A fledgeling four-acre forest farm, a few weeks old.

Pliant Vine forests consisted of 11 dimensions and 24 sub-dimensions. 9 of these main dimensions corresponded to different vertical layers, ranging from giant trees to deep underground tubers. The remaining 2 were horizontal, a ‘static’ dimension for surface-growing plants like vines and a ‘mobile dimension’ – wild animals lured in by bait plants.

Henry, intending to populate every dimension, had shipped in 789 cultivars from a massive seed bank accumulated from over a century of farming and selective breeding. The chosen plants were suited to the local soil conditions and climate. Additionally, he’d picked those with a symbiotic or neutral relationship to each other, avoiding any possessing aggressive allelopathic mechanisms for inhibiting competitors – in-fighting was a major issue when farming at 11 simultaneous dimensions and 24 sub-dimensions.

Surveying his forest farm now, one could see the many seeds of his prior journeys taking root. Prized amongst the imports from The Three Rivers region were saplings that would later yield a juicy apricot-like fruit with a spiked exterior; this defensive layer was shed in the wild by the pheromones of migratory herbivores who spread their seeds but, by him, through grinding. Between a small cottage and a grove of sugar-filled bamboo from the Bamboo Jungle stood a young hedge of Sweet Olives, whose autumn drupes fermented into a salty white-pink liquor. Coursing through the Sweet Olives' ranks and chilling their roots were glassy rivulets of ice-melt, which flowed into a bog-garden of plants from the marshlands adjacent to his home island. Already, one could pick the first ripening harvests of spring: Crystal Irises flaunting their shimmering edible petals on a Frog-Beetle-pond, and Black Wound Turnips who, so long as care was taken gathering them, paired well with the meat of the regional Scorpion-Wolves. (These pioneer foods, their cultivars having been selected for hardiness over palatability, were actually dreadful eating. The fruits were no sweeter than printing paper, the vegetables indistinguishable from lawn grass. But the inconvenience of taste didn’t bother Henry, who would fix their flaws eventually.)

He’d arranged all these diverse species according to disputes forecasted into their adulthood over sunlight and nutrients, placed beside allies, corralled from rivals. He’d corralled the forest itself in a fenced perimeter, around which roamed the local beasts awakening from their hibernation, sniffing in confusion at the obstruction keeping them out of their usual grazing ground. Flocks of Flying Crabs returning from migration managed to enter by air, but they flew on after being unable to locate their preferred berries.

Overall, the forest farm's total view was as hideous as a newborn child. Consisting of over three hundred juvenile species, the forest farm resembled the patchy hair of an infant’s crown; its shin-height saplings were clothed in less than a dozen meagre leaves and separated from their neighbours by vast stretches of bald earth. But this aesthetic, too, would improve.

Everywhere, rows and layers awaited sowing still. Nevertheless, Henry was already preparing for the day when his forest would be destroyed.

While sewing a hedge of Dwarf Spinning Top Berries around the base of a Sourpear sapling, he’d been repeating to himself the wisdom of an anonymous Pliant Vine sage on the necessity of detachment. “Trunk by trunk, bid farewell to the persimmons, frognuts, gourdfruit, bananas, cocoa, spiceguava, avocadoes. Bid farewell to your clinging to familiar tastes. Bid farewell to the warm rains and the known soils. Say goodbye, and go. Bear with you only the orchard of the soul.”

Cling to nothing, bid farewell and go…

Such was the dour mood of this people whose farming methods he imitated, the Pliant Vine farmers never forgetting to counteract any happy gains with a stark reminder of loss. An unusual but necessary mindset. The tribesmen lacked the population size to mount a serious defence against invaders, who might want to abduct their prize harvests or themselves; therefore, they had to maintain a mindset readying them at a moment's notice to pack up and retreat into the safety of the inner jungle. Whether a patch had been cultivated for a week or a century, once the alarm-horns bleared, all had to leave. Those farmers who insisted on clinging to their forest perished.

