The next morning, the vines were doing just fine. Part of this was because the branches Tulland was trying to sleep on were far from comfortable, which meant multiple opportunities to empty his sleep-refilled magical power on his brand-new farm. He had put down every available seed he could the night before, and about ten of the vines had gotten tall enough and strong enough to push out fruits. He ripped one of the fruits from the tree and gave it a cautious bite. It wouldn’t do to give these second floor fruits to Necia if they turned out to be poisonous in some way or another.

They tasted fine. If anything, they were a little bit sweeter and meatier than the fruits he had grown before. Which was good news, really. In a world where this was all he had to eat, any small improvement was a huge deal. A sudden rustle from the trees behind him meant it was time to share that big deal with others as well.

“I hardly believed you.” Necia looked around at the farm, then stepped forward to one of the other fruits. “May I?”

“Sure. Help yourself to as many as you want. Only…”

“Save the seeds. Of course. Got it.” Necia reached out to the plant and put her hand around the fruit, nicking her finger on one of the thorns in the process. “Damn. That hurts.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot they could do that. They can’t get me anymore. Benefit of the class,” Tulland said.

“Lucky you. That really hurts. More than it should.”

“It’s venomous. But it should stop in just a bit. Try the fruit. I’m afraid I might not have an unbiased opinion of how good these are anymore, but aren’t they a bit better?”

Necia bit into the plant, showing none of the careful restraint that Tulland had. He decided that made sense, as her vitality and overall level had to be a lot higher than his magic power was. Maybe, just maybe, if he had a poisonous plant, he might have been able to juice it up enough to take her down if she voluntarily ate it. She would still have plenty of time to fight him while it did though, and now that she was back to fighting size, it was easy to imagine how very few blows it would take from her sword to convince him he had made a mistake.

“It’s fine. Better than the fruit in the low-cost food packs The Infinite sells, anyway,” Necia said after a few chews.

“There are high-cost packs?” Tulland asked.

“Sure. I ate one on my birthday.” She winced. “It wasn’t cheap. Maybe I made a mistake there.”

“I don’t know. In a place like this, it feels like finding a way to be happy for a while is… important. Maybe the kind of thing that keeps you alive.”

“How? Doesn’t seem like the monsters care much what kind of mood I’m in.”

“No, but… I had a tutor. Back home. An old man. He and I used to argue about how armies worked. Since he knew and I only thought I knew, there was plenty to disagree about.” Tulland stopped momentarily as Necia snorted in laughter. She apparently had seen something like that before. “Anyway, he told me that morale is what moves armies. Armor and weapons and training matter, but morale is what makes them take the next step. I figure that to live, you have to want to live. And that doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you can fake. If good food helps with that, it’s probably worth it.”

Necia chewed her lip for a moment in thought, then shrugged. “Maybe. But either way, I’d better get going. Will you be safe here?”

“Probably. If nothing else, I can run back into my farm. There are enough briars growing there to make it real hard on any wolf that thinks it’s a good idea to break in,” Tulland said.

“Well, good luck with that. My fruits, by the way?” Necia asked.

“Oh, right.” Tulland ran around the farm and grabbed about ten fruits, using the tip of his scythe to pop out the seeds as he went. “Here. That should keep you for a while.”

“I hope so. I’ll be back tonight or tomorrow night, depending. Be safe, okay?”

Tulland nodded. It was a boring thing for someone to say, but felt really nice under the circumstances. Necia was disappearing over a rise in the terrain when he noticed his eyes were burning and his cheeks were wet, and put his hand to his face in surprise to find it was covered in tears.

*Oh, right. I guess I never really did deal with any of this. I wonder…*

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His thoughts were interrupted by a full-force, completely involuntary sob squeezing its way out of his mouth. A few seconds later, he found himself crumpled on the ground inside the relative safety of his briars, crying his eyes out.

At the end of the day, Tulland was realizing, he was just a kid. He had the body of a man, for the most part, and it was rapidly changing as he spent his days working, fighting, and walking to be even more so. He had at least the responsibilities of a man, in that he was functioning as a monster hunter, farmer, and System-scientist all rolled into one.

But a very short time ago, the most work he was actually expected to do in a given day was pretending to help his uncle peel potatoes while his uncle pretended to need the help. The most danger he was expected to face was a walk to the market.

