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"Defenses of its own" was an interesting enough concept that Tulland was immediately hooked. He drew closer to the flower, inspecting it from every side and looking for hidden thorns or methods of attack he needed to watch out for. Seeing none, he very carefully lifted his gloved hand to where the parasite joined the tree to pull as much of the flower off as he possibly could. And then the flower struck.

"Gah!" Tulland yelled despite himself as the entire flower seemed to dissipate in his hand, expelling itself outward in a puff of yellow powder. He sprung back from it almost as fast as the buff, but only almost. A bit of the powder got into his eyes and nose, where it immediately started burning like fire.

And then, suddenly, the world got a lot more colorful. He turned on the System communication channel.

"Hey, System." Tulland said. "Why is it a rainbow?"

Why is what a rainbow? I don\'t understand what you are talking about.

"The wooooorld." Tulland slurred just a bit, beginning to grin. "It\'s so pretty."

You are intoxicated. Somehow.

"I\'m… what?"

High. Drunken, almost, as you would understand it. Listen. I\'m going to give you this one for free. You should probably get back to your camp.

"With the flower?"

Sure. What\'s left of it if that\'s what you want. But you\'d better get moving. Or not. I don\'t care.

Tulland wasn\'t entirely sure what the System was talking about, but he also didn\'t have a better reason to not return home. He had a pretty flower, after all, or at least the stem of one, and it was still yellow on account of all the powder.

He wasn\'t at all sure he picked the right direction to walk in until he saw the edge of the swamp off in the distance. Smiling, Tulland ambled toward it amiably and happily, appreciating all the beautiful butterflies that were now existing just beyond the edges of his field of view, and the funny way they disappeared when he tried to look right at them.

Once he broke the edge of the biome into the badlands, he saw he had actually missed his mark by about a minute\'s walk, and started towards his now-visible farm. He was about halfway there before he saw a friend, and decided to finish the trip faster to make sure he had food to offer it.

Such a nice puppy. Loud. But very nice.

He was just ahead of the dog when he finally broke through his briars into camp, and then spent a few minutes picking berries as he heard the dog getting more and more excited just past the edge of his garden. When he finally had several of them, he sat down to count the berries, something he found surprisingly hard in that moment. The dog was quite loud by now, which made it all that much better when it finally fell silent.

A minute later, Tulland was at least sure that he had more than four of the fruits when a system notification and a sudden clearing in his perception brought him down to earth and left him with an odd, growing sense of dread.

"Oh shit. Oh shit. System. Did you see that?" Tulland called.

You don\'t recall? I told you to go back to your camp. I believe you arrived just in time as well. That wolf did not sound at all happy to have run into your defenses, by the way.

"No, I guess not." Now that he was sober again, Tulland could more or less remember what that had sounded like, and turned around to find three fully used-up briars leading up to one very healthy, very well-fed looking plant. "What level do you think that briar is?"

Six, I believe. It got all the experience for that kill. You were not in the least aggressive, and The Infinite appears to have cut you out of it.

"Better than dying. Why did you help me anyway?"

The bet, remember? I get paid out in a currency much purer than you can imagine once I win it, and again once the skill I steal from you leaves you dead. It isn\'t to my advantage to let you die unnecessarily before then.

"And that\'s all?"

Of course. Does it not make sense?

"I suppose. And thanks, for what it\'s worth," Tulland replied.

Tulland cut the connection. It was weird, even if the System had about half of an excuse for doing it. Even if it was true that the Ouros System would get more pay if he lived a bit longer, that wasn\'t the whole story. Tulland could remember the System\'s voice when it had directed him. There was something there besides pure greed. It was hard to say exactly what it was, but he would have sworn it was there.

He shook his head a few times to make sure his balance felt normal and stood. The Infinite hadn\'t been kidding about the drug being clear from his body. He felt normal, at least to the extent he could tell. But on top of all that normal-feeling healthiness was something else now. He was greedy. Whatever that flower had done to him was something he wanted in his arsenal, and as soon as he could possibly get it.

Luckily, The Infinite had given him a pretty solid roadmap for making that happen. The first step was in his bag in the form of a seedpod for what was admittedly the very worst, lowest-quality kind of tree he had ever seen. He bounced the pod in his hand a few times, then took one of the seeds out of it and hit it with an Enrich Seed to get it into fighting shape.

