I woke up in pitch-black darkness, sore from sleeping over a pile of bones. I woke up because something was gnawing on my leg. I screamed and kicked, the thing let go and ripped a chunk of meat off of me. Worst spelunking ever. 0/10 I would like my money back.

At least my life.

I shouted, screamed, screeched, wailed, kicked, flailed, tossed, turned, and then I saw a series of faint glowing lights around a round thing that was moving, gurgling, screeching and afraid.

A blue troll or water goblin as the lich said. And the critter was eating my leg. Funny, its eyes were bioluminescent. Good to know. I gritted my teeth to ignore the pain and summoned my phone. Twist, turn, open the camera app. Press the red button because the flash is already in the ON setting.

BANG.

The water goblin wails in pain as the sudden light of the LEDs burned its sensitive retinas. I wished I had a gun but that wish lasted for one second. Instead, I summoned my hatchet and threw it at its head. It hit on the off-spin and just bashed the critter a bit back. I couldn't stand up, my leg was missing half the calf and I had dozens of small cuts from its shark-like teeth.

And it hurt like hell.

I summoned the bag of metals and tossed them at him, one by one. Each one of them had three-tenths of a liter in volume and different weights because of density. I threw copper, magnesium, titanium, tin, nickel, iron. Humans are very good at throwing things, it is some evolutionary trait we picked up along the way from the isolation of the caverns to the facebook pages. A full circle as I reckon.

The water troll got bored of being blind and getting hit with metal and ran back down the tunnel. The tunnel I swore I had closed. I could still feel the lich's robes and bones underneath me, worst bed ever. But the point was that I hadn't moved from where I fainted after going all-out against the ancient and millennial undead.

Not talking 'bout my generation here. I'm barely one.

With nothing better to do besides laying on the lich's remains and waiting for my calf to regrow, I took the lantern and lit up the tunnels. Nothing changed from when I fought but I was hungry as heck. And also in freaking pain. I thought of pulling a Hugh Laurie and take an opioid painkiller I had in my first aid kit but the leg would've healed by the time the medicine hit. So I just waited, in the dark, listening carefully and with the camera app ready to shoot at the first sign of a water goblin.

I liked the 'blue troll' way more, but I wouldn't just make up another brontosaurus.

I cried while I waited for my leg to regrow.

I was seriously dehydrated and the air was stale again. I could feel the dizziness. I touched the ground and Decomposed a hole in the stone. Much better. I felt my foot and could move the leg slowly. I shifted to a sitting position and summoned the lantern. The light was weak. Then I saw my hand-crank flashlight and retrieved it. The device was dead but I cranked it to distract myself. The disks of metal were everywhere. And my hatchet. Stupid monsters.

I had charged the flashlight halfway when I heard gurgling coming up the tunnel. I stored everything and waited in the dark, phone ready to snap some ugly monster's mugshot. The one that chewed on my leg came back, leading the two larger goblins.

Flash! Ahhhh!

And more metal disks flew at them. They ran back. I cranked the flashlight again. The phone marked 01:48 hours when my leg fully healed. I could still feel phantom pain but it would disappear soon. I turned on the lantern and placed the phone in my breast pocket and the flashlight in my storage. I wanted to keep track of time. The phone was at eighty percent power.

With the light from the LED lantern, I retrieved my stuff. I checked down the tunnel but no water goblins were in sight. After I retrieved everything, I went back down the tunnel and checked. The damn amphibious goblins gnawed and clawed the rock until they opened a passage. I widened it so I could get through and walked down the leaching tunnel to check. They had taken over my staircase. I saw a whole clutch of water goblins run down the stairs and into the brine pool. The whole place smelled of goblin dung. But I had to replace my water supply and it meant reaching the brine pool.

After the last goblin fled, it was one of the big darker ones, I checked up the stairs and saw several piles of rocks on the steps. The whole place was a mess. Dung and some slimy kelp and fishbones. The stench was unbearable so I sealed the staircase shut and Decomposed all the organic matter back into graphite and saltwater.

I should've made more gasoline and burned it all.

With enough oxygen from Decomposing rocks, knocking floating scents, and raising the roof around the tunnel, the air became breathable enough. It smelled as much as the streets of Es-Kina. I walked to the brine pool and saw what became of my spike trap. The goblins learned to gnaw the base of the spikes and break them. I could see some of them swimming near the tunnel mouth. Probably waiting in ambush for me to come and drink water. As if.

