<<<>>>
Congratulations, Master Crafter! Meta-Materials reveal an entire world of possibilities, and there is still more to be discovered. You have earned access to one unique formula. Due to a heavy aetheric burden, these items can only be crafted once by a single Survivor, though if lost or destroyed, they can then be replaced. Make your choice carefully. Even if you know a unique formula, the crafting will fail if the item in question is not already unlocked for you.
Please select your reward.
[Storage Ring]
The Storage Ring grants its bearer access to an extradimensional space capable of containing a vast array of items and materials without affecting its external appearance or weight. After attuning the ring, the wearer can mentally access its contents. Only the bearer can perceive or retrieve the objects contained within.
3 Gold Ingots
1 Ender Pearl
1 Essence of Water
[Eternal Elytron]
Soar like a beetle!
The Elytron is a device modeled after the wings of nature’s most beloved flying species, the noble beetle. Wearing a pair of these will allow you to glide safely from the greatest heights, and with the proper propellant, even ascend to the skies.
The Eternal Elytron will never degrade from use and does not require gunpowder for propelled flight.
3 Orichalcum Ingots
1 Terror Beetle Membrane
1 Essence of Fire
[Master Sword]
A legendary blade from another Realm, renowned for unparalleled sharpness and high Harmonic Resonance. It is most powerful when its wielder has full health and can be charged with essence for a special attack.
1 Orichalcum Ingot
1 Cerulium Ingot
1 Sacred Rod
[Iron Golem]
A towering guardian crafted from iron, this golem is a stalwart protector of villages and fortresses. Possessing immense strength and resilience, it can stand alone against the forces of Bedlam, or operate as a valuable addition to an adventuring party. It can understand simple commands, carry messages, and watch your stuff for you.
4 Iron Blocks of Runic Protection
1 Iron Helmet of Runic Speaking
4 Sanguinum Dust
[Compass]
Feeling lost? The compass will always point true. Each version of this formula guides the bearer unerringly toward their destination. The standard model will sync to the Point of Origin of the bearer, while those crafted from Meta-Materials will seek the source from which they were made. Obsidian compasses will seek the nearest Portal, and a Golden Compass will guide you to other heroes.
Unfortunately, the unerring nature of the compass can be compromised by unstable Realms. No compass can guide you toward objectives not in your present dimension.
4 Iron Ingots
1 Sanguinum Dust
All compasses are considered a single formula regarding this selection: one of each variety can be crafted without violating the unique item limit.
<<<>>>
I stared at the screen for a long time. Everything on the list looked too good to pass up. A second Storage Ring would have been nice, but expanding my inventory wouldn’t change my capabilities much, and I had no intention of giving Kevin his back, so I mentally crossed that one off, but that still left four options.
“What’s a Sacred Rod?” I asked Kevin. He looked at my screen, but I turned to keep it out of his line of sight.
“Don’t know,” he said, still angling to get a look. “What are your options? I can’t give you advice if you won’t even show me what you got.”
There wasn’t really a reason to keep it from him, so I relented, holding out my arm so he could read through the list. His eyes lit up when he was halfway through.
“I told you!” He bounced on his heels. “I told you it was Princess Zelda!”
“I’m sure it’s a different Master Sword,” I said, unable to convince even myself. “And I just got a new weapon with its own weird stuff going on, so I’m not as interested in that one.” Also, if neither of us knew what one of the ingredients was, the chances of us running across it by chance were despairingly low.
“What are the Essences? And where do I find a Terror Beetle?” An Elytron with unlimited range would be invaluable for getting around Bedlam.
“Not sure about the terror part, but I’ve seen an island with a lot of beetles before. We could probably find it. And the essences are just elemental cores. Essence of Fire is what powers the brewing stands. We could get another one of those from around my shelter.”
So it was a possibility, but it would take some doing. The Iron Golem sounded amazing. They were strong in the game, and this would be one that responded to commands. It could be a guardian for Mount Doom when we were gone, or be part of the assault on Gundurgon. And who didn’t want a robot helper?
As for the recipe, it was doable. My Inscription skill wasn’t high enough for Runes of Speaking yet, though, and inscribing enough ingots to make that many blocks, as well as a helm, would be extremely essence intensive. It wasn’t getting crossed off immediately.
Still, for sheer utility, there seemed to be one clear winner.
Using Fortune to hunt meta-materials was far from a perfect system. The compasses would allow me to always find exactly what I was looking for, though it sounded like Bedlam would interfere with how they functioned somewhat. The term “unstable realm” certainly applied to this one. Aside from that, though, the basic model had its uses, and the Golden Compass seemed like a godsend.
I didn’t know where Gastard would come back to life. He might be on the other side of Plana, and this would allow us to find him. If I got separated for any reason, I could make my way back to them. It would also have the potential to tell us if there were more heroes on Plana we didn’t know about.
