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[Wool Socks]

Did you miss these? How are your toes feeling? Wear a pair, and your feet will thank you.

There were no regular clothes in Minecraft, and your avatar wasn’t naked, but that was an aesthetic choice that had no meaning relative to actual gameplay. You crafted armor to wear, and that was it. The recipes for armor all held true for textiles but with some interesting additions.

The socks were a godsend. My feet had been sweating their lives away in zombie leather boots, and slipping them on felt like a little piece of heaven. The socks were generated by placing a coin in the bottom left and right slots. A second coin above each of those won me a pair of gloves, which were almost as welcome as the socks. Finding that out had cost me virtually all of the wool, but the linen had gone into reproducing the basics.

[Linen Tunic]

Light and comfortable to wear, a must-have for any starting adventurer. You won’t be the bell of the ball, but this all-weather attire will serve you well at work or in any casual setting. One size fits most.

The tunic wasn’t fancy, but like everything else I made, it was seamless, and the thread count was so high it felt like silk. It wasn’t exactly the dress Esmelda had asked for, but on her frame, it would be a nightgown. There had been more than enough to make myself a wardrobe as well as extras for Brenys.

After that, I gardened, whittled, and collected resources. My artisan skill advanced much more slowly than harvest. Every carving I finished jumped up the percentage beside the rating significantly, but they took half an hour or more to complete.

As long as I remained close to the shelter, the crops I planted by throwing coins took only hours to mature. The wheat was finally ready, so I collected it and replanted the resulting seeds. I chopped down the hickories that were over ten feet, and new saplings popped up as soon as I plopped the nut coins into the soil amid the old roots. I was getting more seeds than I needed to replace what I harvested, and my garden doubled in size.

From the wheat came bread. A normal person would have had to have put in an awful lot of work to go from freshly harvested wheat to warm, delicious bread. Wheat grains had to be separated from their husks by threshing and winnowing, and those grains had to be dried and milled into flour. Water, yeast, and salt all have to go in to make dough, then comes kneading, and the dough has to rise before it's baked.

No, thank you. A log got my furnace started, and then three wheat coins went into the upper slot. For whatever reason, I wasn’t able to craft bread on the worktable. Logically, it made more sense to cook it, but that was yet another diversion from the mechanics of the game. A golden yellow coin rolled out of the dispenser, and I slapped it into my hand.

The bread came into existence as hot as if I had baked it in an oven. The smell was warm, yeasty, and comforting. People who came into Subway always said it smelled good, but it didn’t when you worked there. The odors of the meat and the onions got into your clothes and on your hands, and they were hard to get rid of. The bread, though, was one thing that was hard to get tired of.

I took the loaf over to my coffin to sit down. It actually did look like a sub roll, rather than a bigger loaf of sliced bread that you would get at a supermarket. The rind was soft, brown, and springy. It was dense and chewy, and the taste reminded me of nuts. This was the first bread I’d had since being reborn in a new world, and I took my time savoring it.

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Gastard visited me the day after my first bake. He brought another load of iron, enough to round out my tool set, though not enough to get started on armor. I could have made a helmet with it, or boots, but I wanted better tools first, and the leathers had served me well enough against the shamblers and phantoms.

He was very impressed with my sword.

“This is fine work,” he said, running his hand along the flat of the blade. “Dargothian steel.”

“It was just iron,” I said. We were standing to one side of the expanded garden, and he lifted the blade to the light, causing its edge to flash.

“These markings,” he gestured with his other hand to the pattern of dark and light, like ripples in water. “They know the secret to forging blades like this in the dark lands, but we have no steel like this in the Free Kingdoms, apart from a few heirlooms. Weapons like these were bought from Dargothian traders before Egald the First issued his ban.”

“Kevin must have made a lot of extras,” I said. “I wonder if their smiths actually make them like this, or they were all his work.”

“A strange thought, that one man could produce so much.” Gastard frowned. “But I suppose you could if you had the material. You would force all the smithies in Drom out of business.”

If my goal had been to establish a merchant empire, my crafting ability certainly would have put it within easy reach. I didn’t need money though, apart from what it would take for me to get the materials I wanted. I could craft anything else I needed, and do some bartering here and there when it was required. Upending the medieval economy was not on my to-do list, as fun as it might have been to try.

“Would you like one?” I asked.

He shook his head and returned the sword to me. “My blade was my father’s. It has no equal.”

“What about a shield?”

He became thoughtful. “That, I would accept. We could consider it the price of your lessons.”

“My lessons?”

His smile was grim. “Now that you have a proper weapon, you must have proper training as well.”

We spent a few hours going over the basics. I expected him to instruct me as we sparred, knocking my sword around and insulting my feeble attacks, but instead, he spent most of the time gently chiding me about where I put my feet and how I held the weapon.

“Forget the shield for now,” he said. “Grip with your right hand nearest the guard, and the other closer to the end of the handle. Not so tight. Your hold should be firm, but allow for flexibility.”

I did as he said, feeling self-conscious, but his manner as an instructor was utterly level. He told me what to do, and whether I was doing it wrong, but he didn’t fault me or become impatient.

“Your stance should be balanced,” he continued, “your feet shoulder-width apart. Bend your knees, not too much. Keep your back straight, but not tense.” He tapped my shoulder. “Relax these.”

“First position. The knight holds his sword in front of his body, prepared either to attack or defend. The blade is angled upward, its point directed toward your opponent’s heart.”

“Like this?” I asked, but I was holding it too high, and he corrected me before moving on to another stance. He used his own sword to show me low, middle, and high guard and had me cycle through them for what felt like a hundred times. While the blade was light, the repetition was enough to make my shoulders burn long before we were done.

We had barely gotten to me attempting my first strike, swinging the blade down from a high guard when he called an end to our training.

“Practice on your own,” he said. “A few more days of instruction, and we may have another night of revelry ahead of us.”

Revelry was not how I would have described it, but at least he wasn’t insisting we slaughter as many zombies as we could right now. I gave him a salute. “I look forward to it.”

"What of the face stealer?” He asked. “Is it still confined?”

“He is,” I said, “as far as I know. I walled off the cell.”

“Good,” he nodded. “I will return soon.”

“Do you want to try some bread first? I make it hot.”

He paused for a long moment as if he was considering whether the offer was a trick of some kind. His eyes narrowed, and he gave a serious nod.

“I accept.”

We broke bread, and he went on his way.

I was making notes in my Captain’s Log to keep track of time, and the next few days before I was due to head back to the village were peaceful and productive. The fires of Dargoth might have been somewhere in my future, but for now, there wasn’t any smoke. As long as I kept the logs burning at night and the shelter secure, the monsters didn’t bother me. My training continued, and though we still didn’t spar, I felt like I was getting a better feel for how to properly handle a sword.

It was the night before my scheduled visit to Erihseht that I heard the scream. The sun had just gone down, and I was fiddling with my coin collection, sorting materials and converting them to tokens and medallions as needed when the sound reached me. The phantoms were going to scream, that’s what they did. It was their one job. This time though, the sound was different. There was an echoic quality to the calls of the phantoms, a hint of the otherworldly. I’d gotten so accustomed to them that they hardly bothered me. This was different. It was human, a woman’s scream.