn't explode unless he gave them the go-ahead to. Since then, he had been using them to fidget away the sheer dullness of the walk. "Now if I could just find a pit."
You have. Look ahead.
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