I Decomposed a lot of silicon and poured it down the hole. Once it came out of my immediate area of influence, it stiffened again and dropped down as pellets. But most of it kept bound to the silicon already being moved around. I shut the whole pool except for some small channels. I could access water but the child-sized goblins would have to dig their way around. And then I dumped even more silicon on top of that.

The oxygen in the leaching tunnel reached dangerous levels and I was forced to stop.

To make things worse, breathing this much oxygen would send my metabolism to the stratosphere and make me consume even more energy. I did what I could. I opened the staircase and prepared the basin at the end of the drain channel to receive what was coming. I went up the stairs, Decomposing all organic matter into hydrocarbons. Methane, octane, all the ~anes you wanted from one to eight. I kept it to liquid chains though. Nothing above octane. I had to focus Decompose into pushing the hydrocarbons away from my nose because the smell of methane was unbearable when I reached my room and saw what became of it. Breeding warrens. Fortunately, I was spared of the moral dilemma of murdering the man-eating younglings. They left none behind.

The choice would be easy because I hadn't forgotten the pain in my calf. I was grumpy like an old cat forced to run.

I went back down the stairs and saw the pool of gasoline that collected in the basin. Sodium, a drop of water squirted from afar and you know what happened, right?

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The whole staircase lit on fire. Since there was so much free oxygen, it all burned almost perfectly. There was almost no smoke odor.

Speaking of odor, I must be stinking filthy. Still better than the available water. Which I had to purify. Putting that filth in my filter was a sure-fire way to ruin it. And I had no idea if it would restore itself. I paused to think and decided on a strategy. I carved a basin next to the water. It was close enough that I could put a finger inside the basin and a finger inside the brine water. Then I used Decompose as I did for the sodium. I imagined a path going over my hand where water would flow. The clear liquid climbed up from my thumb, over my hand and dripped down my pinky finger. Soon the basin was filled with what could be called distilled water.

Then the assholes goblins smashed something in the channels that caused the water level to suddenly rise and contaminate my water. I rose the wall separating the basin higher than the water splashed and opened a side channel to draw excess water away from that wall. I did it once, I could do it again. I went around the basin of formerly pure water and did the same but with a smaller basin. Just one or two liters. I washed my hand with the dried soap we made and a burst of loneliness assaulted me. I would go away after I was done here, no use trying to make something that would last. And the goblins would just use this as a spawning pool.

I filtered more water into the secondary container and then placed the hose of my filter in it. I squeezed the hand pump and the filter started to work. The water came out of it and I refilled my canteen and the bottle after drinking my fill. I was back to five liters of water. I also filled some of the plastic soda bottles with non-filtered water for other uses.

And then I stored all my items and took a bath in the basin. A well-deserved one, I must say.

I thought of dumping the soot soap I bought at the market in the brine pool but that would be an asshole move. The ecosystem down there didn't deserve that. Refreshed, I put on the spaghetti dress, some yoga pants, and the hiking boots. They were filthy but only on the outside. With clean socks, I'd not see the difference. I Decomposed the soap left in the tub and climbed back to the cave tunnels. I shut down the entire leaching tunnel with meters of pure silicon.

Then I went back to my alcove, created a table, sat down and ate the last of my food. Now it was surface or bust. Maybe I could eat some undead bone marrow, but I was afraid of what it would do to me. I had the goblin corpses stored too but just eww.

Surface or bust was a good motto.

The threat of starvation would surely drive me upward, I just hoped it wouldn't be towards heaven. I retrieved the lich robes and bones. I saw something shiny among the vertebrae, it was a necklace with a beautiful sapphire.

To the winner, the spoils.

I walked for hours in the mine tunnels. The lich kept the tunnels well-maintained but now his workforce was gone. In several places, I saw piles of bones and decomposing dried flesh. When the necromancer died, the energies powering his undead waned and they crumbled. Good to know. At least his dungeon, for these former mine tunnels were nothing else but a dungeon while he ruled it, his dungeon didn't crumble.

I really hate these senseless demolitions of the villain's lair. I mean, this is a perfectly fine mine.

Was that coal?

I saw a mineral formation on a wall, a dark striped ore that in the dim light resembled coal. I doubt it was because the miners wouldn't leave coal in the walls. This world could not even have a coal level, as it was the product of a fortuitous geological and evolutionary phenomenon. The plants developed lignins before the microbes could eat it. For around sixty million years, give or take a tenth of that, the trees that died weren't fully decomposed and eventually, they were buried. They transformed into coal over the next millions of years with the pressure and the lack of oxygen. But if an organism was able to digest lignin from the start, the coal deposits would be smaller or even non-existent. Given that the population of this world was transplanted and some of the animal and vegetable biodiversity also came from Earth, there's a chance this world never got the chance to develop coal.

