The first stop was the trees. They were kind of everywhere except directly by the briars themselves, which seemed to compete with them for nutrients. Tulland had been somewhat in the forest since arriving at the briar patch, getting close enough to touch some trees and even to pump a Quickgrow into one or two.

It hadn’t done anything visible, and had left him wondering why. His best guess was that either the trees were so slow-growing that Quickgrow couldn’t affect them enough to be immediately visible, or else that they were so big already that the amount of magic he could output just wasn’t enough, pound for pound, to matter.

This time, Tulland wanted to investigate that more closely. He headed to the closest tree, looking carefully for Razored Lungers as he did. It looked as if his briar-traps had cleared the nearby ones out for the moment, leaving him with a bit of room to work. His first move was to scatter several Lunger Briar seeds out, covering a broad area around the tree. One of his experiments had shown that even though Quickgrow wouldn’t work until seeds were actually in contact with the soil, Enrich Seed was something that could be used beforehand as a sort of prep-work for eventual planting.

Tulland wasn’t putting out any magical power on Quickgrow right now, since he could do it pretty quick if he needed to. But he knew that given enough time, the briars would root and grow on their own. For now, the seeds were sown into the ground plain as Tulland went straight to the trunk of the tree. In the few moments he had spent close enough to the trees to check them, he hadn’t seen anything on them resembling a seed on any of them. No acorns, no pine cones, no fruits. He had not so much as a guess as to how these things actually reproduced.

And his worry was that they didn’t at all. If other people had traveled through this zone, Tulland imagined that they were much stronger than him. But even while all of them would be tougher than him, some of them must have been weaker than others.

If they were very weak, they might spend more time in this zone. They might spend enough time to notice the briars growing, or changes in the prairie grass. If The Infinite was trying to maintain the illusion of realism, it would probably simulate things like seeds and pollination for quick-growing plants.

But in trees? It could probably ignore seeds and things for trees if it wanted to. Nobody would be around long enough to notice they weren’t regrowing.

Of course, that was assuming this whole place wasn’t real. And that the Dungeon System wasn’t basing these trees on real plants somewhere. And that it cared about saving energy by being less than complete.

It was a whole host of questions and assumptions that Tulland didn’t have answers for just yet. With no real way of knowing how fake this dungeon was or how completely it was simulated, Tulland was left with the task of painstakingly making sure he wasn't missing things he would need in the future. He started out by searching the ground near the base of the tree and a few others to make sure there weren’t seeds that had been dropped, going as far as to rake the nearby ground by changing his Farmer’s Tool to a hoe and seeing if he could turn something up.

That yielded just dirt, so he examined the branches again, turning up nothing on any of the trees. And by then, his time of easy, murder-free searching was over. Without much warning, a Razored Lunger burst from around a distant tree and ran at him.

Tulland grabbed for his club, which he placed leaning against a nearby tree, but badly fumbled the attempt and ended up with his club falling to the dirt as the enemy closed in. With his heart beating wildly in his chest, Tulland dived for the weapon and prayed he’d find enough time to dodge around the tree.

Before he could execute that plan, the briars on his arm jumped into action.

The briar vines weighed so little thanks to Tulland’s newfound strength that he had almost forgotten they were there before both of them loosened from around his arms and more or less shot through the air at the enemy, keeping only a single loop tethered to Tulland’s forearms for stability.

Nobody was more surprised than the Razored Lunger itself, which tried to abort jumping for its prey a moment too late and ended up in an awkward half jump, sliding across the forest dirt on its hind legs and looking a bit like a startled cat.

As Tulland jumped to the side to get out of its way, both vines swatted towards the animal. One missed outright, but the other caught the Lunger on its outstretched front leg and whipped it around towards Tulland. The Lunger panicked, clawing at the tree with its three free legs as it tried to right itself and get the leverage it needed to escape the briar.

It didn’t work. The second briar came down and looped around its neck, before both of the plants detached from Tulland’s body and began to worm around the Lunger’s free limbs. A few moments later, the animal was pinned to the ground, growling and bleeding until Tulland had pity on it in the form of a strike to the skull with his club.

As the animal went limp, the vines continued to writhe and work on it. Tulland remembered what the description of the Hades Lunger Briars had said about regaining energy from prey, decided not to watch, and turned to examine the damage the Lunger had done to the tree.

I’m glad that wasn’t aimed at me. It got pretty deep into the wood.

On the backside of a piece of bark that the Lunger had ripped loose, Tulland finally found what he was looking for. It was a small, round node, clearly separate from the bark despite being embedded in it. He pressed it out of the wood with his fingers, getting a system description when it finally broke free.

Ironbranch Seed Node

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

The Ironbranch Tree reproduces by means of large herbivorous animals which feed off its bark. The animals carry these indigestible seeds with them, eventually depositing them in some other location with a generously provided dollop of fertilizer to go with it.

Putting the seed in his pocket, Tulland started to circle the rest of the tree, looking for more of the nodes. They were fairly easy to see now that he knew what he was looking for, and he found that several good thwacks with the blade of his hoe were usually enough to dislodge the pieces of bark they were stuck in.

Once he had six seeds pulled from two separate trees, Tulland dumped whatever remaining magical power he could muster into the briars he had planted earlier to help them get started, and hightailed it back to camp.

