I woke up in a field. Nothing particularly special about it, but there were woods behind me, a mountain ahead, and I was completely naked. It took me a second to realize that I’d had this exact experience before. The details of my death were hazy, but I remembered the previous day, the appearance of monsters, and my original conversation with Mizu. It wasn’t hard to piece together what had happened. The sun was barely peeking over the mountains, and their shadows seemed to stretch impossibly far.

I had died again, but the System came with a respawn mechanic.

My hands went to my ears, both ears, and they were fine. There was nothing different about my body, no injuries or scars, and I wasn’t even hungry. There was no health bar floating in my vision, but I guessed that meant I was back to ten hearts. Dying reset your appetite, but it didn't reset everything. The elder sign was still on my right hand, and when I tapped it, the blue screen reappeared. My Miner ability was at three, and my journal had all the notes and notifications from the previous day, as well as the additional tabs that had been unlocked. My overall level was back to one. Death caused me to lose experience. Did that mean that if I died now, with no levels to lose, that I would die for real?

Minecraft respawned you at your point of origin. The obsidian block was still where I remembered it being, but I felt like it was farther away than it had been the first time. Had I come back into the world in the exact same position, or was it more that I was set to spawn in this general area? Being naked again made sense, at least where it related to how the game worked. You lost your stuff when you died unless you went to find it before it despawned. Experience too. But in the game, you came back immediately, not the next morning.

What about my stuff?

I walked toward the rising sun. As long as I had spawned in the same location as before, then I should be able to walk to my shelter with no trouble, and my stuff would be there. The System notification had stated that the monsters would be banished by the sun, so at least I wouldn’t have to worry about the zombies hanging around my shelter.

"Zombie" was a convenient term, though not exactly accurate. The monster that killed me was not an animated corpse, and their vibe was more Lovecraft than Minecraft. Trans-dimensional tentacle having skin flap monsters. Shamblers. My first notification had referred to the mark on my hand as an elder sign, which was a phrase straight out of the Cthulhu mythos.

It did look pretty eldritch. So I wasn’t just isekaied into a Lord of the Rings type world with Minecraft adjacent powers, the entire set-up was sticky with Lovecraft jam. Thanks, goddess. Appreciate the heads up.

My shelter came into view, a sad little shack surrounded by a murder of crows. The birds didn’t seem scared of me at all. Some were squatting on my roof, and others crowded around my previous body, enjoying the continental breakfast.

My body hadn’t vanished when I died, or exploded into confetti, or anything cool at all. It was just there, splayed out to one side of my shelter a few paces from the stream, all kinds of mangled and gnawed on. I wasn’t sure if it was the shamblers or the birds who had eaten my eyes, but someone had. Also, a lot of my skin was gone, like more than you would expect. It was hard to tell how much actual meat was missing, and they had cleaned the stomach area out, but man, had they been after that sweet, sweet skin.

It was so bad, so surreal, that I actually didn’t freak out that much. This was something you would see in a horror movie, a set piece. It wasn’t me. That hadn’t happened to me. Besides my body, there were also two shambler corpses, which I noted the birds were ignoring. The smell was powerfully swampy.

"Hey guys," I said to the crows, "excuse me, hey, excuse me.” My backpack’s straps had snapped, which made it mercifully easy to get it away from my corpse after I’d shooed the birds. The crows were absurdly casual about my arrival, as if I was just another scavenger and no threat to them. My shack was still intact, and there were no shamblers lurking inside of it. They had also left my worktable alone.

Trying not to look at my corpse or the animals feasting on it, I took a quick inventory. My coin supply was very low, but all my tools were intact. The garden was trampled, but it hadn’t been in the process of producing anything edible anyway. I liked to think of myself as a pragmatic person. It wasn’t always true, because I had a habit of getting bad ideas and chasing after them, especially when I was younger. But what I am is goal-oriented, and I tend to take things in stride.

When a judge gave me fifteen years, I had gotten back to the pod and people had asked me how court had gone. When I told them, they didn't believe me. This occurred multiple times throughout that evening. Other inmates asked me how much time I’d gotten, and I told them the truth, and they thought I was joking.