I also suspected some areas were terraformed. Some geological structures I saw on the god-satellite photos were too odd. And that meant Tarhun did a crappy job with this region. There was a vast grassland to the north that should absorb a lot of water, why the drought?

I doubted I'd have an answer. Time to stop digressing and examine the ore. Pickaxe time.

I broke samples of the ore and checked. The ore had a monoclinic crystallization and Decompose told me it had iron and manganese resonances along with oxygen. Something else too. I checked around the vein, it had quartz and was in a large granite formation. Clearly igneous. This was once a fissure that filled with lava and water in ancient times.

I broke another sample and Decomposed it. Away with the iron, the manganese, and the oxygen. I was left with a mote the size of my fingernail of a dark silver metal that was extremely dense. Very dense, like one of those nice metals that make people rich. It was in the transition family, that was obvious. It was hard. It could scratch the quartz.

I forgot my conundrum and jumped in glee.

What the heck did I find? Dense, hard, transition metal, and obviously had a high Z value. I pulled my iPad and checked. Except for gold and mercury, it could be any transition metal in period six. Hafniumor tantalum, no. They were too light. The sample I had was as dense as gold. Tungsten, maybe. Rhenium, too rare. And then the platinum family. Osmium, iridium, and platinum. The first and the last were white-ish while iridium was darker.

Tungsten or iridium, place your bets.

Iridium is usually found with platinum and is very corrosion-resistant. No way that most noble and rare metal would be mingling with the peasantry likes of iron and manganese. The winner is tungsten.

Tungsten. It was mouth-watering. A tungsten mine was almost as valuable as a gold mine. The miners ignored this vein because they thought this was a low-quality iron ore. I bet smelting this tungsten ore for the iron was a bitch.

I was so going to claim this mine.

I wanted to get all the tungsten I could. But I had to see daylight or I'd become the next lich. I snapped a photo of the vein and went on my way.

I wandered and mapped the tunnels, trying to find a way up. I followed the left-hand rule, leaving a band of silicon on the irregular tunnel walls. I checked the ceilings, for collapsed shafts, sifted through the rubble piles and checked the roof for any signs of a way up. The mine was gigantic. Kilometers wide. I followed the larger tunnels until they shrank. The main tunnel, logic dictated, would remain wide.

I gave up when I felt like it was time to sleep. I was tired of walking around. The dismantled undead even lost its creepy appeal after a while. My legs hurt, my arm hurt from cranking the flashlight. I returned to the largest hall I found, one braced by several timber squares and with a wooden roof.

Oh. Stupid me.

I made a staircase to the wooden roof and pushed the timber up. It moved. I put it over the next one and repeated the process. There was my shaft. it went up for a couple dozen meters. I could see the thick nails where a ladder was once secured on, but no more. The lich probably had the ladder removed, fearing an invasion.

And now it was going to get a solid aluminum ladder. The third most common element in the crust. For every three silicon kilograms, one kilogram of aluminum. I had a lot from decomposing random rocks and clay. And since the ladder was going to be solid, it didn't have to be too thick. Enough to bear my weight with some safety slack. I started to mold the metal, creating the steps from two holes on the ground underneath the shaft.

Since I could move the atoms as I wished, I could also bond seamlessly two pieces of metal. Move the air away, then the oxygen from the oxide layer and bang. The metal thought it was always a single piece. Decompose enacted the same thing that happened in a vacuum, cold welding. And since I could make the atoms flow freely in my range of influence, the metal crystalline structure was normalized as well. The crystals reformed once I removed my influence.

That's how I made my gold necklace and how I was making my ladder. I ran out of aluminum several times but my drive to go up and reach the surface was stronger than my tiredness. And my couple dozen meters estimate was off. Make it several dozen meters. Or a hundred. I had no rangefinder. Who could tell?

I could triangulate but I was not interested in the world below. Upward was the name of the game. I reached another dusty and stale hallway with several tunnels. I heard not a sound. It was eerie. I was too tired to explore. So I did the sensible thing any Minecraft player would do.

I went back halfway down the ladder, dug out a hole and slept in it. Let's hope the mobs can't climb ladders also.