Infinite Farmer-Chapter 171: Liar’s Grass

“I don’t want anyone to die over this,” Tulland protested.

“They won’t,” Necia said. “I’ll make sure for you, Tulland. I promise.”

“Okay, then. I guess all I need now is a workshop.”

Amrand’s eyes tracked towards the best building in town, a sort of meeting hall that everyone used for various purposes as needed.

“You’ll have it.”

“No, not that one. Something smaller would be fine. Preferably something you wouldn’t mind blowing up,” Tulland said.

“You think that might happen?”

“It’s Tulland,” Necia said. “It would be weirder if it didn’t.”

This is it. It’s been a really long time, System. A really long time. How did it ever take me this long to get back to farming?

You are easily distracted, and there are a high number of high-intensity distractions on this world. The only person surprised by this outcome is you.

Well, yeah. Okay. Still, it’s been a long time coming. How do I actually use this thing?

Tulland turned the temporary stat-enhancing potion over in his hands. It didn’t look like much. Of course, he knew actually using it would be as simple as popping the cork and drinking it. Using it well was another thing entirely. The System caught his gist and immediately began explaining what he should do.

Everything related to the proper use of a potion like this is also related to preparation. Get out one of each of your seeds. I mean it. One of every seed you have.

Tulland did. It was a surprising array of variety. He had several seeds for trees, various seeds for briars, dozens of grasses, a bunch of different kinds of foods seeds, and more. Under a broad definition of seed, he also had a bunch of fragments of mosses, Acheflowers, and other plants that didn’t exactly have seeds but still had a way to propagate themselves.

The items on the stone table in front of him were the product of months and months of hard work, and he was proud of them.

Pretty good if I say so myself.

Very good, considering some particular impossible seeds on the table. Now think about what you are trying to do while looking at the seeds. No, don’t take the potion yet. Just get a feel for what you are trying to do.

I only have the vaguest idea of what I want.

Then build off that.

What Tulland wanted had a lot to do with what he had learned about his dungeon-based plants. Virtually nothing had survived the blight. It moved into the soil plants occupied and stole their means of survival right out from under them. His dungeon plants were different. They tried their best, then wilted. It had taken the whole planet with that one simple tactic.

Even the efforts of other farmers were of limited use stopping it. They could pour all the magic they gathered into the plants, and that really did keep them going for a while. But they were dumping water into a leaky bucket, as the blight still stole everything. It took the vast majority of what a conventional farmer could do to keep even a sickly food plant alive.

But how were Tulland’s plants staying alive? That was a question Tulland had never looked closely enough. He quickly ran out to the back lot of the building he was in and planted a few seeds. A quick application of Primal Growth later, he had several conventional food plants and a few normal briars growing. None of them seemed bothered by the blight in the soil at all, to the point where there was nothing for Tulland to observe.

From what he understood, nobody else on this planet had that experience. But his skills were undeniably weird. There might be something in how Primal Growth worked that just interfered with how the blight worked in a way a normal farmer’s growth spells didn’t. It had been a long time since Tulland thought about it, but unless he made a special effort to separate out the way he was communicating with the plants, it was almost always something like do well. Fight. Be strong.

He threw the same mix of seeds on the ground and made a special effort to keep his intent a lot more dialed in to something like grow fast, with no other flavors of intent rolled in. This time, there was something to see. The blight moved in like a flood, looking to steal the energy he had given them. It succeeded, although it had a much harder time sapping the briars than it did the conventional foods.

He tried again, mixing up his intent for the plants to try and find out what worked. Eventually, he found that some sort of will to fight was the key. If he could convince the plants that part of their purpose was to resist and destroy enemies, they could ward off the blight. It still took a fair amount of power, but it worked.

The more interesting thing was how much less power the dungeon plants took. The Hades Briars took very little effort to get into blight-fighting shape, and the Lunger Briars took even less than that. Some, like the Chimera Sleeves, took more despite being more advanced. It was even more than the difference it should have taken to grow a more advanced plant.

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I think it’s because the Chimera Sleeves are more passive.

Are they? They kill things much more efficiently.

Because I tell them to. Left on their own, they don’t attack anything. The Lunger Briars just fight no matter what. You have to order them not to hurt friends. They’ve always been like that.

Is it that simple?

I mean, it’s part of it. It has to be. But somehow it doesn’t feel like enough.

Perhaps you should go look at all your seeds again. Armed with this new knowledge, it might go a bit differently.

It did, mostly because it was easier to rule things out. None of his trees were aggressive, even the silver star variants that did nothing but grow caltrops all day. The Acheflowers were really the opposite thing, in that they were more reactionary and afraid than angry. In the end, there was nothing in his arsenal more aggressive than the Lunger Briars and Clubber Vines, and although the Clubber Vines were the much tougher plant even they couldn’t complete with the lungers on sheer pissed off, kill-everything anger.

