Infinite Farmer-Chapter 148: The Infinite

“That’s not possible, right? You have enough power to keep every adventurer that comes here supplied with rewards. Even if you gave me a hundred times what someone else got, would it make a dent?” Tulland asked.

“Tulland, I offered you hundreds of times what I give the average adventurer on their best day, judged by how it affects my costs. It didn’t even put a dent in what it would take to make this deal fair, as you call it.” The Infinite looked slightly sick now. “The average adventurer never finds a system exploit in their entire stat-extend lives, Tulland. The few that do find something small. You found a large loophole in your first few weeks here, and now you’ve found an enormous one. I can’t keep taking away things you’ve earned without paying you enough to keep it fair. They won’t be pleased if I do.”

“They?”

“There are those who watch. Who are pleased or displeased with the things systems do. What we are. How we approach our work.” The Infinite shook its head. “I can’t give you details on what they are. Just know that without them, neither you, I, nor any adventure would exist. And they have power here, however indirect.”

“Ah. So you just let me keep the power, then?”

“No! I can’t do that either. My whole purpose is to create a challenge against which you have to struggle. To see how far you can go. To gauge you. Not your power. You. How much you can use a particular level of power to go further than you should have gone. Your farmer class should have never made it past the fifth floor, without help.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what that means. In practical terms,” Tulland said.

“In practical terms, it means that by the time you passed the fifth level, you had set the record for your entire world throughout its entire history. That girl you travel with is close to doing the same thing for hers. The only reason she hasn’t yet is that your class has helped hers. It lowered the score,” The Infinite said.

Allow him to hear me, please.

You sure?

I’m sure. He is… what’s the term? Babbling. I need to guide him back to productive talk.

“My system wants talk. Bring it back.”

“And the worst part of it all, Tulland?” The Infinite waved its hand, opening back up communications to and from the System. “If I just let you back, even without the score? The whole purpose of the thing would be dashed. There would be no tension anymore. You’d be bored. Imagine it. Bored! Here!”

Focus, Infinite. Please. There must be some sort of option you came up with over the last several days. Something for if Tulland insisted on keeping the Chimera Sleeves. You wouldn’t have been able to force him without standing, and you know it.

“There’s very little.” The Infinite held his head in his hands. “We certainly won’t be able to get the proper measure of Tulland now.”

“Does that matter? I mean, really matter.” Tulland stood and paced a bit around the room. This was all getting to be a bit too much for him. “If that’s already a done deal, then put me back in and let me live out my life as long as I can maintain it, then pay out the System for my incredible performance. Let it do whatever it was going to do.”

“There is…” The Infinite coughed to clear its throat. It seemed, of all things, embarrassed. “There’s more of a problem there than either of you would think, as well.”

How? I’m willing to wait.

“I’m sure you are, but you coming here revealed a problem with the world from which you hail. We investigated why you were so constantly here once it became apparent you weren’t going back at all. You might not know this, but that world is falling apart at the seams. It won’t hit a critical spot for years, but if Tulland survives for years and years, it’s going to become a serious threat. That means that both of the major functions of The Infinite dungeon are compromised.”

“So stabilize it somehow,” Tulland said.

“Even if I did, it wouldn’t matter. Because your planet is unique, and your place there was already compromised. You were no longer bound to the workings of it. Even before coming here, there was no way you could carry the rewards Tulland won back.” The Infinite smiled weakly at Tulland. “If it’s any defense, we never meant to withhold that information from you. Back then, it seemed like we owed nothing to a System that would trick and kill a human. We never thought you two would make up.”

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As The Infinite continued wallowing in its own stresses, the System gently prodded Tulland.

Have him cut us off again. Then go outside.

“Privacy again, Infinite,” Tulland asked. The Infinite waved his hand and cut off communications without any objections. “Thanks. I’ll be back.”

Once outside, Tulland took a stroll down the road. He wasn’t in the mood for purely internal dialogue.

“So what’s the deal? We’re just going to have to stay here forever, while our world is destroyed?”

Not quite. I don’t think so, anyway. There’s something The Infinite is withholding from us, still. Something that isn’t quite true.

“You don’t think Ouros is in danger?”

No, that I believe. I couldn’t define the exact size of the problem, but I was beginning to see instability in the makeup of the world. Problems I couldn’t correct piling on each other in a way that seemed to grow to be more than the sum of the parts. It’s part of why I made such a desperate move with you.