The way I had reacted didn’t seem genuine to them. I had just come back into the pod and gone back to reading a book. It was from the Dune series, the good stuff, before Frank Herbert’s son ruined it.

I’m not normal. I know I’m not normal, though I really don’t know what normal is. My emotions could be all over the place, particularly at that age. I’d had extreme reactions to non-events, while my feelings about major life changes came across as muted. In my twenties, a psychiatrist had diagnosed me as bipolar, and given me pills, but honestly, psychiatry is a load of crap. They don’t know what’s going on with you. No one knows. We all just make it up as we go along, doctors included. The process of getting older had allowed me to calm down and figure myself out.

So when I got back to camp, I didn’t waste time feeling feelings, because I had stuff to do. I had a challenge. The only quest the System had given me seemed like a joke, but I could give myself one.

"Captain’s log," I told my journal. "Quest Update, construct a shelter sufficient to survive the night. Reward. Not getting eaten."

All right then. I shooed the crows, waving my ax around, and they left my body to alight on the roof, cawing and crowing their disapproval of my rude behavior. I’d deal with them later. First things first, I needed wood. Most of the morning went to shaving off the edge of the treeline of the closest forested area. Traveling into the forest itself was murder on my bare feet, and over the course of a couple of hours of work I could already feel the sun’s rays prickling my skin with the promise of impending sunburn.

Clothing was a must. As I carried back a pack full of mixed coins, logs and sticks and leaves, my thoughts turned to armor. In Minecraft, mobs dropped loot. Monsters sometimes carried equipment, as well as materials specific to their species. Spiders dropped string, Endermen dropped Ender Pearls, and Creepers dropped gunpowder. I was lucky the only thing I had to deal with was zombies. A single Creeper would have blown any shelter I constructed wide open.

Passive mobs, like cows and sheep, dropped meat and materials. Sheep gave you wool, which was necessary for crafting your first bed, and cows gave you leather. Leather armor was the worst defense in the game and I usually didn’t bother making it. You could make your first iron set relatively quickly. But killing the zombies hadn't resulted in item drops, and I suspected that mechanic would not be a part of my adventure.

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The crows were back to pecking at my corpse, and I glared at them while squatting beside the bodies of the zombies I had killed. While the monsters had not disintegrated into convenient item drops, that didn’t mean they weren’t potentially harvestable.

I started swatting at the skin flap robes and nothing seemed to happen. No cracks formed to hint that I was making progress, but I kept at it, just in case. After a full minute of fruitless patting, something truly horrible occurred. I got a new coin.

The zombie's insides looked even worse than its outsides, and the coin felt exactly like what it was. My materials log contained a new entry.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

[Tainted Leather]

Why would you do this? Leather is a highly versatile material with many possible uses. It can be obtained by harvesting the skin of any animal of sufficient size. For whatever reason, you have collected it from a koroshai.

“I’m working with what I have,” I told the screens. “Give me a cow, and I’ll make leather out of a cow.” Why was the System so judgmental? After skinning both zombies, the result was something akin to a grotesque art exhibit. Their musculature was recognizable, but deformed, and the placement of the tentacles didn’t seem to make sense, anatomically speaking. They were just tubes of meat hanging from their abdomens.

There was very little blood. The insides of the zombies were surprisingly dry, and less fleshy than I would have expected. These monsters were part plant or fungus. What looked like gray and white threads of mycelium had saturated their musculature. The smell had actually diminished now that their skin was gone, and it reminded me more of decaying leaves than what I thought a body should smell like.

I now had eight leather coins, and if the formula from the game held true, then that would be enough to make only a single item of clothing. It took eight leathers just to make a chestplate, and seven for pants. While covering my nethers was tempting, and sunburn was a potentially serious issue, I opted for boots to begin with. My feet were all kinds of scraped and chafed. Walking around the field was one thing, but a forest was no place to go barefoot, and my lack of footwear had severely hampered the rate at which I was collecting wood and exploring.

