Oak and Broccoli's Tulip Cull is a small but decisive episode of cooperation in the Darkwoods. What begins as Broccoli Bunch's search for Two-Lipped Tulips turns into a negotiated partnership with Oak: Broccoli Bunch identifies the plant and gathers its flowers, while Oak explains that the invasive growth must be culled, fashions wooden spears, and restores a tree damaged by the plant. The event changes their relationship from wary contact to mutual recognition, and its final reward is both practical and social: a haversack filled with nearly fifty flowers and a Friendmaking skill eligible for advancement.

Circumstances and First Contact

Broccoli Bunch reaches Oak after fleeing an ambush by abominations. The escape leaves Broccoli Bunch exhilarated, desperate, and sickened when the smell of the creatures catches up with them. Oak initially stands apart with his large arms crossed, embodying the tension between the trespassing adventurer and the forest guardian. Broccoli Bunch apologizes for having entered the area while searching for flowers and admits that running into the forest seemed safer than remaining near the attackers. The apology is followed by a more important discovery: Oak is injured.

Rather than treating Oak only as a guide or obstacle, Broccoli Bunch offers to inspect the wound, clean it, and bind it with cloth. With sufficient mana available, Broccoli Bunch fires a powerful burst of Cleaning Magic into the injuries and the material lodged within them. The action establishes the practical basis of their cooperation. Cleaning is not merely a domestic talent or a way to maintain appearances; here it becomes care directed toward a potentially formidable forest being, allowing an uneasy meeting to move toward trust.

Identifying the Tulips

Once the immediate injury is addressed, Broccoli Bunch shows Oak the dog-eared page depicting the Two-Lipped Tulips and explains that this is the flower being sought. Oak's response is terse: the plant is a weed and must be culled. His judgment reframes Broccoli Bunch's objective. For Broccoli Bunch, the flowers are valuable specimens to collect; for Oak, the plant is a threat to the living balance of the forest. The same object therefore carries two meanings at once, as harvestable material and destructive growth.

Oak first demonstrates that the forest is capable of renewal rather than merely danger. With a wave of his arm across the ground, he causes numerous wildflowers to sprout and bloom, transforming a dreary patch of woodland into a brilliant spread of color. This display gives Broccoli Bunch a concrete glimpse of Oak's relationship to plant life. His power is not simply destructive, and his hostility toward the Two-Lipped Tulips is not generalized hatred of growth. He distinguishes between flourishing vegetation and a plant that feeds upon its surroundings.

The pair then passes a cliff and reaches rocky, dry terrain where trees stand sparse, leafless, and emaciated. Oak points toward one of them and identifies the problem at its base. A Two-Lipped Tulip has grown around and into the dying tree: its long, thorny roots coil around the bark, while several fanged flowers bite into the trunk. The scene makes the cull necessary in material terms. The tulip is not an abstract nuisance but a living parasite visibly converting a tree's weakness into its own support.

Tools, Tactics, and Restoration

Broccoli Bunch climbs onto a lower branch of the dying tree and uses the edge of a spade as an axe, cutting away a long branch and throwing it beside Oak. The improvised tool matters because the work is not performed with ideal equipment or a single overwhelming spell. Broccoli Bunch contributes initiative and practical resourcefulness, while Oak converts the available wood into weapons suited to the task.

Oak first shapes a long pole as tall as himself, ending in a broad, wavy wooden leaf. His next spear is more refined, with a thinner haft, a sharp wooden point, and vein-like markings in the wood. It is deceptively sharp and heavier than it appears, though still manageable to swing. Oak makes a second spear for himself, longer and heavier, and the two begin cutting down the plant from a distance. The spears create a division of labor that protects them from the tulip's thorns and fanged flowers while preserving the close, physical character of the work.

After the flowers are removed, Oak approaches the flowerless bush and repeatedly stomps on it, an act that reveals his personal disgust toward weeds. The cull is therefore both controlled and emphatic: the dangerous growth is cut apart from afar, then suppressed at close range so that it cannot immediately resume its attack. The sequence gives the plant an unusual presence as an opponent whose roots, thorns, and mouths force the participants to invent tools and maintain distance.

The work does not end with destruction. Oak turns back toward the damaged tree, and its branches shift as the color lightens from rotting brown. Tiny buds appear along the branches and open into small leaves. Oak steps away, lifts his spear, and declares that the tree is healed. The contrast between the tulip's parasitic growth and the tree's renewed life defines the event's central value shift: clearing the weed is meaningful because it permits damaged life to return, not because removal itself is treated as the final good.

Harvest and Relationship Change

Broccoli Bunch gathers the flowers after the cull, filling the haversack to the brim with a quantity estimated at nearly fifty. The harvest converts the dangerous expedition into a successful completion of the original objective, but its circumstances matter. Broccoli Bunch does not obtain the flowers through solitary searching or by ignoring Oak's claim over the forest. The result comes from adapting the request to Oak's ecological priorities and helping him restore the tree he protects.

Oak's manner changes as the work proceeds. At first he is tense and annoyed after Broccoli Bunch's accidental intrusion; afterward, he looks at Broccoli Bunch without that earlier hostility. His final word, “Grow,” functions as both an observation and a compact acknowledgment of the result. The relationship has not been developed through elaborate conversation, since Oak often communicates in single words, but the physical sequence supplies its own language: apology, treatment, shared labor, crafted weapons, healed tree, and completed harvest.

The change is also registered mechanically. After repeated actions, Broccoli Bunch receives notice that the Friendmaking skill has improved and is eligible for rank up. The system translates repeated cooperation into measurable progression, making social development as tangible as combat advancement. In this episode, friendship is not declared in the abstract; it is accumulated through specific acts of care, labor, and responsiveness.

Significance in the Larger Narrative

The tulip cull presents Broccoli Bunch's support-oriented identity in action. The Cinnamon Bun is defined as a pure support and friend, and the event gives that definition practical form without reducing it to passivity. Broccoli Bunch heals Oak, identifies the needed plant, improvises a cutting tool, joins the hazardous removal, and carries away the requested harvest. Assistance becomes a mode of agency.

The episode also establishes a sharp contrast with Broccoli Bunch's later response to killing Titan and Rex. In that later aftermath, Broccoli Bunch recognizes that two people will not return to their families or friends and struggles to bury the emotional consequences enough to function. In the Darkwoods, by contrast, the act of cutting down a threatening life form is ethically stabilized by Oak's distinction between a weed and a tree, and by the visible healing that follows. The earlier cull thus provides a nonhuman version of removal whose consequence is not bereavement but restoration, while still requiring courage, proximity, and deliberate force.

Finally, the event links material objects to relationship-building. A dog-eared Herbology Book page identifies the desired flower; a spade becomes an axe; discarded wood becomes a spear; and the emptied, flower-filled landscape becomes evidence of shared accomplishment. None of these things remains transparent or merely serviceable. Each changes function under pressure, revealing how Broccoli Bunch and Oak negotiate the forest through tools, bodies, and living matter. The tulip cull is consequently both a successful harvest and a formative act of alliance: Broccoli Bunch leaves with the flowers, Oak leaves with a healed tree, and their cooperation leaves Broccoli Bunch with a newly advancing Friendmaking skill.