Infinite Farmer-Chapter 175: Emergency Teleport

“I like you, you know,” Tulland said.

“Oh, I know.” Necia laughed. “I’ve always known. You liked me that first time you met me, when you thought I was gigantic all the time.”

“Did I?”

“You did. Even though you thought I might cut you in half.”

“I guess so. Did you like me?”

“Not until later. At that time, I was very focused on killing a few more wolves and ants, if you remember. It took me a while to remember other people mattered in a way that went beyond worrying if they were going to kill you.”

“I’m glad you came around.”

“Me too.”

They held hands for a bit.

“I’m okay with it, you know.”

“What?” Necia asked. “Me cutting you in half? Because I use a club now. It might take a while.”

“No. I mean… the kids. The house on the hill. All of it. I want that.”

“You don’t.” Necia laughed again. “You just started to think about all that today. You don’t know if you want it yet or not. But it’s fine.”

“Why? You seem to want it.”

“Because I’ve been thinking about those things since I was a little girl. They were things a princess usually doesn’t get to have. At least not in any normal way.”

“I ask again. Why would it be okay that I’m so far behind that?”

“Because you want me, dummy. The other stuff comes later for most people.” She squeezed his hand. “And if we never got the chance to have kids or we never got the house on the hill, it would still be enough. Because the thing I really want now, the thing I know, is you. That’s the stage we’re at. It’s fine.”

“I can promise that, at least. Old Tulland the Farmer, just following you around forever.” freewёbnoνel.com

“Oh, Tulland. You think that’s how it works?” Necia giggled. “I’m here on another world, alive, and it’s not because you were following me. I don’t know what you think you are, but I can promise you that it’s not something small. You weren’t always strong, Tulland, but from the first day I can promise you I was just following along in your wake.” She put her head on his shoulder. “I just didn’t know it yet.”

—

The next day, Tulland left while Necia was still asleep, grabbing his seed bags and giving her a kiss on the cheek before he crept out into the dark. Everything was still in the village, and he was pleased to see there were plenty of seeds on the grasses around town. Being grass, they didn’t need to be completely harvested to bear more seed. They grew faster the longer they had been in place, and the more established their roots got. Within a few more days, they’d have more seed than they could ever harvest and sow, just there for the taking.

Things would go faster and faster after that. For now, they needed to protect what they had. The first sign of the difficulty of that were the four full dungeons Tulland saw as he left the village, parked just outside of the range of the thick, grown-in grassy fields starting to surround the town. They were smaller and weaker, somehow, in a way he could both feel and see. He jumped into one, finding it was an easy-to-destroy one-room affair.

The next three were just as easy, to the point where it only took him about fifteen minutes to clear all of them. The hardest thing in any of them was a small number of rodents, each about as dangerous to Tulland as an itchy ankle. It was like the small amount of grass around each of them had disrupted them somehow, like they were starved and couldn’t reach anything like their full potential.

“Oh, good. I caught you.” Amrand appeared behind him. “I see you noticed the dungeons.”

“I did,” Tulland said.

“I’m thinking that’s the confirmation we needed. The blight can’t function within the space these grasses control.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Yes. Not only because it’s going to push those dungeons farther and farther out, but because of something you probably have in that seed bag.”

“Oh. The dungeon seed. You think it’s time?”

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“If not now, I don’t know when. There’s a pretty thick patch just outside the gate. I say we put it down there.”

Tulland and Amrand jogged over to the spot, where Tulland put down a bucket of good earth as a just-in-case sort of thing before holding the seed down to the soil. He was honestly glad he wouldn’t be carrying the thing around. The idea of accidentally hurting it had been stressing him out for days.

As soon as the seed touched down, that fear was momentarily realized as it cracked, crumbled, and reduced itself to dust.

“Oh, please tell me that’s how it works.” Tulland looked at his empty hand in horror. “I’m not that strong, I don’t think.”

“I’m sure it will be fine. Just give it a minute. See? There it is.”

Where the seed had touched the ground, the slightest of cracks began to develop, putting off a strong sense of hunger Tulland could feel through his Farmer’s Intuition. He began to feed it magic through his Primal Growth, and even though the thing didn’t register as a plant exactly, it was more than happy to accept the power. It took a minute or so, but eventually the hunger began to taper off, then stopped all of a sudden as the embryonic dungeon shut itself off to any energy at all.

“It’s growing faster now. Although it seems like it will probably take a while before it turns into what it’s supposed to,” Amrand said.