How would that work? Would it always point to the hero closest to me? If that was the case, it was decidedly less useful. Still, overall, Compass was the most must-have of the five. The obsidian version would mean I didn’t have to worry about not being able to get back to base while in Bedlam. The mere fact that selecting Compass would give me multiple items to craft instead of only one made it stand out as a deal.
I selected the Compass, and my screen flashed. The other options disappeared, and the new formulas added themselves to my Crafting Log.
“Did you bring redstone?” Kevin asked.
“Sanguinum,” I corrected, “no.” There was plenty of the crimson dust, and even whole blocks, back in Mount Doom. But I hadn’t brought much in the way of meta-materials along on this trip, and aside from playing around with pistons and sliding doors, had never used sanguinum for anything. We could harvest some from Kevin’s base, but if we were going all the way there, we might as well have crossed through the portal and gone home. “Let’s get this atreanum and get out of here.”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“You don’t know what’s down there,” Kevin said glumly. “We should just go back.”
“I thought you’d be more concerned with extending your freedom.”
He gave me a shrewd look. “You mean you’re going to put me back in that box as soon as we go home if I don’t keep playing along?”
Kevin was going back in his box no matter what. The oaths were not sufficient to let him walk around, and neither Esmelda nor Gastard would stand for giving him real freedom. I closed the visor of my helm so he wouldn’t see the answer in my face.
“Cut off my hands,” his voice was barely a whisper.
“What?”
“My hands, cut them off. Not now. When we get back. I won’t be a threat to you, to anyone. And that’s a pretty metal thing for the Dark Lord to do anyway, have the other guy walking around your castle as a cripple. What a flex.”
“I’m not a dark anything.” That was a heck of a thing to suggest. Would it completely prevent him from crafting? Even without hands, he might wrangle some coins onto a worktable and pull a lever. He wouldn’t be able to use any weapons or tools, though, not unless he got some utility attachments for his stumps. Was he serious?
“I’m serious,” he said. “I don’t want to be in a box anymore. You have no idea what that’s like. I’ll do anything to get out.”
His lack of awareness, as always, was stunning. He’d done the same thing to me, and others before. Aside from that, I knew what he was going through. My stint in isolation had been more comfortable than his current housing situation. They’d let me have books to read, and paper to write on. There had been letters, and once a month or so, a phone call to my family.
Boredom was torture. Lack of stimulation is maddening. Of course, it was less than he deserved. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to treat anyone this way, but this wasn’t a perfect world.
“We can talk about it,” I said. “For now, let’s get moving.”
He nodded, and we took a quick inventory. Healing Potions for both of us, he had fresh gear, and I had mine. After a moment of indecision, I crafted him a bow and passed over a handful of arrows and food tokens so we wouldn’t have to waste the potions in between fights.
Then we jumped off of the mountain together.
Our Elytrons allowed us to descend in an orderly fashion, dropping between mushroom caps into the thick jungle beneath the canopy. The scents of decay filled my nose, and a zombie moaned somewhere in the gloom.
We landed in a cloud of spores, a soggy patch of ground beside the bedlamite cliff. A warty frog about the size of a dog lifted its head out of a nearby pond, its head crowned in a spiky shell. It took one look at us and dipped down beneath the water.
“What was that?” It hadn’t appeared threatening, but I didn’t like leaving monsters behind me while I mined.
“Passive mob,” Kevin said. “Baresh. The zombies hunt them.”
“There are passive mobs in Bedlam?”
“It’s Bedlam,” Kevin shrugged, “it’s got everything. I’ve never seen one big enough to be dangerous.”
Durin’s Digger was still pointing us down, though now at an angle that suggested the deposit was in the substrate of the bedlamite formation. The chalky, porous stone vanished at the touch of my pick as I quickly mined out the beginning of a tunnel. Having Kevin to watch my back wasn’t ideal, but it was better than being alone. After I began cutting out a stair to move lower, the first beddlemite appeared.
The squirming, silver insect was a foot long and triggered every disgust response I had. I stomped it before it could spit acid on my boot, and after that, Kevin was on bug duty.
He killed dozens more as I continued to dig. The bedlamite was slick, as water was already seeping through to fill whatever space I opened, and I worried that if there was a cavern below us, it would be completely submerged. The stone, however, soon gave way to clay, and I switched to using a shovel for more efficient digging. Beneath the clay layer, which was only a few feet thick, was actual soil, something I’d never encountered in Bedlam before.
We were thirty feet down when I hit rock again, smooth basalt, and on the other side was a crystal cave.
Amethyst, enough to refill the entire wall of blocks I’d discovered inside Jason’s old base many times over. We were inside a massive geode, a stone egg, the interior of its shell lined with purple crystals. Though Kevin and I could see in the dark, I summoned a torch to illuminate the space, marveling at the glimmer of ten thousand facets.
“Let’s loot it,” Kevin said. “It’s good for enchanting.”
