Everyone Plants Zombies: I Can Add Passives to Plants

When the time came, if zombies appeared on the roof just like in the game, wouldn't that be a disaster?

The system panel had indeed been displaying a line all along:

[Wooden house can be upgraded to Level 2, consuming Wood ×100]

After thinking about the three hundred sunlight she still had in reserve, Lin Yue figured that as long as they didn't encounter a Gargantuar, the defensive pressure would remain manageable for a while.

"Alright, let's go."

There was a shortcut to the woods outside. They only needed to climb over the low wall in the backyard, cross a dry drainage ditch, and walk a short distance down a dirt road.

Each of them carried a shovel. After walking along the overgrown path for less than ten minutes, the view before them suddenly opened up.

An empty plain stretched out before them, with a dense forest in the distance.

If a large number of zombies invaded the neighborhood later on, the system would place everyone in the neighborhood on the plain at the same time. They would need to plant plants and prepare across the entire plain for the arrival of zombies.

This forest was far larger than Lin Yue had imagined.

The surroundings were utterly quiet. Only the occasional birdcall drifted down from deep among the treetops before quickly scattering in the wind.

"Thunk—thunk—thunk—"

Lin Yue swung his shovel at a dead tree as thick as a bowl. The iron blade buried itself in the cracked wood with a dull thud.

Wood chips burst from both sides of the blade, striking his sleeves and the back of his hand with a cool sting. He pulled out the shovel and chopped again, then a third time. A long crack split down the middle of the trunk, and with a rumble, it tilted halfway to one side.

[Wood +1]

Not far away, Bai Qingfeng had picked a dead tree of her own and was swinging her shovel with great effort.

The little shovel in her hands was a full section longer than she was. Every swing made her whole body sway, and her braid whipped back and forth behind her. Every now and then, she let out a "Hey!" or a "Yah!" as if she were cheering herself on. After five or six chops, she would pause for breath, lean on the shovel handle for two seconds, then keep swinging.

For the entire afternoon, the forest contained nothing but the sound of two people chopping wood and the occasional exchange of words.

"Didn't you chop that tree wrong? The trunk's leaning left, but you keep chopping the right side."

"Why do you care where I chop? It fell over anyway..."

Lin Yue chopped fourteen pieces that afternoon, while Bai Qingfeng chopped seven. The two leaned against separate tree trunks, gasping for breath, sweat staining two dark patches across the backs of their school uniforms.

Bai Qingfeng planted her shovel in the ground and used it as a cane. Tilting her head, she glanced at the sky. The orange-red hues were already beginning to shift toward deep blue.

"Heading back?"

"Yeah."

As night approached, the gray mist along both sides of the streets seemed thicker than it had during the day. Fortunately, there was nothing unusual on the road.

There were even other people hurrying back and forth through the neighborhood streets.

When they saw Lin Yue and Bai Qingfeng each pushing a sizable load of wood, they were slightly stunned.

After all, everyone needed to collect wood, but with so many zombies at the start, no one had time to worry about it.

Growth Phase

After returning to the courtyard, Lin Yue picked up the watering can and watered the Zen Garden.

Droplets rolled along the veins of the leaves and seeped into the soil in the flowerpots with soft, fine gurgles.

He squatted down and picked up the coins scattered around Marigold one by one. There was even a shining diamond lodged in the gap between two flowerpots, pushed into the corner by a snail shell.

He counted up the day's earnings. His sunlight reserves had reached exactly one thousand, while his coins amounted to one thousand six hundred.

He sat on the doorstep and stared at that number for a while. Suddenly, he felt that Marigold had truly put him on the path to never worrying about money again.

He opened Dave's Shop and spent six hundred coins on nine bags of fertilizer. His finger paused over the confirmation button, then he gritted his teeth and spent another thousand on two flowerpots.

Sure enough, when the flowerpots arrived, they came with the copied Nourishment passive already attached:

[Provides plants in the flowerpot with +10 Health and +100% growth speed.]

(The effect is doubled in the Zen Garden.)