At the worktable, I placed coins in the left and right bottom corners, and one more above each of those, leaving what looked like an empty T in the middle of the grid. When I pulled the lever on the side of the table, the coins disappeared, and I was gifted with a fresh pair of boots.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

[Tainted Leather Boots]

Armor Rating: 1

As sturdy as they are disturbing, these boots will keep your feet safe in treacherous terrain. What they lack in style they make up for with comfort and dependability.

The boots were tall enough to reach up to my mid-calf, and the leather was a brownish green with a bumpy, mottled surface. I dusted off my feet and slipped them on. Socks would have been nice, but as promised, they were actually quite comfortable. Taking a few practice steps, I found they were already as soft as if a previous owner had broken them in. Wearing them gave me a new sense of confidence. Despite still being free in the breeze, I felt less naked now that I had footwear. I looked back to where my original body was still being ravaged.

The first crow didn’t see me coming, but the others figured it out pretty quickly. An ax was not an ideal weapon for merking small animals, but it got the job done and I managed to get two of them before the entire flock was up in the air and screaming crow curses at me.

"Hey!" I shouted. "You started this!"

I buried my body, and then, after some thought, buried the remains of the zombies as well. It turned out that I could harvest the crow’s feathers, but not their meat, which was a major disappointment. I snacked on the last of my blackberries while thinking about fire.

You needed coal or charcoal to craft torches and campfires in the game. You could also use flint and tinder to light flammable materials, but I had neither. What I had was a chisel, dry grass, sticks, and the survival skills of someone who had seen movies. So how did I make fire?

Logically, I knew that doing the spinny-stick-to-make-fire routine wasn’t as easy as it looked on television. But I had what I had, and I was going to give it my best effort. I set up a little campfire zone in the area I had cleared of grass the day before and attempted the friction method of starting a fire.

I set up some wood, put dry grass on and around them, and grabbed my sword. I had yet to actually try using the wooden blade in combat, though it actually looked quite sharp, and from the performance of my ax, I had no doubt it would do its intended job when it came down to it. But right now, I wanted it to do a job for which it was not intended. Its handle was perfectly round and smooth, which probably wasn’t ideal for a grip, but it was convenient for this.

Feeling ridiculous, I carefully placed the point of the sword on top of my chosen stick and used it as a drill. Despite being made from the same material, the point had no trouble biting into the stick. I spun the handle between the flats of my hands, expecting nothing but embarrassment and failure.

A few seconds later, a thin tendril of smoke rose from the point of contact. I got so excited that I misaligned the sword and it popped off where it was supposed to be, but proof of concept had been established. After long minutes of many failed attempts, as well as careful rearrangement of sticks and grass and dropping to blow on smoldering stalks, only to have the beginnings of a flame die out, I had a fire.

It was definitely a cheat. There was no way that should have worked. Gutting the crows was unpleasant, but I soon had a nice thing going, and built up a nice campfire to roast them with.

They were almost ready to eat when I saw the riders. Two figures, a man wearing a breastplate and a girl with long brown hair. She was a lot smaller than him and looked like a kid on top of her full-sized horse. The pair had come to a stop a respectful distance away from me beside the stream, at least a football field between us.

“Hey!” I shouted, holding both my arms up in the air to show I was unarmed. Neither rider had weapons out, and I took that as a good sign. “Hello!”

The man said something to the girl, and the two of them wheeled their mounts around and kicked them into a gallop.

“Wait!”

I ran after them, but it was quickly apparent that I would not outpace a horse. They were headed in the same general direction as the stream, and I continued to follow them as the distance between us lengthened.

Civilization, humans, had to be nearby. But you could cross a lot of distance in a day on a horse. If the pair had been out here looking for me, they wouldn’t have run away. Maybe they had been hunting, or just out for a ride. The man had looked like he might have been a soldier, but the girl had been wearing a riding dress, and I hadn’t noticed either of them carrying a bow. If they hadn’t been out here looking for me, then their reaction had been reasonable. Confronted with a naked crazy person in the wilderness, avoiding contact was a solid response.

Eventually, I lost sight of them completely. I continued to walk for a while, but I couldn’t be sure if they would stick to the same direction, or how far away their destination was. Finding other people was a priority, but it came second to surviving the night.

I needed to get back and finish my shelter.