—

“Is it too much to hope I can make a monster tree to guard me?” Tulland asked with a slight smile on his face.

Likely. Especially since you’ve failed so miserably at the beginnings of that task so far.

Back home, Tulland had harvested more fruits from his pet briars and set them in the soil to grow. His plan was to now mass produce as many Lunger Briars as he could, slowly making more and more of the territory around his camp dangerous to local wildlife and creating a sort of safe zone for himself until he figured out his next steps. He only had so much magic to dedicate to that task, but even without class enhancements, he could still count on a whole lot of seeds per day to scatter haphazardly into the wilderness.

And it was free experience, even if they didn’t give very much per plant.

Tulland had then turned to the tree seeds, immediately getting a hard reality check to his hopes of a tree ent army in the form of a blunt, disappointing message.

Seed Enrichment Failed!

This plant is compatible with seed enrichment, but is much too powerful of a species to be affected by your current level of power. In the same way that a normal person would fail to subvert a lich, you simply don’t have what it takes to change the makeup of this plant.

Enrichment may or may not become possible as your skills advance and your personal power grows.

It is not surprising. What is more surprising is that you could alter any plant, no matter how simple or weak.

“You’ve really never seen anything like this before? No farming class has ever improved a plant?”

Improved, yes. Stolen from a dungeon and domesticated, no. And I’m relatively sure they tried. If this is the absolute limit of what your class will do, I’m not surprised.

Tulland sighed and turned the System’s connection off. He had no way of knowing whether or not it was telling him the truth, and so far, it had provided him with precious little actual help. But as long as the System didn’t actually directly harm him, Tulland was willing to keep opening the connection. The mere chance that it might be helpful at some point wasn’t a resource he could pass up.

And if I’m being honest, I need the company. I’m going to go insane if I’m alone in here.

Tulland took the few tree seeds he had and ran a similar experiment to what he had with the briar seeds, but this time without enriching the seeds at all. He applied the briar fruit as a fertilizer to one, animal fertilizer to another, and so on, getting several variations of experiments in the ground before hitting one of them with Quickgrow. Before he could judge the results, the world darkened and rose up to meet Tulland’s face.

Five minutes or so later, he woke up.

Wow. Greedy little guys, these new seeds. That took everything I had.

Tulland hadn’t waited until his magic was entirely full after the last batch of Quickgrow charges he delivered to the briars planted near the tree, and had apparently bottomed out hard. Overdrawing magic was something Tulland had heard of, and something he knew was mildly dangerous when it happened consistently, but the only solution he knew to the problem was to just have more magic power in general.

In this case, the most he could do was eat, drink water, and sit around until his power climbed back to full. His earlier complete rest helped that happen a little faster, and within several minutes he was able to charge up the next seed while maintaining his consciousness. It didn’t feel great though.

Once all the tree seeds were as empowered as Tulland could make them, he was tired. Something about using magic in particular sapped him of energy in a way moving around, working, or even fighting just didn’t.

He picked a few handfuls of Lunger Briar seeds and planted them around the entrance to his space, which always seemed to be a good policy. Then, with a bad headache brewing, he went back to sleep.

—

“That’s because you’ve never been hungry. Not really.” Tulland’s uncle was peeling potatoes. Tulland was hard-pressed to say when this memory actually happened. It could have been at any point in his life after he had learned to speak. “If you had, you wouldn’t say that.”

“It takes a month to starve,” Tulland said. He knew he was being stubborn, and even knew his uncle was right, at least on some level of his child-like mind. “And the army was two weeks away. They could have marched there. They could have made it.”

Some historic city had been sacked because some army or another in one of his tutor’s lessons hadn’t been able to get there, and they were more than strong enough to protect it if they had just marched faster. It was the dreaded boring logistics his teacher was so fond of and claimed was all-powerful in matters of war.

Tulland was convinced, absolutely convinced, that the solution for that problem was simply to push through. The army had swords, and they had a target. They should have been able to take care of things. The solution to saving the city, Tulland felt, was easy. They would just march faster and then swing their swords against the invaders.

His uncle had laughed when he had told him that. Like it was silly.

“And after you had marched a week on an empty stomach, you’d turn around and three quarters of the men would be gone. Half of those would have deserted because that kind of hunger is much less pleasant than you think it is. Another half might have kept on because of duty, then found out that when they say it takes a month to starve, they meant while standing still.” His uncle held up a potato. “A couple of days march on no food, people start to drop. Hurt or dead.”

“And you know this how?” Tulland grabbed a potato and a knife and started working on taking the peel off too. All this talk of food was getting to him. “You were never in the military.”

“No, but I was in a boat with no wind, rowing with a little oar that wasn’t built for the job, and having bad luck catching fish. When I got a little one at the end of the second day, I ate it raw. Eyeballs and all.” His uncle tossed the second to last potato into the pot, looked to see that Tulland had the last one, and wiped his starchy hands off on his coat. With semi-clean hands, Tulland’s uncle ruffled his nephew’s hair. “Point is, they weren’t being cowards. You can’t move an army without food any more than you can throw an army up a cliff. It doesn’t work. Your tutor isn’t wrong. If you didn’t like the idea of battles so much, you’d know that. When has he ever been wrong before?”