As he placed the flowerpots onto the Zen Garden shelves, he cursed inwardly. Five hundred coins for one flowerpot. Back when he played the game, three hundred sunlight could get him a Marigold. Now they were only selling bare pots, yet they dared to charge five hundred for a pot with dirt in it.

"Forget it. Expecting business ethics from a lunatic who mutters about tacos all day was naive of me."

He honestly arranged the flowerpots. Aside from the pots holding Sunflower and Marigold, which could not be moved, after temporarily putting away the pot, he now had five empty flowerpots in total.

He buried five seeds in the flowerpots and thoroughly watered each one.

Normally, a plant seed took at least half a year to grow from germination to maturity. Even plants like Puff-shroom needed half a month to mature.

But in his Zen Garden—

Water on the first day, germination.

Water and fertilize on the second day, entering the growth stage.

Water and fertilize every day on the third and fourth days, entering maturity.

It only took four days to turn a seed into a mature plant. Compared to everyone else, that was a qualitative difference.

Lin Yue patted the dirt from his hands and said to the snail slowly crawling beside the shelf, "Keep an eye on them. Don't let them get thirsty."

The snail's antennae swayed once in response.

Lin Yue pushed open the door to the little wooden house, felt around in the dark until he found the hard little wooden bed, and leaned his shovel against the wall by the headboard.

The moment he lay down, every bone in his body seemed to collapse toward the bedboards. Every muscle protested against an entire afternoon of chopping wood.

He stretched with his eyes closed, but his elbow bumped into the edge of a plank. The pain made him hiss, and he curled back up.

Moonlight leaked through a gap in the roof where a tile was missing, a narrow strip of silver-white lying across his chest.

In the darkness, he closed his eyes and went through tomorrow's tasks in his mind: water the plants, collect sunlight, apply the first round of fertilizer to the five new seeds, then go to the street corner and see whether Luo Chen had cleared out the remaining empty courtyards.

Could he find more plant seeds?

When the time came, even if he did not use them himself, he could quickly grow plants and sell them to others.

He turned over, the back of his head bumping against the hard wooden board. He shifted uncomfortably.

[Please confirm house upgrade. Consumes 100 Wood.]

With a silent confirmation, a radiant light wrapped around the dilapidated wooden house. When the glow faded, the formerly shabby house had become clean and tidy.

The original one-story cabin had turned into a two-story house. It was not luxurious, but at least it was sturdy and practical.

"So this is... a housing project." Lin Yue nodded to himself.

As for the wood, it was naturally the result of Lin Yue's two weeks of hard work.

Besides that, he had obtained two more seeds and harvested ten mature plants. Five of them were Light Peashooters, though they were vastly inferior to the one Dave had given him.

However, ordinary Peashooters were not particularly useful to him. Even with passives, they would be phased out later on. There was no need for them to occupy backyard space.

For now, the greatest use of ordinary Peashooters was trading them to others for different plants or supplies.

Of the remaining five plants, two were Sunflowers. After receiving matching passives, they were now stored in the Zen Garden.

The other three plants were rather special: Lily Pad, Torchwood, and Ice Peashooter.

As for their passive abilities, Lin Yue had planned them out long ago.

There was no need to explain the importance of Lily Pad. It could be called the most crucial plant.

Name: Lily Pad (Mature)

Health: 100

Ability: Aquatic Plant

Water Drift (Passive): Can move in pools.

Name: Torchwood (Mature)

Health: 250

Ability: Burning

Burning (Passive): Consumes 10 units of Wood daily or burns a zombie corpse to increase flame power. Peas fired from behind deal greater damage.

Name: Snow Pea (Mature)

Health: 200

Ability: Slow

Freeze (Passive): Reduces the toughness of slowed targets until they freeze.

What Lin Yue liked most was Snow Pea. After all, the plant his mother, Li Xue, had grown the most was Snow Pea.

Not only did it possess decent attack power, but its ability to slow zombies had also convinced many people that Snow Pea was one of the essential plants for every Plant Garden.

