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.

The Infinite Storehouse

The Infinite is meant to be a challenge of the best that a world can bring to bear, not one of meaningless survival. On many floors, some things that you might need or want are simply not obtainable. While many things fall short of the high bar of being true necessities, it is also true that most amenities don’t exist in dangerous, monster-laden woods or barren, environmentally volatile wastelands.

The Infinite’s Storehouse bridges some of this gap by taking your rewards from facing good, old-fashioned common dangers and converting them to a currency of sorts, spendable on any number of items both useful and desirable to the adventurer on the go. In doing so, The Infinite allows for the reasonable purchases of a few creature comforts with the explicit purpose of promoting continued sanity and morale in its climbers.

Be warned: This market is explicitly geared towards the emergency need or the very rare indulgence. Over-use of its services can and will result in disaster.

You are currently an occupant of the fifth floor safe zone. Purchases of designated safe zone goods (to be left in the zone upon leaving) are heavily discounted.

Tulland found that heavily discounted still meant unrealistically expensive. He could no sooner buy a table than he could purchase the entire dungeon, as much as he might like to. He was years away from buying the most basic bed. But some things, like a bar of soap, were cheap.

“You know, that might not be a bad idea,” Tulland said as he scrolled through the options.

“More like a very, very good idea.” Necia held her nose. “I could use one myself too.”

Unfortunately, hot water was not for sale. With Licht’s guidance, Tulland found a stream deep enough to easily bathe in, but one that was also only just warmer than ice would have been. He spent as much time as he could in the water, then a few minutes scrubbing out his clothes with soap until the river water was just as clear coming out of them as it was going in.

He then returned home, passed the soap off to Necia, and was almost dry and comfortable by the time she walked back into view, wringing the water out of her hair.

“So you ready for your little search?” Necia asked. “We can go right now.”

“You don’t want to spend some time drying off?”

“No use. I’ll be just as cold out there as here. Let’s get going.”

Assuming their roles as the haughty, annoying princess and the weak-willed, put-upon servant, they wandered out of the village and into the surrounding wilderness. Unlike most places in The Infinite, the safe zone wilderness held no true threats. There were no animals, something Licht had bemoaned. If there had been, he said, he would have no problems feeding himself at all.

Other adventurers were still a risk to them though. They walked in a straight line just long enough to break sight from the village, then immediately zigzagged in an unrelated direction. Keeping their eyes peeled for threats, they did everything they could to put distance between them and the village in an unpredictable sort of way, shaking off anyone who might be following them.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

It was a lot of walking, which left a lot of time to pick plants.

“What about this?” Necia asked.

“The grass, or the weed?” Tulland looked on suspiciously.

“Both?”

Tulland moved a bit closer.

“The grass I have, the weed is new. Toss it in the pack.”

Half of Tulland’s garden was already planted, courtesy of a full night’s work, a full pack of seeds, and some careful planning. First, he had dedicated a half of his garden to briars of various kinds, judging them to be too important to his combat capabilities to skimp on, even if the less-verbose versions of their descriptions indicated that both would be inadequate sooner or later.

Lunger Briars

Your bread-and-butter plant through the first five floors, the briar’s first and most important function was to produce edible food in the form of nutritious but mediocre tasting fruits. They excel in this role, creating a nearly nutritionally complete product in all but the harshest growing conditions.

These briars also mutated using monster-based fertilizer to become aggressive, mobile hunters. The Lunger Briars will reach for any target you consider a threat, constricting them even as they dig their fine, agonizing thorns into any soft surface they can find.

Lunger Briars are a relatively weak plant, as befits their early dungeon origin. At your current skill, growing Lunger Briars up to their level cap is trivial. Their use in the future, if any, will likely be as breeding stock for new, more powerful varieties of plant.

Giant’s Hair

A variant of Lunger Briars that sacrifices the agony of its predecessor’s thorns in favor of better grip and stronger restriction.

While the Lunger Briars were depressingly easy to cut through, the Giant’s Hair variant is slightly better at resisting slashing or cutting. Even so, the Giant’s Hair is only a medium-sized improvement over the Lunger Briars. Seek improvements to it when possible.

