Chapter 14: Cards

And so the bet was set, and done in a way that Tulland suspected wasn't reversible.That, in itself, was the first win for Tulland. He had another piece of information about the relationship between his System and The Infinite that he wouldn't have ever gotten from the System itself. It had to, as near as Tulland could tell, do what The Infinite said in certain situations.

At the very least, it seemed The Infinite could bind the Ouros System to certain kinds of agreements it had made. If that's all it was, The Infinite's Dungeon System wasn't necessarily an all-powerful entity. But it was a way for Tulland to get things out of his System that it wouldn't otherwise give, or to get it to pay out where it might otherwise cheap out on him. Sёarch* The Novёlƒire.n(e)t website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

If there was a way for Tulland to get any kind of real victory over the System, it would have to involve something like this. Some kind of clever loophole he could exploit when trying to down a literal god. He had nowhere near the power to do that alone, but by calling on the strength of another god? It just might be doable.

Of course, that's making quite a giant assumption that their whole relationship and everything I can see isn't some kind of cruel, elaborate prank. But if that's the case, I'm going down anyway. This is the best bet I can make.

Tulland had turned off the System as soon as the bet was finalized. He had planning to do, and he didn't particularly want the System influencing him with honeyed words while he tried to do it.

The way Tulland saw it, he didn't have an absolute overabundance of cards to make his hand out of. But he had some, and if he learned one thing while watching his uncle play betting games, it was that you didn't always make your bets when it was sure you'd win. By that time, other people would have ways to figure out the strength of your hand and wouldn't commit. Instead, you started betting early, got them in deeper than they wanted to be, and hoped your hand would improve as the game wore on.

The first card Tulland had was an unlikely sort of ally in The Infinite. It wasn't necessarily on his side, but it did at least seem impartial, and the terms it had stipulated for him on the bet were more generous and better thought out than any he would have negotiated himself. It wasn't anything he could count on, and The Infinite hadn't provided him with the rule book it used to mediate those kinds of things, but it was better than having a hostile entity in cahoots with his arch-nemesis.

Tulland's second card was a bit harder to quantify. His new skill made his plants stronger, and it made them grow faster, and seemed to imply some characteristics plants held, like value, that he didn't understand yet. He imagined that the actual effect of the skill would be pretty weak on a per-plant level, but there were a couple of things that made him hopeful.

A normal farmer would be limited in terms of the total amount of land they could access. Tulland had heard of some pretty big farms on the continent, even some bigger than the entire island on which he lived. But those were worked by big groups of agricultural specialists, unclassed but skilled. There was a limit to what one person could do themselves, even if they had a class. They would have to till the soil, fertilize, weed, and harvest, as well as a dozen other things an expert farmer would do that Tulland had no clue about. They would only claim so much land because there was only so much land they could actually work.

Tulland had neither of those limitations right now because the plants he was growing simply didn't need that much help. Even unenhanced, the seeds of the briars seemed willing to sprout anywhere, on any soil, with any amount of moisture available to them. They were weeds that hunted, and once a seed landed somewhere, the plants seemed entirely capable of taking care of themselves.

To the extent Tulland was limited in this place, it would be by the total size of this floor of the dungeon and how much time he could dedicate to scattering seeds.

Which isn't much of a limitation at all. Let's get to work.

Since the briars no longer tried to make life hell for Tulland, he could pick more seeds in a few minutes than he could carry. The first job would be fixing that limitation. Scythe in hand, Tulland harvested several vines, then cut them to length before beginning to weave them together into an unbelievably crude, brutal-looking fabric.

If he wasn't immune to the damage his own plants could put out, it would have been a dangerous job. Even in a situation where he couldn't get pricked to death, the thorns were still a big problem, getting in the way constantly as he rearranged the plants again and again until they fit relatively close together.

Once that was done, the thorns became an asset instead of a liability. The completed weave couldn't have come apart even if it wanted to, given that the thorns either acted as pegs to keep the vines from sliding or went completely through them to more or less nail them into place.

Once Tulland had a makeshift, half-meter-square tarp with two sides weaved together, he took a few more vines, wove them through in a slightly different way, and managed to create two rope handles of sorts that would pull the bag mostly closed as he lifted it.

Then he got to work in earnest. Running around his space, he grabbed as many fruits as he could, tossing them into of the bag. There was no shortage of fruits growing in his original cut-out briar area, and after a minute or so, he had dozens of the things. He started to move towards the outside world, pulling fruits from his gate-keeper briars as he went.

Once Tulland was outside, he started chucking the damn things to lighten his load. He very honestly didn't care where they landed so long as they landed by themselves, and with enough points in strength, that was easy to do.

Once he had thrown out what he had, Tulland returned to his area, made sure to get whatever remaining fruits there were, then exited and started doing rounds of the more distant, sparse areas. He took along a few new Lunger Briar vines in his bag in addition to the few he had around his arms, just in case. As he passed the little clumps of briars he had planted earlier, he stripped them of fruits, hit the plants with Quickgrow and seeds with Enrich Seed, and threw them as he went.

Tulland could move faster now than he had ever been able to at any point in his life. Even carrying a big, awkward bag that kept snagging on his clothes, he could cover a mile in mere minutes. It only took him an estimated few hours to make a full circle as big as the one he made in the days before.

His increased spirit was doing a hell of a job keeping him topped off, too. Even short gaps between clumps of plants that took a few minutes walking regenerated enough magical power to push a few charges of Quickgrow. Longer walks meant he could use the more expensive Enrich Seed, which seemed to drain him more than anything else he could do physically or spiritually at the moment.

By the time he got back to home base, some of the higher level briars he had magically enhanced before he left had already pushed out new fruits, which he immediately planted. Then, after resting for about an hour, he picked what new fruits he could find and began to leave.

And then he saw the damnedest thing.

Well, isn't that interesting. I didn't plant you, did I?

Just outside of the entrance to his briar fortress, Tulland saw a briar sprout that had taken hold near the base of another plant. It wasn't anything special. A quick inspection told him it was a level 1 nothing, a seed that didn't seem to have gotten any benefit from Tulland's magical abilities or fertilizer.

But it had grown on its own. At some point, one of the briars had dropped a fruit, and it had taken root all by itself. That was Tulland's third card in his rapidly improving hand against the System.

Tulland laughed, and flipped on his communications with the System.

"Heya, System. What do you think of this?" Tulland asked.

This? I don't see anything interesting in the area, except your little thorn bushes.

"That's what I mean. This one in particular, right here. What do you think of it?"

There was the usual System's-pregnant-silence Tulland had come to expect, either before it mocked him or when it was at a loss for words.

I don't understand what you are getting at.

"No, I bet you don't." The System had no idea about Tulland's recent biome skill, and the sheer confusion in its voice confirmed that it hadn't even begun to figure out what Tulland was up to. Without that skill as context, the things Tulland had spent the last few hours doing probably looked like sheer insanity, like he was wasting time growing lower quality plants when he could have tried to figure out how to cultivate better and better ones. "Just know that I'm going faster and doing better than you could possibly imagine. I'll talk to you in a week, okay? Keep your eyes open while I work. You might see some interesting things."

Tulland worked for another five or six hours until he found he was finally too tired to make any more rounds. It was only when he sat down to eat some fruits and rest that he finally started to see the results of his hard labor.

Skill level up!

Tulland smiled and went to sleep. He saved the satisfaction of looking at his new, survival-crucial numbers until after he woke up.