Walking to the swamp-side of his farm, he took out his Farmer\'s Tool scythe, harvested a few briars, then used the hoe-mode to make the soil a little wetter and more boggy than it had been before. Into that soil, with no fertilizer at all, he dropped the Swamp Ache seed. Then he walked along the entire back border of his farm, planting the others.

From what his notifications had hinted at, these trees were pretty useless outside of being used as a food source for the parasite. So long as they grew, he could use them as a platform for making more of the flowers. Tulland hit the entire row of new tree plantings with an Enhance Plant, then tried seeding his new Acheflower.

With the petals mostly turned into powder, the yellow flower was reduced to a stem with several of what he was pretty sure were seeds stuck to it. Taking these carefully onto his fingertip one at a time, Tulland walked over to the swamp, found a grown Swamp Ache, planted the flower seeds, and then empowered them with what magical energy he had to spare.

Between enriching the seeds and speeding up the growth, he was hoping to have several of the flowers pretty soon. If that worked, he would hopefully have some level of tree to plant them on while it was still relevant for his efforts. The variety would at least help, unless he missed his guess. The only question was if the just planted trees would get big enough to support the parasites before it was time for him to move on.

Once that work was done, Tulland found himself exhausted. Magic was a weird master to serve under, in a lot of ways. He was pretty sure his body would be good for days of work now, if that was all he asked it to do. Adding a more mystic energy expenditure to the mix was enough to have him sleepy almost every time he bottomed out his force.

Naps are the secret to power. I thought uncle was just taking them because he liked the couch.

It also didn\'t help that Tulland had spent the night before almost falling out of a tree, but if nothing else happened today, at least his farm had proven its worth. Deep inside the briars, it would take a concentrated attack from several wolves to penetrate to Tulland, and with how few were left in this part of his world, he didn\'t expect that to be a problem.

Before laying down, he had the presence of mind to harvest whatever briar fruits had popped up in his absence and throw the seeds out onto freshly tilled soil at the border of the swamp and the drier land. Then he laid down, finding himself asleep almost as soon as he settled onto the hard dirt.

—

The Ironbranch trees had been out-and-out resistant to Tulland\'s attempts to grow them, both rejecting Enrich Seed entirely and barely getting anything out of Quickgrow or Enhance Plant. The first sign Tulland had that the Swamp Ache would be a different story was when it had greedily lapped up whatever magical power he could provide it at the seed stage. It didn\'t complain one bit, just soaking up his energy until it was topped off and then doing the same with Enhance Plant once it was in the soil.

It was, in a way Tulland couldn\'t really explain, almost unrespectable behavior for a plant. The briars took his energy, sure, but they didn\'t seem to have any feelings about it. Something in his farmer\'s intuition gave him the sense that the Swamp Ache was needy or desperate, or whatever the botanical equivalent of those feelings were.

The second difference wasn\'t a feeling at all, but something he could see with his bare, unassisted eyesight. It wasn\'t even something he could have missed if he had tried, as he opened his eyes to a foot and a half of new growth and a row of established saplings staring him in the face. Not a single seed of the swamp trees had failed.

And to Tulland\'s surprise, each of them was feeding him much more energy than the briars they had displaced. He had almost expected the garbage tree to fail him in that way, but he could feel the new power flowing through all his defensive vine armor. He stood up and stretched, oddly pleased at the development.

Emptying out his refilled magical power into the new trees, Tulland considered the next steps in his plan. As much as he hadn\'t expected it, the new trees were overperforming what he had expected them to do, and it wasn\'t like the briars were in short supply. Wandering into the swamp again, he picked through the trees until he had a dozen more seeds, then put each of them in the soil with either some fruit flesh or the last little bits of the wolf-meat in his pack. He had an inkling that the piggish, unsophisticated little trees would get something out of both fertilizers.

They aren\'t picky. Which I guess makes things easy for me.

He waited around a few more hours, making sure every bit of his farm and annex got a little bit of benefit from his magic as it filled and refilled. As he did, he carefully checked his current briar armor against the plants growing in his new farm. Soon, the new plants would surpass what he was wearing, with no shortage of extra plants in sight. Which meant he had resources to burn, and an enemy type he wasn\'t experience-capped on yet.

Wait for me, little wolves. It\'s time for some payback soon.