Tulland expected most people that made the transition from the kind of life he had lived to this new, worse kind of lifestyle did so gradually. They probably had time to work up from their childhood to the adult adventures they finally got around to. Tulland had none of that, and had been alone for days on days now.

In the end, it wasn’t the danger or the hard living that cracked him. It was simply having been reminded what it was like for someone to be concerned about his safety, however superficially and casually. When Necia told Tulland to take care of himself, it took him to the ground as neatly and quickly as any punch to the gut could have.

He figured that whatever was bubbling out of him emotionally was better dealt with entirely right now if he could. He didn’t want to crack up during a fight with a wolf or when planting seeds in some dangerous place. He let himself cry and shiver on the ground until he ran out of that kind of energy naturally, then slowly sat up and ate a couple of fruits. Only when he felt completely himself again did he start to go back to work.

Tulland’s first point of order was to hit the plants in his farm with some charges of *Enhance Plant*, as filtered through *Broadcast*. After that, he started his day-long work of slowly enhancing every seed in his possession as much as he possibly could before dedicating them to the soil and slowly increasing the size of his stationary army. For now, he was still working off the bonus his farm on the first floor had given him, but that would be gone in about one more day. By that time, he needed something better in place or he wouldn’t stand a chance against the second floor monsters.

And that meant he needed something besides briars to grow. He could feel the energy coming in from *Broadcast*’s farm-staking function, and the increases it got as every new plant was added. If it wasn’t so obvious, he would have missed the bottleneck entirely, but what he was seeing was undeniable and clear. The farm awarded each plant of a given type a little less than the last. There was a balance to be struck, but at the moment he was entirely investing in just one particular kind of trash-tier briar and missing that balance completely.

*I need some more seeds.*

Tulland sighed and made his first bet of the day. He had a very limited stock of Ironbranch seeds, but he was willing to invest about half of them to border his farm, just as he had the last one. His farmer’s intuition was telling him they wouldn’t want to grow here at all, and that they’d probably fail. Even so, he couldn’t afford to not try. He gave them the best start he could with mashed-berry fertilizer and some *Enhance Plant*, and said a short prayer that the little fellas would germinate well.

After that, he was off to do some searching. Because although the badlands didn’t have a lot going on plant-wise, he had seen a lot of biodiversity from the swamp. If he was going to find anything worth growing in this hellhole, it would probably be there, and Necia had indicated she thought this area was pretty hunted-out for the time being. There wouldn’t be a safer time than now to check it out.

Surprisingly, the trees themselves seemed to be a bit of a wash. He found some seeds on them, and he’d plant them later, but judging by their system description, even The Infinite itself seemed to consider them to be useless in a boring kind of way.

*Swamp Ache*

*The Swamp Ache is a tree that would be of ill-repute if it were interesting enough to have a reputation at all. The wood is useless for construction and burns in a dirty, smoky flame that produces little heat compared to the trouble it takes to light and tend the moist wood.*

*The one redeeming feature of the plant is its ability to survive in the swamp in the first place, tolerating low-quality soils and high levels of moisture with very little trouble. While this is impressive in its own way, it’s simply not enough to make up for the sheer brittle, inconsistent nature of the wood that this plant produces. There are simply better options for almost any conceivable purpose than this tree.*

Tulland took a few of the crumbly-feeling seed pods just because he could, but the claim that they were flat-out-useless meant that he was motivated to keep looking. There were some algae growing in the muck that he scooped out handfuls of, trying and failing to get a system description on before just hucking them in his bag with the rest of his seeds. And found some things he wasn’t sure were plants at all in the technical sense, like the weird mosses and lichen that were growing on rocks and under trees here and there. He took some with him as he pressed on.

A few minutes from home, Tulland was starting to get antsy. He had enough briars on him that he could do an all-out armor-sacrificing attack to get out of most kinds of trouble he expected, but he really didn’t want to have to spend more weaponry than he had to that day.

In a few days, he’d have an overabundance of vines to work with, or at least he hoped he would. Today, he was one broken branch or two wolves-on-the-way-home from having to harvest plants before they were ready.

Tulland was just about to turn around when he saw it. There was bright, bright yellow something off in the distance, standing out as a single point of color in an otherwise dingy, dirty environment. He made a beeline for it. Once he was closer, he saw that it was a flower, or something doing its damnedest to look like one. It was closed like a rosebud, but the petals and bright colors made it hard to classify as anything else.

The Infinite agreed, kind of.