“The blight dungeons popped up instantly,” Tulland countered.

“The blight has energy flowing everywhere all the time. I’m guessing the System only has what the grass here can provide to it. It’s not too weird.”

“Well then.” Tulland watched a bit longer as the dungeon grew. It would be hours at least before it was bigger. “I guess I can check it out when I’m home. Just make sure Necia’s up when it looks like it’s getting done. If this thing turns. You’ll need her to clear it.”

Amrand agreed before heading back into town to do other work. Finally freed up, Tulland found himself walking off in no particular direction, striding across featureless terrain for a few hours while simply soaking in the silence and monotony of it all.

It was midday when he found another dungeon. It was populated by a kind of giant reptile that proved too slow and too stupid to be much of a threat to Tulland. He worked his way across their watery domain, killing and slaughtering as he went until he made it to the dungeon pillar.

I’m going to plant some grass in it. Just this one time, to see if something different happens.

Do that. I’ll be interested to see it.

Tulland very carefully dug notches into the pillar, grinding away dust until there were channels that the seeds could adhere to. He took wetted the seeds in the reptile’s swamp, packed them into the pillar, and waited a bit.

Something about the proximity to that much blight power made the Rebel Grass grow faster than he had expected, and in a few moments he had sprouts coming from the pillar, each projecting its own little angry grassy domain where once the blight had held sway. Tulland watched as that domain grew and grew until, suddenly, he found himself standing outside.

<+

Emergency Teleport Activated

Your actions in the latest dungeon accomplished two separate things.

First, you disrupted the dungeon’s core structure by introducing a conflicting energy source. The presence of Rebel Grass inside the blight's domain created an unsustainable contradiction, forcing an immediate collapse of the dungeon.

Luckily, it also granted the System of Aghli just enough power over the space to exert influence on you and your plants, allowing it to remove them from the space before you were sealed into some sort of interdimensional space beyond any likely help.

As much as Aghli’s System encourages adventurers to resist the blight in any way possible, it strongly suggests you don’t try anything similar in the future.

+>

“Wow. I wonder what the rewards from that were.”

None, if I had to guess. That sort of teleport is expensive.

“Nothing for it, I guess. On to the next dungeon, I suppose.”

Tulland sat up, rubbing the back of his neck as he considered his next move. The experiment had still been worth it. Even if the grass couldn’t be used to seize control of dungeons, it had proven something important, something that was reinforced by the weakened dungeons he saw around the town before he left. The blight’s energy didn’t tolerate interference.

It was looking more and more like the real battle wasn’t about fighting dungeons at all. It was about giving the land the armaments it needed to fight back. If they could turn the entire world green, they could starve the blight. So long as nothing changed and they kept chucking seeds at patches of open soil, they’d eventually make progress.

Tulland sighed, getting to his feet and dusting himself off. He still had a job to do. The dungeons weren’t going to clear themselves, and the farther they pushed them back, the safer the town would be. Throwing down a few handfuls of seed, he moved on in search of the next dungeon.

Within a few hours, it was raining. The water fell in slow, fat droplets, turning the dust at Tulland’s feet into sticky clumps of mud. He kept moving, his boots sinking slightly with each step. It wasn’t the worst weather he’d walked through, and if anything, it gave him a better sense of where the ground was soft enough for seeds to take root.

He scattered a handful of Rebel Grass seed at the base of a rocky outcrop, watching as the tiny grains vanished into the damp earth. There wasn’t a dungeon here, but the dungeon-finding was slow-going. At this rate, it’d take longer than a week before he accomplished what he wanted to try, and he didn’t want to let the moisture go to waste.

Tulland walked until the sky turned dark and the stars shone sharp and bright. The land was quiet, with no distant howls, no rustling from hidden threats. Just the wind moving over fields of nothing, He scattered handfuls of seed every now and again, but otherwise just rested in the cool wet of the air. It didn’t wash the blight away. It couldn’t. But somehow the world felt a little cleaner anyway.

It was lonely and boring, but still nice in a way. Ever since his time in The Infinite, he had learned to enjoy and get the most out of small moments of respite. He tried to do the same thing here, undisturbed, until instead of him finding the next dungeon, the next dungeon found him.

The rain hid the sounds of the gulls until they were almost on him. Only the fact that they still screeched like birds alerted him in time to react, rolling out of the way before a cloud of hundreds of blighted birds swept him off his feet.