“I traded for it,” Tulland said.
“Traded what?”
“Things.” Tulland was stuck for half a beat, then pointed at the cooking animals. “Animals like those.”
“Like those?” The man shoved the bag back over the counter towards Tulland. “Son, there aren’t enough animals in the whole world to…”
“It’s all right, Pol. I’ve got it.”
Tulland felt an armored hand close hard around his shoulder, strong in a way that went beyond stats and heavy with what his young mind still interpreted as adult authority. If this guy was grabbing his shoulder, he was in trouble.
Or at least he would have been before. Necia had a point about extreme over-leveledness. Whoever this guy was, he wasn’t a real threat unless he was very literally one of the strongest men on this planet. Tulland gave Necia a wait-and-see sort of look and turned.
The man was old, and clearly authoritative. Tulland immediately pegged him as some kind of peacekeeper, like White had been. And like White, he looked distinctly sane. Reasonable. Not happy by any means, but in control of himself.
“You said you traded for these things? That you traded animal meat for them?” The man looked in the bag and whistled. “That’s an awful lot of dried plant to have traded meat for.”
“No. Not for this much. This would keep a village going a week. Maybe a month, if you made it stretch.”
Tulland tried not to think too hard about how the local cooking must have worked if the bag of food he had just set on the counter would last them a week, let alone a month.
“Besides. Couple weeks ago, a town a few days off got blighted. Every man, woman and child of them. I wondered how they got into that place. It was sealed up tighter than a drum, with plenty of supplies to last. Supplies like this.” He tapped the bag. “I guess I have a better idea of what’s happening now.”
“Wait, you are accusing me? Based on having food?” Tulland asked.
“Based on having food no one man in a hundred miles could grow. Now come on. Both of you. Or these boys will make sure you come.”
A few absurdly husky young men lined up behind the older, mustached one, each with their arms crossed in the way Tulland would have thought was intimidating when he was their age. In a way, he was their age. They were probably born around the same time, although Tulland had been through a bit of a rebirth since.
“No need for that.” Necia did an excellent job of looking scared as she gripped Tulland’s arm. “Licht, you’ll tell them, right?”
“Of course, Halter.” Tulland ignored Necia’s sudden glare at the back of his head as he stepped forward. “Where are we headed?”
“To the cell.” The man made a hand motion to the boys and they fell in behind Tulland and Necia, book ending the walk over to the cell. “We’ve got a lot to get through fast. Hope you don’t expect much in the way of comfort because these chairs can be pretty rough.”
The rough chairs ended up being perfectly conventional chairs, much better than the tree stumps and raw dirt Tulland and Necia were used to. They sat and waited while the lawman let the tension build, talking in their minds and using the System as an intermediary.
You dropped the stuff?
Waiting a few moments for the System to repeat everything he said was annoying, but it meant fail-proof, undetectable communication. So that felt like a small price to pay.
I did. Just as we passed the door. I’m pretty sure nobody noticed.
“So, why the big deal?” Tulland asked. “Just some food. Just a few plants. I’ve never seen anybody freak out about them before.”
“Oh. Sure.” The man sat down backwards on another chair across from them. “Never seen it before. Never seen people hungry. Never seen towns burned as people fought over the scraps left in someone’s basement. Never seen any of that at all.” S~eaʀᴄh the NovelZone.fun website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.
“You have?” Tulland leaned forward. “Tell me about that. Tell me about why.”
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“Sir?” The man was using sir in a way Tulland hadn’t heard before, a sort of anti-use that made clear the person saying it was choosing to, rather than forced to by convention. “I don’t think you are in any position to make demands. I want you to consider that. I really do. Let me think of a list of reasons why.”
The man dramatically paused, pretending to count off reasons in his own head. Tulland let the man. He was already in control of the conversation, and not because he could take the man and his muscle on in a fight.
“First, let’s talk about what it means to even have that much food. It means you are hoarding. By order of the fallen king, that’s not done. Now, you might think just because he’s fallen, that rule no longer stands. But turns out, when you fall holding the line between a retreating capital and ten thousand shadowed blight cats, you earn a bit of lasting respect.”
Tulland nodded. The king sounded like a good guy.