Even considering The Infinite’s obvious disdain for the briar plants, they were still the main way Tulland approached killing his many enemies, and thus got the lion’s share of his plot. The rest of the space was taken up by a few varieties of trees, each of which had their own potential uses.

Ironbranch Tree

This tree is not particularly pretty, particularly tall-growing, or in any way exceptional outside of its unusually tough wood. While well-cared for plantings of the Ironbranch tree will eventually gain impressively thick trunks, those grown within reasonable time-frames will usually assume a shape more suitable for spear shafts than barrels-making.

Giant’s Toe (Ironbranch Variant)

Much like the Ironbranch tree, this variant produces hard, tough wood. Unlike it, it’s a thick-growing tree that sacrifices potential height for sheer mass. In most other ways outside of shape, it is identical to the Ironbranch Tree and can be substituted for the same purposes.

Growing both varieties meant that Tulland would have ample stock for both enhancing his Farmer’s Tool and creating armor, but it also meant variety. Lesser trees like the Achewood and Wolfwood were comparatively less useful outside of serving as platforms for growing mosses and other parasites, but they were still worth it just for that and sheer variety.

And variety was important. At the end of the day, every last bit of Tulland’s strength was tied to how good of a farm he could make. His plants were stronger when his farm was better, and the armor and weapons he made out of those plants were stronger too. Adding the knowledge that only through experimentation with new seeds could he come up with anything to replace his older, weaker plants intensified that need to avoid a monoculture.

“Is this enough?” Necia asked. After a few more hours of searching, they had eleven distinct weed-like plants, several grasses, a few colorful mosses, and seeds for each of the three types of trees that grew here. None of them seemed to be particularly special to Tulland, mostly carrying descriptions of a type he was starting to think indicated they were just plants from another place, transplanted here to serve as set dressing.

Entheos Tree

Known for it’s especially colorful leaves after the onset of the cold season, the Entheos tree produces a soft, sappy wood ill-suited for most building and crafting.

“I think so. I mean, keep an eye out as you walk around, but it seems like we’ve tapped out most of what’s here,” Tulland said.

“And that’s it? You just grow that?”

“Yeah. And mess around with proportions of things, trying to fine-tune how much energy I’m getting out of the farm. It’s not like I can go to another floor yet.”

“Good. Because I’m ready to eat.” Necia patted her stomach sympathetically, but it was Tulland’s that growled at the mention of food. “Sounds like you are too.”

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

It had taken them a few hours to get where they were, but they had zigzagged a lot in the process and had been looking pretty closely at the environment so as not to miss anything. Beelining it straight back would be much, much faster, though it would still take at least several minutes.

“I actually wish I could get my hand on that orange. Or whatever it was. The thing that Licht was trying to buy.” Tulland’s magical storage space would sterilize the seeds he tried to put in it, but he figured that was more likely to be a restriction on him personally than an overall aspect of how most people’s magic packs worked, if they had them at all. “But I don’t have anything valuable.”

Necia stopped in her tracks. “Tulland, you idiot. Ugh, not even just you. I’m also dumb. We are rich. We can buy that orange because you and I are rich.”

“How do you figure?” Tulland did a quick mental inventory of what he had on him, and it was mostly stuff that would be useless to everyone else, plus one bar of soap. “It’s just seeds and stuff.”

“And food, Tulland. How many pounds of rice do you have on you? I mean right now.”

“Right now?” Tulland checked in his bag. “Probably about twenty, I guess.”

“Which is how many levels worth of experience? I don’t even want to count. At the very least it’s enough to trade for one orange, and probably anything else we want until we flood the market.”

“Well, sure.” Tulland slowly mulled over the implications, trying his best not to think about what it meant that he had forgotten that food costs money. “But is it smart to let them know we have all that, this soon? I’d rather be a bit stronger before we… you know. Demonstrated my value, or whatever. I don’t want to encourage them to attack me. Or enslave me. Both seem pretty bad.”

“Tulland, I’m not saying that you empty your entire cheater’s storage out in front of him. That’s stupid.”

“Then what?”

“You just start looking more contrite and cowed. The mighty princess has an idea.”