“Then what?”

Not everything he is saying adds up to sense. He can’t send you back because you’d continue on. He can’t pay you off. But the logical way to handle that is to give you an unbelievably high score right now, or let you continue on for a few months until you earn it yourself. You could stay in the dungeon, and I’d go home with the reward. Or something of that nature. We wouldn’t resist that much.

“I might. This is going to be the best chance I’ll ever have to get out of here.”

But if The Infinite swore to the fact that there was no way to do it, you’d still go along with it. You’d take whatever the best option was. I’m not sure I know what it is and isn’t allowed to do, but there simply must be an option besides sitting forever in this room out of sync with time, and he isn’t offering it. He’s just saying what he can’t do, not what he can do.

“Do you really believe we can’t be separated?”

That… is hard to know for sure. As you’ve seen, he can mislead in some complex ways. If I had heard anything about this before, or knew any of the intricacies of a System in my position, I could probably ferret out those clever lies. I doubt we’ll know the truth on this matter until we convince him to tell us the whole truth of everything.

“So I need to press him?”

You or me.

“I’ll do it.” Tulland walked back to the house, sighing. He didn’t particularly believe that The Infinite, the ageless being in charge of this realm, was really freaking out to the extent he was pretending to. Getting him to stop would be a whole other thing. “It’s not like I have anything better to do.”

After getting The Infinite to look up from its possibly feigned distress, Tulland went right back to business.

“So to be clear, at this moment neither I nor the System believe you entirely. There are options here. You just aren’t telling them to us. We aren’t going to sit here for an eternity while you pretend to be upset. Give us the other options.”

The Infinite looked up with an offended look on his face before sighing, shaking his head, and taking on an expression much more like what Tulland had come to expect from him.

“I guess you can’t blame me for trying. This is a mess, but it would be much less of a mess if you would have accepted one of the much easier deals,” The Infinite said.

“I think you know I probably won’t. So give me the rest of the details you are leaving out.”

“Will do. Would you like food while we talk? If I’m going to lay it all out, there’s no reason to keep you hungry anymore.”

“Sure.”

“Meat?”

Tulland remembered the roasted meat from yesterday, and his mouth immediately started watering. Then he remembered something he wanted much, much more.

“Could you make my uncle’s stew? The one he made on rest days?”

“I’d be a fool not to.” The Infinite waved its hand, and the stew appeared. Not just a bowl, but the full pot of food, just as Tulland’s uncle had made it, and with a particularly good loaf of bread like the baker nearest his house had made. He immediately ladled himself out a bowl and tasted it. It was not as good as the meat had been, or even close to it. But it was right. “Enjoy.”

“Thanks. I will. Now on to the truth.”

“Right. The first thing you’ll need to know is what I was leaving out. It involves your System. It is, as I have said, stuck to you. There was a role, a long time ago, called a System Guide. Some worlds had them before they were determined to be too much of a burden, especially for those who valued their privacy. When your System left your world, it more or less fell into the empty slot that function created after it was disabled.”

Tulland nodded, too busy with his stew to respond.

“And it’s still true that your System is untethered from your world. Fully so. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be sent back in some form or another.”

Some form?

“I could recast you. That’s what we generally call it. You don’t remember this, but at one point you were part of me. That reflex you felt where you saw me as a predator? That was because, in some ways, I am always inclined to consume you. In this case, you’d be taken in, scrubbed, and sent back different.”

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“The System would be different how?” Tulland swallowed and asked the next question. “More powerful, at least. I know that.”

“The biggest difference would be that it would lose its memories. Some that I’m sure you’d want to lose, System. The centuries spent alone and useless would be gone. But so would everything else. You’d be a person, you would know who you were, and what you were meant to do. But everything else would be gone. You would see your role as cleaning up someone else’s mess.”

Ah. The prospect of that hit the System hard. Tulland could feel it, if not quite understand how. Continue, please.

“That’s the main thing. There are reasons, reasons I swear to, that you can’t be stripped from Tulland and sent back as you are. The recasting would be the minimum we could do to correct what the Church on that world did to you. But there are other options.”

“Tell us, then.”

“I will. First, Tulland, I want you to brace yourself a bit. This next part might be upsetting.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that I’m about to tell you something that no other adventurer in The Infinite has ever known. Tulland, could you please tell me what you think The Infinite dungeon is for?”