15 – Let me just make tools now, okay?

Right in front of him, an unassuming wooden chest was closed shut. He gingerly extended a hand, prying open the unsealed lid to reveal what was inside.

Gold ingot x2

Book x4

Feather x1

Iron ingot x1

Apple x3

This was good. He didn’t expect to find what he needed right away, although that would have been quite nice.

According to what he remembered about jungle temples, there was another chest waiting for him. he gripped the handle of the pickaxe, and set to dig again.

Enchanted book (strength 1) x1

Small health potion x3

Iron ingot x2

Emerald x1

Achievement unlocked: emeralds!

“Nice!” he exclaimed, and finished digging the rest of the temple out, just to appeal his hoarding habits.

It was evening when he came back to his basement, after having visited a few more interesting ravines. With the last one, he got quite lucky and ran back home so far that he almost broke his own door when he slammed it open and then shut it back again.

He rushed to his basement, where his chests held all the things he had collected so far. One by one, he placed all of the items in his inventory and then back out again, smiling ever more widely as he did so. In his right hand, a little book was gradually being filled up with drawing and schematics, which he knew were recipes and construction plans, and every time it ran out of pages it just got thicker on its own.

He turned around and looked at the pulverizer, staring at it like he would with a woman who took his breath away. He smirked.

“It’s time, my dear, to get to work!”

He placed the coal generator next to the pulverizer, and then filled the machine chock full with raw mineral. As he watched the stone get crushed and the ore extracted, he felt like a kind entranced by the washing machine. And he laughed.

“The age of industry, my friends! The age of the real modded gameplay!”

Night was about to envelop the whole forest in its silver embrace once again. Lumia sat on the highest branch of her tree, with her legs dangling down and moving playfully, and watched the village slowly go to sleep. It was a ritual she did almost every night, sitting here and watching the people below.

She remembered about a couple nights ago, when Jacob played for her that masterful piece of music. It was something she had never heard before, the magic of the notes and the words as they came out of that strange machine entrancing and beautiful.

She closed her eyes, and shook her head gently. She brushed some hair away from her face, glowing the palest of silver under the moonlight, and then she got up. Her face home to a renewed spirit, she hopped from branch to branch, stopping on the way by her room to take the necessary things.

Jacob placed the enchantment stone on top of the altar. A faint radiance began to pulse out of the altar itself, powerful and arcane, that almost dared him to touch it. This was from a mod he knew, although both the recipe for the altar had been altered to match a 4x4 grid, and the effects were completely different than he remembered.

He touched the pale orb, that was floating and revolving in the air above the altar. It nestled in his hands, like a puppy, and glowed bright.

Tier 1 magic

Firebolt

15 levels

Lightning bolt

23 levels

…

Lumia reached her usual spot, a small clearing just outside the village. She removed the sharp blade from its sheath, hidden away inside a backpack she carried, and started to swing the sword at the empty air.

“Ok, well, I don’t have those levels.” Jacob said, dejected but definitely energized by the discovery.

He removed the finished ores from the pulverizer, loaded it up again with a new batch, and set to smelt them. He was running out of coal, he noticed, as both his furnaces and his generators were consuming quite a lot of it.

“Good thing there’s a forest for that.”

Taking out his irtsteel axe, which looked green in the reddish light of his basement, he went towards the stairs. Before he went up, however, he turned around and looked at his machines.

“I could… nope, I need gunpowder for that. But maybe… oh yes!”

He went back, and made a whole new set of tools for himself.

When he was done, he went out and into the forest. Battery in his inventory, new lumber axe made at the tool forge, he was ready for anything out there.

Lumia heard it, again, for the fourth time in an hour. The first three times it was distant, the echo barely reaching her sensitive ears after bouncing so many times around the trees that it almost felt like a distant dream. This time, however, it came from right behind her.

A low, guttural growl. The short shallow breaths of the beast. The scratching of claws.

She found herself paralyzed. She could not move, she could not react. All this training, and this was the result. She was pathetic, worthless.

The beast leapt out of a bush, and landed right next to her. It turned, slowly, mechanically, glowing red eyes studying every inch of her, of its prey.