Henry himself didn’t have that specific concern on his lonesome planet. But he did have things that, through this forest mandala exercise, he hoped to detach from, his own ‘forest farm’.

***

Young Arrow, Wise Claw.

Arrow and Claw, the greatest Beast Tamer style Henry’d encountered, had belonged to a Cosmic deity he’d slain in Saana II. Developed for pairing with a highly-intelligent Elemental Dragon companion, the art had a wondrous assortment of tactics for synergising with this unique monster type, merging the merits of the Beast Tamer’s poisoned arrows with the dragon’s magical claws. It’d been a pretty exciting fight - the three of them utilised an entire solar system, teleporting between planets and meteors.

Young Arrow, Wise Claw was a failed candidate for A Thousand Tools’ base art. Henry's first reason for rejecting it, technical, was that although Beast Tamers as a Class could achieve a complex fighting style in bursts, by overlapping the companion’s attacks with the player’s, the sustained complexity was limited by too high a proportion of the Class’s abilities being offloaded to the monster companion, whose anatomy and intelligence—outside of dragons, which didn’t exist in this instalment—prohibited advanced tactics. The second reason was entirely personal. In Young Arrow, Wise Claw, the companion remained ‘untamed’, unbound by Beast Tamer magic – this enabled it to preserve its intelligence and extra monster strength, but it also left the monster mortal. Henry didn’t want the unnecessary trauma of training a companion only for it to get assassinated by his vengeful enemies, so the style was ruled out.

Despite the absence of dragons in the current instalment, he was able to create in the Overdream weak ones he’d previously encountered. One focus of his training in Arrow and Claw centred around searching for a substitute monster to replicate its duo-tactics. For this mission, he tested many of the game’s intelligent creatures, from ape-types to crow-types.

These experiments proved a failure. By the end, he did churn out a decent enough adaptation with rare Plaguetigers. However, after subtracting that fact of him being a digitally-enhanced hyper-genius who could convert any dumb concept into a workable martial art, Arrow and Claw's techniques without a Dragon companion were sub-par compared with simpler Beast Tamer traditions.

Nevertheless, in the grand scheme of A Thousand Tools, his explorations into Arrow and Claw weren’t a total loss. Its completion coincided with the fulfilment of an in-depth study of every basic Class in the game. The opportunity to focus on his bowmanship was also a pleasant change of pace, half a century having passed since the last archery style.

***

Two years into the Pliant Vine forest farming, a normal day.

Perched in a Normal Apple tree, Henry was spell-zapping a flock of Crow-like Flying Crabs out of the sky, the creatures exploding in bursts of feather and shell.

A common misconception by hippy players was that the beautiful Pliant Vine forest farms were a type of permaculture, an example of man conceding to nature’s wisdom by giving up the unnatural hubris of crop farming. Incorrect. This method was artificial and invasive. The Pliant Vine forest farm mirrored a modern city, its skyscraping layers gaining their height through the continuous plundering of minerals from surrounding territories. No harmony appeared within the forest farm, either. The gardener, when not collecting resources, devoted their hours to policing the arguments between the antagonistic factions of each forest storey, which, being overly crammed, were locked in a perpetual gang-war over territory and nutrients.

A careful scan of Henry's forest farm would expose its ongoing conflicts with nature, the gardener, and itself.

Wedged between a canopy of Choconuts and a ground-covering of miscellaneous tea herbs, new bushes of Jadecurrants were competing for sunlight, their struggle debilitated by Henry coating one-third of their leaves with an edible moss and hacking off the other-fifth. Some groves already housed simultaneous arrangements of the three tallest Pliant Vine dimensions: giant-trees, mid-trees, and dwarf-trees; but the soil beneath these tripartite treaties was pockmarked with holes, marking where roots had been sawn and dug up, and discoloured from poisonous anti-fertilisers. Every plant had to be beaten into compliance. Still, even with this management, vast quantities of produce were quietly thieved in the scuffles between rival layers, roots sucking up critical trace minerals from geophytes and stunting their growth, vines piercing branches and intercepting nutrients flowing to tender fruit.

