Infinite Farmer

Chapter 18: Adjudicating

"Well, this is interesting." A tall, mediocre-looking man walked from behind Tulland, who found himself in a near-duplicate of his own briar-fortress. The man was holding a similarly detailed copy of his over-powered briar, turning it over in his hands and gazing at it in interest "I haven't had to do an active judgment in… well, in a while. What did you say your name was again?"

"I…" Tulland gulped. This guy was weirdly casual in a way that, for some reason, screamed danger. "I didn't. I don't think."

"Oh, right." The man made a mock motion of slapping his forehead. "I didn't need to ask. Let me just check. Oh, I see. Tulland Lowstreet. The same one who made the wager the other day, right? I kind of expected you to be dead by now."

"Are you…"

"Yes. Well, part of him, anyway."

"Part of us." A woman's voice rang out. Tulland turned to see a middle-aged lady sitting in a wooden chair that simply hadn't been there before. "I'm going to need you to stop applying him to our chorus like it covers all of us. It doesn't."

"And when she whines about it, I have to listen to it." A surly looking teenager walked up to one of the briars and flicked it. "And I don't get to see whatever's going on that much these days. Good job, by the way. It's rare we see anything new."

"Oh. Thanks." Tulland scratched his head. "So all of you are The Infinite's System?"

"Kind of, yes, sorta, no, and of course," the unimpressive man said. "We've found that trying to explain exactly how this works to humans doesn't really take, no matter how we do it. The best approximation I can give is that multiple beings give better advice, on average, than individual beings. And I'm supposed to do a good job, so there are a lot of me."

"More than this?"

"Oh, yeah. Dozens of us. Hundreds. Thousands. Don't worry too much about the details. We thought three would be enough for something like this." The woman was now drinking an iced beverage that also hadn't been there the last time Tulland looked. "Could you turn on your little System friend, by the way? He could probably explain some of this while we work."

…when you get this going you should leave right away, just demand it and they have to let you go. Nothing good can come of this at all. Go, before they decide to…

The System was, for whatever reason, panicking when Tulland switched him on.

"Shush, you." The Infinite's System boy turned around and made a slapping motion with his hand, which looked playful enough until Tulland actually heard his System gasp in pain. "Just tell him what we're doing. There's no reason for us to do anything to you beyond that."

Oh. Well then.

That was enough to calm you down? Tulland thought.

It's The Infinite. It wouldn't bother breaking a promise to me. That's simply not worth its time.

Tulland chewed on that little tidbit of information about the hierarchy of things for a moment before pushing the conversation forward out loud. It probably didn't matter whether he was speaking or not. If The Infinite's Dungeon System was that powerful, then it had just as much access to Tulland's thoughts as his Ouros System did. On the other side, the woman was out of her chair now, saying things to the other two people.

"So what are they doing?" Tulland asked in a lower voice.

Adjudicating. You did something that The Infinite hasn't had to think about before. It's not enough for it just to make a decision on the fly, since it's much harder for it to adjust a skill after the fact than to decide how things work well from the beginning. So it's…

"Having a meeting to decide?"

Close enough. I still think you should leave, by the way.

"For my sake, or because it makes you more likely to win our bet if I do?"

The System went quiet then, which felt like a pretty good indication that whatever was happening was at least as likely to help Tulland as it was to hurt him. He turned the System back off for the moment so he could focus on what The Infinite's different personas were saying.

The boy was the one talking at the moment. "The point is that we've already been treating the plants like they work that way. Which is probably why he tried it in the first place. And it's unfair to rip capabilities from adventurers here. He worked for it. He should get to keep it."

"Yes, I know." The woman nodded at the boy seriously. "But this… It's a bit powerful, but that's not the issue. With this, he'd never have to move. He could plant briars, stay in the center, and wait until the entire floor was eaten up with them. That doesn't just affect him. It affects the floors themselves."

"And if he found the right combination of beasts, some of those vines would put tamers to shame. Those are the issues. The propagation and the uncapped fertilization effect. Not cobbling together something that works with a class that by all rights should have already got him killed." The man glanced Tulland's way and winced apologetically. "Sorry."

"No, I know. Please continue," Tulland said.

"Polite." The man nodded approvingly. "I like that. I've heard both of your inputs on this matter now, and I'm the lead in this scenario. Are we all comfortable with me rendering my decision?"

"Sure," the boy said, as the woman also nodded along. "Ready when you are."

"Well, then." The man turned to Tulland. "To give you a quick summary of what's happened here, you managed to find a loophole in your skill that we all more or less agree would stretch the definitions of your class past its breaking points. You would be something like a vampire-class by proxy. No, don't ask what that is. It's just not something you can be."

Tulland nodded. He was fine with not understanding every single thing being said right now.

"At the same time, it's not fair to rob you of a more-than-reasonable reward for figuring out how to do that. There are ways classes just can't work, or else very lucky people would get invincible classes from time to time and dominate entire worlds. You know that doesn't happen."

"So you just say no?" Tulland was getting over the shock of the meeting and beginning to understand he might take a loss here. "And I try to beat things like the Forest Duke to death with a stick?"

"Not quite. Because you still did something cool. May I?" The boy looked at the man, who nodded. Whoever The Infinite was, they really liked nodding. "See, this was allowable under the rules of your class until just now, and we never penalize someone for optimizing, even if we can't allow it moving forward. So you get a payout. You don't win the court case, but you get a settlement, if that makes sense."

It didn't. Tulland nodded anyway.

The woman picked up the mantle of the conversation then, smiling and patting Tulland on the shoulder.

"What we are doing won't hurt your progress, Tulland, at least compared to what you've already accomplished. You'll be as strong as you were fighting that monster, and you'll be able to do some things you weren't before, just capped by your skill levels like any class would be. It's as fair of a trade as we can manage, within the rules. The rest you can see in your notification screens, but you've made real progress here. You don't have much of a chance, but nobody who finds their way here does."

"All right, then. All done." The man nodded, as if he had actually accomplished something. "We'll give you just a little bit to read your new notifications, but don't lollygag, all right? It's not forever. And good luck with that wager. It's… fun, even if we can't help with it. We're looking forward to seeing how that turns out."

And then all three of them were gone.

Tulland rushed through the notifications. He hadn't figured out every little bit of meaning behind the changes to the skills, but he had understood enough to know two of his next steps.

If he understood the Broadcast skill correctly, it wanted him to place his stake where his plants were the densest. Luckily, that was almost directly behind him, where his Lunger Briars had been growing like crazy and the roots of his Ironbranch Sapling were still in the soil. He activated it and felt a bit of feedback that his plants were now benefiting from the density of his farm.

Which, sadly, also meant his briars were a bit weaker now, as they had gone from using some uncountable huge number of plants to a much more limited stock. It wasn't a huge difference, as the farm seemed to get more plant-for-plant enhancement than before.

But if Tulland wanted to level the playing field again before he took the time to grow more plants and optimize his new farm area, he had only one to do that with. And to his pleasure, he found his magical power was completely topped off and ready to play with, perhaps as a parting gift from The Infinite.

Tulland walked through his farm until he found fifteen vines within range. He could feel them through the skill. He selected them mentally to be the beneficiaries of the skill, and added his Ironwood Sapling fragment to the tally.

The magic power flowed out of him in a torrent. The sapling took none of it, which was something he'd figure out later. The briars were a different story. He focused on making them temporarily stronger, not making them grow faster, and felt the guidance take hold. His farmer's intuition tingled as he felt all of them get stronger. Individually, none of them was quite what his mega-briar had been. But as a group? They might have been even more.

Oh, yes. Tulland smiled. I can probably work with this.