“I know what it’s good for,” I said, “but I want to explore more first. This isn’t what we came for.”
There was a break in the lower half of the egg, an opening large enough for a horse to ride through. We picked our way across the crystalline expanse to reach it, and discovered a natural tunnel. In Minecraft, this would have been totally normal. You dug around just about anywhere on the map, and you’d run into a cavern. The networks of the underground world were almost as expansive as the land above ground, procedurally generated to create a sense of endless exploration.
Caves existed on Plana too, of course, just as they did on Earth. They simply weren’t as common, or usually, as big, as the ones in the game. Things could work differently in Bedlam, and I hoped whatever we had stumbled upon didn’t go on forever. As we went, I placed torches at regular intervals to mark our progress.
The tunnel soon branched, but the Fortune enchantment told us which direction to follow. Though the passage was bare, silent apart from our footfalls, I had no idea a mob was waiting for us until it appeared at the edge of the torchlight.
It looked like a flesh-colored cactus with legs, lots of legs. No other limbs, but at least a dozen appendages supporting the bottom of its cylindrical body, each ending on a soft-nub. It slipped forward soundlessly, spines covering its skin, along with more eyes than were necessary. They were arranged haphazardly, a pair here, a single lonely orb plopped near the top of what I hesitated to call its head. No mouth, at least not an obvious one, but maybe there was something toothy hidden by the legs, like an upright squid.
“Creeper!” Kevin shouted, retreating up the passage toward the split.
Creepers existed? None had ever spawned around me, and Kevin hadn’t had any in the pens under Mount Doom either. I lost a second deciding whether to drop my shield to summon a bow, and the mob rushed forward, faster than it had any right to be.
I raised the shield, hearing a sizzling sound as its body ballooned.
Boom.
As soon as it touched my shield, the mob exploded, the force of the blast throwing me back. Dust fell from the ceiling as I blinked away the aftereffects of the flash. Even through the shield, it had hurt me.
There was a crater where I had been standing moments before. Somewhere between ten and twenty cubic feet of stone had vanished, leaving behind only a few chips and shards on either side of the passage. All that was left of the monster were a few scraps of its skin and a lone, scorched foot.
“I told you to run,” Kevin said. Though he hadn’t, his shout should have been enough warning. I’d been too slow to react.
“You can carry the torch,” I told him, pointing to where it had flown. The runic barrier around my shield faded a moment later, still intact, though that must have cost it some durability. My armor seemed fine, given the kinds of attacks I was accustomed to tanking, the fact that it had damaged me through several layers of protection spoke to the sheer power of the kamikaze mob.
“What does the System really call them?” I asked, my ears still ringing.
“Thermits,” Kevin picked up the torch, “but that’s dumb, you know what they are. You’ve played the game.”
“This isn’t the game, and why haven’t I ever seen one before.”
“Because they blow up, duh.” He had a particular tone he adopted whenever he thought other people were being stupid, and I didn’t like it. How could someone that old be so childish? “You can’t keep them around. Even if the demons take control, they still blow up if another mob bumps into them. It’s not worth it.”
“Will they blow up if we shoot them?”
“Yeah. The only way to stop it from going nuclear is to kill them in one hit.”
“Challenge accepted.” Despite my enthusiastic front, it would be smarter not to bother trying. Committing to an attack would leave me open. Though I could try to hide behind my shield, a poke wasn’t going to be enough. I would likely have to cut one in half to avoid another boom.
After wolfing down a beet to restore my health, we continued exploring the cavern. Some passages were larger, others were too tight to go down, and it was easy to pick out the craters in the walls and the floor that had to be signs of the death throes of more thermits.
Rather than keeping the pick out, I was carrying my sword, then switching them out to check our bearings wherever we came to a decision point. We’d entered a chamber as big as a house, a mixture of basalt and bedlamite dotted with stalagmites. Water dripped from the ceiling, not a good sign, considering the swamp above us.
Durin’s Digger didn’t want us to take any of the available passages, its orichalcum tip pulled down as if begging to be used to mine out the floor.
“Back up,” Kevin hissed, and this time I reacted immediately, retreating into the passage from which we had just emerged.
“What is it?” The pick went into my inventory, and I drew the viridium sword. It didn’t have a name yet, I would have to think of one.
“On the ceiling,” Kevin said.
Inching to the entrance with my shield in front of me, I looked up. Amid a nest of stalactites, a thermit was hanging upside down. Its eyes didn’t blink, but at least one of them was focused on us. It had been waiting for me to walk underneath it.
Kevin carefully placed the torch at his feet, followed by his shield. The mob didn’t move as he aimed with his bow, standing behind me and to one side. The arrow flew straight, embedding itself in the fleshy cylinder, and the thermit dropped, expanding as it went.
Even fifteen paces away, the explosion was deafening, echoing in the confined space. A section of the floor vanished, revealing a vast cavern below.