Henry, in the back-and-forth scrambling to settle the in-fighting with shears and fertilisers, had yet to cultivate the eye-pleasing artistic configurations of Pliant Vine’s veteran practitioners. The unruly youth of his forest farm had to make do with no-frills, army buzzcut-style pruning. Contributing to the eyesore, littered throughout were the war-machines: Arcaneworker devices, branch-hung sprinklers and vats of Alchemical concoctions, their metallic angles standing in conflict with nature’s organic smooth designs. The forest was ugly as sin.

And don't even get him started on the invasive nuisances attracted by this abnormal concentration of food, the pestilential diseases, the locust-like swarms, and the beasts: lumbering beasts, towering colossuses who, if not lured away, could vacuum up the whole four acres in hours; flying beasts, flocks who preyed upon his precious apples.

“Fine, then!” he shouted at the Crow-Crabs he'd been blasting. “Take these wretched things. I didn't even want them....their taste is completely average....”

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Ceasing fire, Henry leapt down from his perch. Swearing, he walked away, and the flock engulfed his Normal Apple tree and began snipping and gnawing at its almost ripe harvest.

To the annoyance inside of him, he replied with a calming meditation from a Pliant Vine sage.

“On occasion, allow the lightning-fires to consume your shrubs, not just the shrubs who’ve become barren, but those in the prime of their sweetest fruit. Remember, it is not the shrub’s conflagration that pains you, it is the conflagration of your pride incarnated within the shrub. Meditate as the shrubs become flame. Carefully gift the lightning-fire that shrub you slacked on fertilising, and observe the silly delight accompanying the conflagration of the embarrassing you. Remember, he who abandons 2000 shrubs abandons 2000 woes…”

Abandon his Normal Apples; abandon his woes…

The first impression when reading these sages was that they were bi-polar idiots. In a paradoxical absurdity, the writers devoted excessive effort to describing how meaningless their farms were and teaching the reader helpful tricks to abuse their own patch. There was even an entire sub-genre of Pliant Vine poetry resembling horror fiction, with graphic descriptions of farms being obliterated by volcanoes and disease. Saana’s hobby anthropologists perusing such accounts were often puzzled. Why, if these tribesmen loathed their forests, did they insist on cultivating them at all? Made no sense.

But missing from the page was the other, unspoken part. The tribesmen’s complaints were just the last response in a conversation whose first phrases sounded at a frequency too deep and profound for an outsider to pick up. Unheard was the whole rest of the farmer’s life: the life immersed in the grove, the years nurturing it from seed to fruit, the platters of tasty produce returned for one’s effort, the immense bond that develops over the extended length of this reciprocal exchange. The love for one’s forest after a decade was hard to distinguish from that for a human lover. As with a human lover, a willingness arose to make sacrifices for the forest’s sake, to even sacrifice oneself for its preservation. Yet the Pliant Vine tribesmen knew consciously that they must not succumb to this love, that this love must never be verbalised or acknowledged, because one day, if they were to survive, their forest would have to be abandoned. It was this anticipated divorce that their complaints were really responding to. A farmer who seemed to be rejecting their forest was, in truth, rejecting the forest’s future rejection of themself. The volume of their bellyaching was set by the intensity of love they couldn’t bear to lose.

Henry, prior to taking up the farming practices of these tribesmen, had recognised the same paradoxical absurdity in his own whingeing. What would a stranger questioning him about Saana hear? Shoddy game design. Braindead, sociopathic player-base. Irresponsible, careless developers. On and on. Yet the contradictory fact remained that he was still playing, still tending this stupid forest.

Meditating on his forests and himself, Henry observed the flock of Crow-Crabs as they cleared one Normal Apple tree after another.

"On occasion, allow the lightning-fires to consume your shrubs, not just the shrubs who’ve become barren, but those in the prime of their sweetest fruit..."

***

Grey-tongue Battlebardery.

