“I…” Tulland gulped. This guy was weirdly casual in a way that, for some reason, screamed danger. “I didn’t. I don’t think.”
“Oh, right.” The man made a mock motion of slapping his forehead. “I didn’t need to ask. Let me just check. Oh, I see. Tulland Lowstreet. The same one who made the wager the other day, right? I kind of expected you to be dead by now.”
“Are you…”
“Yes. Well, part of him, anyway.”
“Part of us.” A woman’s voice rang out. Tulland turned to see a middle-aged lady sitting in a wooden chair that simply hadn’t been there before. “I’m going to need you to stop applying him to our chorus like it covers all of us. It doesn’t.”
“And when she whines about it, I have to listen to it.” A surly looking teenager walked up to one of the briars and flicked it. “And I don’t get to see whatever’s going on that much these days. Good job, by the way. It’s rare we see anything new.”
“Oh. Thanks.” Tulland scratched his head. “So all of you are The Infinite’s System?”
“Kind of, yes, sorta, no, and of course,” the unimpressive man said. “We’ve found that trying to explain exactly how this works to humans doesn’t really take, no matter how we do it. The best approximation I can give is that multiple beings give better advice, on average, than individual beings. And I’m supposed to do a good job, so there are a lot of mes.”
“More than this?”
“Oh, yeah. Dozens of us. Hundreds. Thousands. Don’t worry too much about the details. We thought three would be enough for something like this.” The woman was now drinking an iced beverage that also hadn’t been there the last time Tulland looked. “Could you turn on your little System friend, by the way? He could probably explain some of this while we work.”
…when you get this going you should leave right away, just demand it and they have to let you go. Nothing good can come of this at all. Go, before they decide to…
The System was, for whatever reason, panicking when Tulland switched him on.
“Shush, you.” The Infinite’s System boy turned around and made a slapping motion with his hand, which looked playful enough until Tulland actually heard his System gasp in pain. “Just tell him what we’re doing. There’s no reason for us to do anything to you beyond that.”
Oh. Well then.
That was enough to calm you down? Tulland thought.
It’s The Infinite. It wouldn’t bother breaking a promise to me. That’s simply not worth its time.
Tulland chewed on that little tidbit of information about the hierarchy of things for a moment before pushing the conversation forward out loud. It probably didn’t matter whether he was speaking or not. If The Infinite’s Dungeon System was that powerful, then it had just as much access to Tulland’s thoughts as his Ouros System did. On the other side, the woman was out of her chair now, saying things to the other two people.
“So what are they doing?” Tulland asked in a lower voice.
Adjudicating. You did something that The Infinite hasn’t had to think about before. It’s not enough for it just to make a decision on the fly, since it’s much harder for it to adjust a skill after the fact than to decide how things work well from the beginning. So it’s…
“Having a meeting to decide?”
Close enough. I still think you should leave, by the way.
“For my sake, or because it makes you more likely to win our bet if I do?”
The System went quiet then, which felt like a pretty good indication that whatever was happening was at least as likely to help Tulland as it was to hurt him. He turned the System back off for the moment so he could focus on what The Infinite’s different personas were saying.
The boy was the one talking at the moment. “The point is that we’ve already been treating the plants like they work that way. Which is probably why he tried it in the first place.”
“Yes, I know.” The woman nodded at the boy seriously. “But this… It’s a bit too powerful, conceptually. If he found a friendly beast with an absurdly high level, he could get a army of sorts that would put tamers to shame. And that with a class that by all rights should have already got him killed.” The woman glanced Tulland’s way and winced apologetically. “Sorry.”
“No, I know. Please continue,” Tulland said.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“Polite.” The man nodded approvingly. “I like that. I’ve heard both of your inputs on this matter now, and I’m the lead in this scenario. Are we all comfortable with me rendering my decision?”
“Sure,” the boy said, as the woman also nodded along. “Ready when you are.”
“Well, then.” The man turned to Tulland. “To give you a quick summary of what’s happened here, you managed to find a loophole in your skill that we all more or less agree would stretch the definitions of your class past its breaking points. You would be something like a vampire-class by proxy. No, don’t ask what that is. It’s just not something you can be.”
Tulland nodded. He was fine with not understanding every single thing being said right now.
The man continued, “The big thing is that you would have strength growth that wasn’t limited by your own level in any meaningful way. You could have level 100 plants while you were still at level 20 if you played your cards right. Things just don’t work that way.”