But it wasn’t enough. He knew that even if he could get the vines to propagate on their own, it wouldn’t do the whole job. They took too much to grow, they needed a long time to seed, and worst of all they just weren’t from here. They didn’t like the weather. They didn’t love the soil.

If only there was a plant here that hated the blight and had managed to hold on despite everything. Actually, wait.

What?

Just wait. I have an idea.

Everyone on this world was starving, at least before they met Tulland. Among them, there was a common joke that they’d be okay if they could just eat grass. Then they’d reverse it and say that wasn’t true because even cows couldn’t eat liar’s grass.

Tulland had caught that particular bug at some point. The liar’s grass was everywhere, brittle and useless enough to ignore but still growing and living despite everything. It had beaten the blight longer than any other green thing on the planet, and he had just ignored it.

Tulland ran out to the edge of the town and found a clump growing near the road, ignoring the super-compacted soil and near total lack of water to sprout in blighted soil like any of that made sense. It only took a cursory examination to figure out why.

Liar’s Grass

Liar’s Grass has no beneficial traits. It has virtually no nutritional value, no value as a material, and cannot be burned for heat. It has one objective as an organism, and that is to simply survive in as many places as possible, conserving any and all energy it gathers for spreading to even more niches.

In most biomes, Liar’s Grass is nearly impossible to eradicate once it gains a foothold. When possible, it should be aggressively fought from its earliest appearance.

Tulland grabbed the bunch of grass, yanked it out of the ground roots and all, and sprinted back to the workshop. This was the ingredient he was missing. If he could combine the fighting spirit of the Lunger Briars with the sheer refusal to die that the Liar’s Grass brought to the table, it just might work.

“When do I take the potion?” Tulland asked the System.

Now. Right now while you are still excited.

“That helps?”

More than you can possibly imagine.

Tulland popped the seal on the potion and drank it, It tasted like old seawater, quite possibly the worst flavor he had ever encountered from a system-generate product. He guessed Aghli’s System might be looking for economy wherever he could get it, and so didn’t fault it if the taste of the potion was his fault. After drinking the ancient-tasting brine, he jumped into his work.

The splicer had ill-defined rules, but that had always worked in his favor. He could put in almost any plant and almost any vaguely life-related material into a chamber and it would do its best to find a way to combine them. It was still a very low probability that it would actually succeed at doing this any particular go, but it meant he had a lot of flexibility with the things he tried.

He took one of the seed laden grasses and laid it in the chamber of the splicer, hitting it with all the enhancement he thought it could take. The plant proved to be less durable than he thought. It reduced to ash, as did the fragments of plants he used on his second and third tries. It was the fourth go-round when he finally got some level of enrichment and intent embedded in the seed without destroying it.

Survive against all odds, he told it. Live anywhere, in any kind of adversity.

The Lunger Briar seed was much easier to manipulate, by comparison. He already had a good sense of how much these could take, even if he burned through several seeds trying to overload it with as much power as possible before he loaded it into the splicer.

The second chamber was filled the same way and with the same kind of intent, but with a Clubber Vine seed subbed in for the lunger to cover his bases. That left the third chamber, which seemed a little empty. He didn’t have anything good to load into it as far as this project went, though. Eager not to waste any moments left on the enhancement potion, he ran and grabbed a Silver Sun from his stock of seeds, painstakingly broke some of it off, and threw it in the chamber with a seed from an Achewood. They had never been much as trees outside of their ability to host more worthy Acheflowers, but they were as close to a blank slate as he had.

Be worthy. Be of value. Be beautiful.

You think that… yes, actually, that might work. It’s a good gamble. Will the seeds take any more energy?

No. Looks like that intelligence potion was wasted.

Do not confuse quality of energy with quantity of energy. Now close the chamber as quickly as you can, before it’s a person of lesser stats doing it.

Tulland slammed the lid shut, and felt it shift under his palm as it sealed.

Okay. Now what? Do I leave it to cook?

Possibly. But before you do that, examine the chamber. Throw some energy at it. It’s probably impossible to penetrate to the seeds, but you might be able to do something. It’s worth the time.

Tulland turned the chamber over and over in his hands, trying to see anything from it. He couldn’t. Experimentally, he launched some miniscule amount of energy at it in the form of a Primal Growth intent, only to feel it bounce off the canister like a grain of rice off a city wall. He kept trying for a bit, varying the intent each go-around. It didn’t take.

Are you still trying? I can’t see anything.

That’s because nothing is happening. Sorry, but I think this is a dead end. I wish it wasn’t, but… actually, wait.

What?

Just wait.