The Accompanist one met in the arena was a paltry shadow of their potential. In a 1v1, they were the game’s weakest Class since their entire toolkit was designed for augmenting groups of allies through musical buffs and debuffs. The counterbalance of this fact was that they were, in war, the single most impactful combat role, well-coordinated Hymns bolstering a platoon enough to overwhelm the opposition.

Of the myriad of Accompanist war styles, Grey-tongue Battlebardery was considered the pinnacle. The Battlebards were a two-millennia old guild of Heimlandian mercenaries who sold their talents to warlords and kings across the globe. They'd made appearances at battlefields from the hotly contested banks of Aion Laisije’s Blood River, to the fanatical crusades in rain-drenched Yamalai. These singers of fortune, by migrating between active warzones, accumulated much more experience than the Accompanists of any standing army and, unlike typical mercenaries, the supportive backline aspect of their role minimised their casualties. The consequence of these two joint factors was a peerless expertise. Grey-tongue Battlebards were maestros in the methods of the Accompanist. With inimitable flair, they read the movements in the battle's symphony, found the pauses between the sharp attacks of arrows and assassins, slid their magical instruments into the cacophony of steel, waited patiently for the lethal opportunity to drum up the frenzy.

The Grey-tongue Battlebards all dyed their tongues grey. A few months into their art’s investigation, it became evident to Henry that this practice was part of an initiation ritual into the worship of a primordial apocalypse demon.

But he had no particular prejudice about whose techniques he stole. For A Thousand Tools, Grey-tongue Battlebardery, while limited in use due to the divide between war and duelling, proved a beneficial reflection on the Accompanist Class. It filled in gaps outstanding after the solitary angles he’d studied in Togavian Tulipsinging.

As a brief tangent, central to the Battlebard cult was a sacred, 11-thousand-page compendium of their adventures, composed by the successive generations of members detailing their accounts in a magnificent epic verse. Aside from some sinister demonic undertones, the compendium made for an impressive piece of literature. The bards’ collected songs wove a riveting historical collage. Its lineage of divergent voices across wars captured the beautiful drama of man in his various forms being swept along by the unceasing river of time, jostled and smashed about in the rapids of the ages. Henry was inspired. Once his forest farm project was complete and he resumed the more interesting literary climb, he would pen a similar symphony for his own time-swept world. It would be a titanic, dynastic, 4-billion-year-spanning, 111-thousand-page, multi-voiced lyrical collage, beginning with the first melodies of microbial life and—

***

Year six of Henry forest farming.

The Pliant Vine tribe resided in an equatorial, jungle climate, with little annual variance in temperature, sunlight, and rainfall. Henry’s much more northern latitude subjected him to the changes of the seasons they didn't face.

This weather fluctuation added an additional dimension, multiplying the battle between his multi-dimensional crops, as the factions strengthened and declined at differential rates. Exacerbating the trouble, while his Overdream planet abided by earth’s twelve-month year, the growth-rates adhered to Saana’s accelerated pace, resulting in multiple growing seasons within each season - the plants adapted for early-spring were entirely different from those adapted to mid-summer.

These extra issues could have been resolved by him putting his forest farm inside a complex of greenhouses, but Henry didn't do that because in his arrogance he'd thought the increased challenge against the open weather would add excitement.

Each season did spice it up. Spring demanded meticulous babysitting of the cascade of species taking root one after another. Summer brought the pests and pestilence, the heat invigorating the swarms and bizarre diseases. Autumn was spring’s reversal, a labour in controlling the forest’s waning vigour, to prepare it for the cold months ahead. Going from autumn into winter, he had to install a massive artificial system of heating devices and Lightstones to trick the trees from shedding their leaves; by winter, his forest was a glowing green abomination in the snowy dark landscape.