“So you just say no?” Tulland asked. “And I try to beat this thing to death with this stick?”
“Not quite. Because you still did something cool. May I?” The boy looked at the man, who nodded. Whoever The Infinite was, they really liked nodding. “See, this was allowable under the rules of your class until just now, and we never penalize someone for optimizing, even if we can’t allow it moving forward. So you get a payout. You don’t win the court case, but you get a settlement, if that makes sense.”
It didn’t. Tulland nodded anyway.
The woman picked up the mantle of the conversation. “The rest you can see in your notification screens, dear. Note that you can roll back any of the positive or lateral adjustments we’ve made if you truly think they aren’t good for you. It’s usually not the best idea, since this tends to be a generous moment for us, and you’d still lose the effects we need to limit. But it’s an option you have.”
“All right, then. All done.” The man nodded. “We’ll give you just a little bit to read your new notifications, but don’t lollygag, all right? It’s not forever. And good luck with that wager. It’s… fun, even if we can’t help with it. We’re looking forward to seeing how that turns out.”
And then all three of them were gone.
Skill adjustment: Quickgrow becomes Enhance Plant
Where Quickgrow applied only to the growth of plants and let them take advantage of particularly rich sources of nutrients, Enhance Plant now improves whatever function of a plant is most important in that moment. If the plant is at rest, this will usually be growing or reinforcing itself in some way. If it’s involved in another activity, it will enhance that instead.
Fertilizer will still make a difference in a plant’s growth rate, but the use you can get out of any given fertilizer will be capped by this skill’s level.
Skill adjustment: Biome Control becomes Broadcast
Your previous skill never got to the point of triggering a judgment session of its own, but it was vaguely possible for you to overgrow each floor of the dungeon using nothing but your Hades Lunger Briars and turning each of them into a kind of botanical hell.
It is no longer possible to do this.
The skill now works over a lesser range, and does not affect propagation rates. While your plants will no longer have the capability of becoming a self-reinforcing plague, they will enhance each other’s function just as they did before, if in a somewhat weaker way.
The loss of this function is compensated in two ways. First, the enhancements to your plants are no longer keyed to nearby biome density. Instead, you can now “stake” a location as the center of your “farm” and every plant you grow within that new area (current maximum farm size: a ten-meter-sided square) will provide strength to other plants at an unlimited distance.
This means, for instance, that you can carry a Lunger Briar with you that is enhanced by the overall quality of your base regardless of how far you are from it.
The second compensation involves your ability to use any of your farming skills that affect plants. Unless otherwise noted, the effect of any skill that benefits your crops can be split up among multiple plants, capped by the level of this skill (current maximum ratio: 15 plants). The split is slightly in your favor, meaning that the total power received by multiple plants is more in total than would be applied to a single plant.
Both the maximum farm size and maximum split ratio improve with the level of the skill. However, the strength distance function of this skill fails as you cross over to new levels of the tower, but you may retain the full effects of your previous farm for 48 hours after a new level is reached.
Tulland rushed through digesting the notifications, barely finishing a skim by the time his ears once again filled with the sound of an enraged monster. He hadn’t figured out every little bit of meaning behind the changes to the skills, but he had understood enough to know two of his next steps.
If he understood the Broadcast skill correctly, it wanted him to place his stake where his plants were the densest. Luckily, that was almost directly behind him, where his Lunger Briars had been growing like crazy and the roots of his Ironbranch Sapling were still in the soil. He activated it and felt a bit of feedback that his plants were now benefiting from the density of his farm.
Which, sadly, also meant his briars were a bit weaker now, as they had gone from using some huge number of plants to a much more limited stock. If Tulland wanted to level the playing field again, he had only one skill left to do that. And to his pleasure, he found his magical power was almost completely topped off, perhaps as a parting gift from The Infinite.
There were absolutely fifteen vines within range. He could feel them through the skill. But of those, only about five were touching the Forest Duke at the time. He selected them mentally to be the beneficiaries of the skill, and even checked to see if he could do the same to his Ironwood Sapling fragment.
As the Forest Duke continued to try and dislodge the one overpowered vine that kept its leveled-up potency, Tulland let loose with his power, trying to time it almost at the same time his club would impact with the monster’s head. None of this was likely to work, but Tulland was going to give it his all.
As the stick swished through the air, Tulland felt the power flow out of him and saw the briars and Forest Duke go crazy all at once.