“So just having that? Wrong side of the law. All of it that’s left. That’s before we start talking about how you got it. Now we both know damn well that fallen town had something to do with it, but say they didn’t. Say you stole it from not one place, but dozens. Say you were robbing caravans. Travelers. You think we go easier on that? If you made your victims add up rather than taking them as a lump?”
“I don’t,” Tulland said. “And I understand all that. I really do. But there’s something you aren’t thinking of.”
“Oh? You were gonna drop all that off at our town for a roasted quanja? Yeah, I thought of that. And I’ll tell you, it’s a nice gesture, but feeling guilty after the fact only goes so far. It goes a ways, but only so far.”
“Not even that. Something different.”
“Fine then. The law affords you a chance to speak. You think you have something that will make a difference, let her fly.”
“Yeah. Thanks for that.” Tulland coughed, clearing his throat. “I agree that everything you said is pretty compelling, but like I said, I think there’s probably at least one thing you are overlooking.”
“Yeah? And what’s that?”
“That.” Tulland said. “On the ground over there.”
The soil here was absolute garbage, Tulland found. He had never seen worse. But he was also a high level farmer who cut his teeth in the dungeons and had the better part of several minutes to dump his power into simple, non-magical food seeds. That was plenty.
“See it? See the green? I think you can even see a seed pod there.”
“How?” The mustached man looked like someone had shot him straight through the gut. “I really mean it. How? The best we have failed to grow more than a handful of plants, taking the waste from entire towns. Our best classes. Our scholars. Everyone failed. How?”
“Yeah. So about that. I’m not exactly from around here.”
—
It was surprisingly easy to convince anyone of anything Tulland wanted after that. When he said he had come from another world, it was the most logical way to explain where he had succeeded and everyone had failed. When he said he had been in The Infinite which, as far as they knew was usually a one way trip, they had sopped it up without question.
He found, to his surprise, that no matter how he tried to explain that everyone eventually came back from The Infinite, they kept the impression that it was only possible for him, and that there was no benefit to anyone but one’s home world when you went there. Tulland tried different angles on that pitch, running into misunderstanding after misunderstanding until the System finally cleared things up for him.
There are some things humans can’t understand. What you are trying to make common knowledge is in conflict with that list of things. This won’t work. Every time you try, there’s a roiling of system energy in them that’s preventing what you are saying from being understood.
Well, at least I don’t have to be careful.
Necia saysSmall Blessings.
Haha.
Tulland took to telling them every single thing he could about his class, from his ability to grow plants where they otherwise shouldn’t grow to his ability to make new kinds of plants. What he needed was data. He needed to know every single thing he was fighting against.
The first, they said, was the soil. That was the first sense of the blight that people usually meant, the one that was most front-of-mind because it was the one that was starving them to death. Most plants wouldn’t live, failing to even sprout. Those that did would almost always fail. High-level farmers could make small amounts of them grow, but it took constant attention and a huge amount of effort for every mouthful of food.
The fact that Tulland brought enough grains to be carried in a sack made him not only a hero, but an impossible legend. He could do the literal impossible, and his version of literal impossible left them fed.
That was the biggest sense of the blight. It was bigger to them than the random dungeon spawns and overflows because even though those had killed them by the dozens, it at least wasn’t a sure death. Over enough time, starvation was. It was a slow, painful, debilitating thing that was getting worse every week for them. This was the first time it had ever gotten better for them.
The blight dungeons would still need a solution, even if they seemed small in the face of the food shortage. Tulland had no idea how to even begin on the first problem, let alone the second. He felt like it was probably possible, at least. It didn’t make sense for The Infinite to waste it’s only ready-to-go resource like that.
The third sense of the blight wasn’t the worst, besides being the cause of the rest of it. In a real sense, that was the only way it could be the worst. Things that were bad enough didn’t need to compete with each other, in Tulland’s book. The fact that getting rid of the first two problems necessitated solving the last made it a high priority, but it didn’t make the first two less bad.
“Tell you what. Give my people a couple of days food. Leave your friend here so they don’t get raided while I’m gone.” The mustached man was picking seeds out of his teeth, full for the first time in what he claimed was more than a year. “I’ll take you. I’ll take you to see it myself.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. You’re looking a lot like our only hope. You need to know what you’ll be facing, and it’s impossible without seeing it. That one view will explain everything. It will bring it all together.”
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