The forest certainly hadn't been enjoying the seasonal assault. A newly installed vineyard of Rust Grapes were decimated by the return of winter frost in mid-spring, their juices freezing, expanding, and exploding them from their skin. Brought in as part of his gradual conquest of the underground, a yam imported from the Bamboo Jungle had ramped up in the summer frenzy the production of a novel arcanovirus, eradicating nearby ground-level herbs and shrubs. Except for a small core kept for his sustenance, the forest farm had been partitioned into experimental plots where the equatorial techniques of Pliant Vine were adapted to the seasonal flux. Some plots were dominated by two or three species at the exclusion of the multi-storey variety seen elsewhere; these were his failed attempts at using blends of time-released seeds to overcome the chore of seasonal replantings. Other plots were wiped clean in the frozen months; these were his failure to defeat the snow with the forest farm itself, these plots having had their artificial Arcaneworker supports replaced with plants performing similar functions.

To his insistence on subjecting it to this ordeal, the forest farm often punished Henry with a cold shoulder. Withholding its nutritional affection, it forced him to sate his belly’s cravings with game meat. However, even through those moments of reprisal, he was slowly finding a satisfaction in this contest against the seasons. Disaster by disaster, the inner logic of these climactic mood swings was being revealed to him, and the wild, like a feral mare acceding to a saddle, was gradually permitting him to subject it to his forest farm. With each passing month, a couple more of the seeds he sowed didn't die, managing to retain the shape of his cocky designs.

Throughout, the Pliant Vine sages continued to remind him of what lay at the end.

“Cousin, this garden is merely a means to nourish you who gardens it,” he read to himself on a day the garden hadn't nourished him, while gnawing on a tough slab of Lobster-Elk without seasoning. “Don’t confuse the garden for yourself. The avocado tree you guard cannot shield you. While you must strive to protect the avocado tree, if you do so at the neglect of your own safety, you will lose both yourself and the avocado tree of your protection. This garden is like a machete that clears Blackweed from your prize pumpkin patch. The machete is useful, but the machete has never been the pumpkin patch. Do you continue swinging the machete once the pumpkins have been harvested? Cousin, this garden has become the empty pumpkin patch, this garden has become the old, worn-down machete. Use its final swings to break in new fertile ground and scatter its rusting blade to mineralise the soil. Do not be trapped by this garden. You must live on to garden the next.”

Do not be trapped by the garden…

That's right. His forest farm was no more than a sand mandala, an elaborate art piece designed for its own destruction, a meditational exercise for fostering detachment from that which in life one must not be trapped by…

In his meditations of the temporary forest farm across the seasons, he came to wonder if the necessity of the Pliant Vine tribesmen to inculcate their detachment hadn’t been, in part, a result of them living in the seasonless equator. Due to the relative stability of their climate, the most significant threats to their farm were those imposed by other people, and the intervals between invasions could drag on for decades. Without a semi-religious program of continual reminders during these lulls, one might forget the dangers and lose their preparedness.

Unlike them, however, Henry, at the latitude where he farmed, was reminded daily by annihilation. The seasonal transitions were mini-cullings with the crops accustomed to preceding seasons forced to concede to the next. Winter, the great obliterator, could only be stopped from laying everything to waste through a herculean resistance.

There was something more in that distinction betweem them, he felt.

***

Jingzi Doubling.

The Jingzi Doublers filled a niche role in The God-Emperor’s promotion tournament, where the challenger and challenged fought with the same number of allies. The Doubler’s main job was to seek out opportunities for fighting two opponents on their own, creating a momentary number advantage by which their team could win.

In a sense, the Doublers had the same disruptive function of the earlier researched Abhayan Hulk-Wrestlers and the West Togavian Hardmen, both of which were specialised kamikaze troops who dove into enemy troop formations. There was, however, a critical difference in the methods of disruption. Whereas these other two entangled multiple enemies through brute grappling and throwing, Jingzi Doubling relied almost entirely on speed.

A Doubler was trained to move between their chosen pair, dodging, parrying, attacking each simultaneously, embracing one enemy like a partner in a dance, waltzing two steps, then swapping to the other. Safety was found in ramping the fight's pace up to such a high velocity that the two enemies were prevented from assembling their wits to coordinate their counter-attack. Safety through speed.