Snow Pea was now in the second row, second column. Fine morning dew clung to the edges of its ice-blue leaves, refracting tiny diamond-like glimmers under the sunlight. Still in the same row was Potato Mine. It grinned broadly, its two front teeth a shade whiter than before, its foolish appearance carrying the confidence of, "Go on, step on me and see what happens."

But Potato Mine was far more powerful than before. It could even slightly affect zombies in the two adjacent rows.

Torchwood was naturally placed in the first row, seventh column, some distance ahead of Peashooter. Charcoal-red flames burned dimly at the center of the stump, occasionally spitting out a spark or two that rolled onto the dirt and went out with a hiss.

Three peas were guaranteed to break through a Buckethead Zombie. That lane was now completely reassuring.

The future setup for that lane would basically be Peashooter working with Torchwood to create suppressive firepower. Of course, that was still only a plan for now.

Lily Pad lay flat on the water in the first column of the fourth row. Its round, emerald-green leaf floated above the pool, its veins clear and spread wide, waiting for some future companion to be planted on it.

The only lane that still felt dangerous was the fifth one, with only an ordinary Puff-shroom.

That Puff-shroom sat there quietly.

Lin Yue squatted down in front of it. As if knowing that he was watching, Puff-shroom tilted its cap slightly toward him. Its round fungal face turned in his direction, as though waiting for him to say something.

"...How are you feeling today?"

Puff-shroom did not answer. It merely squatted there quietly as always, as if saying, "Same as usual."

It was the weakest plant in the entire backyard. There were no companions before or behind it. It guarded an entire defensive line alone, like a chess piece placed by itself at the front.

At first, Lin Yue had not even planned to give this Puff-shroom a passive. He had intended to wait for Puff-shroom to reproduce, then trade Puff-shroom plant cards for resources.

But now that the Zen Garden had Marigold, his personal god of wealth, Lin Yue had prepared a passive meant exclusively for Puff-shroom.

In several generations of the game, Puff-shroom had relied on its zero-cost advantage and been used by countless players as a disposable plant on the front lines, where zombies could chew on it.

And during this period, Lin Yue had fully studied his talent. If a plant received an overly powerful passive at the start, its upper limit would be locked in place.

If he wanted a plant to break through that limit, risk and growth were directly proportional.

Puff-shroom, Zhao Lei's Resolve

Name: Puff-shroom (Mature)

Health: 100

Ability: Mushroom

Game of the Brave (Passive): Puff-shroom must be planted in the most dangerous position and cannot be moved. Every time it survives, it undergoes a transformation.

Transformation 1: Early Riser (Can fight during the day without consuming a Coffee Bean.)

Over the past few days, Lin Yue had thoroughly studied Puff-shroom's passive. It was different from other plants.

Other plants only needed to be planted properly, fertilized enough, watered enough, and left safely in relatively secure positions to grow gradually. But Puff-shroom could not do that.

Its growth logic was: "It must survive in the most dangerous places. Each time it survives, it sheds another layer of skin." Comfort was poison to it. Only dancing on a blade's edge could let it continuously break through its limits.

Or rather—danger itself was its nourishment.

The Early Riser effect had appeared a few days ago, when a zombie had nearly eaten Puff-shroom during the day. Lin Yue had lured the zombie to Chomper in the sixth lane at the very last moment, allowing Puff-shroom to survive.

After that incident, Puff-shroom's passive underwent its first transformation. It could now fight during the day as well.

If Puff-shroom wanted to push its talent to the limit, it had to remain in an extremely dangerous situation. For the time being, no other plants could be planted in the fifth lane.

This was a gamble.

He was gambling on whether Puff-shroom could survive every encounter, gambling on whether the next transformation would come, gambling on how far it could ultimately go.

Lin Yue squatted before it, one hand braced against his knee. Countless thoughts passed through his mind before settling on one simple conclusion.

If it could survive one crisis—

Why couldn't it survive a second, a third, or a tenth?

"I've decided to leave you here," Lin Yue said to the quiet Puff-shroom. His voice was not loud, but his tone was firm. "I won't plant anything else in the fifth lane. This lane will be yours alone."