The Dark Lord of Crafting

The stair leading up to the next level attached to the curving wall of the tower opposite the doorway we had entered from. It had no rail or cover until it met the ceiling, and we found ourselves in a well-appointed hallway lit by an everburning torch in a silver sconce. Its light had a yellowish cast, as opposed to the red version below, or the pure white light that mine produced. A magnificent rug, embellished with geometric patterns, rolled out along the floor. The patterns were fascinating to look at, abstract shapes and figures that drew my eye along the length of the rug. I felt like they reminded me of something, but I couldn’t place what it was.

“What are you looking at?” Gastard was at my back, glancing around like he expected to spot a tripwire.

“Just the rug,” I said. “Do you know what any of this means?”

He grunted. “It looks demonic. Sorcery. I would burn it.”

“Maybe later.” It was just a rug. The hall ended with an iron door with a serious locking system. Gears and pistons and chains out of a steampunk fever dream. At the center of the mechanical mess was a flat copper plate with an oversized keyhole near the top.

“There could be traps,” he said.

I slapped a spear medallion into my hand and prodded the rug as we went forward, hunting for pressure plates. Nothing triggered, and by the time we reached the end of the hall, we weren't shot with a single dart or forced to dodge any swinging pendulums. We both examined the locking mechanism, and I noticed a wooden coin hanging on a chain from one of the spoked wheels.

It seemed innocent enough. The coin was attached to the chain by an iron clip. It looked like one of my sticks, only the engraved symbol was a little more complicated. I tapped my spear until it reverted to a medallion, and then removed the coin. When I slapped it into my hand, the result was indeed a stick, though one end had been carved with a series of regular teeth.

Ding.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

[Tally Stick]

Out of paper? Why not jot down some notes on a stick? Want proof of a debt? Notch out the values and split the stick so that only the original pair will properly fit together. If you use your imagination, the potential of this humble item is limitless.

Your Artisan skill is insufficient to craft Tally Sticks. Where did you get this?

I had some vague memories of reading about how tally sticks had been used as lending notes in medieval Europe, but that didn’t seem to be the use case here. The notched wood slid easily into the keyhole, and once it was turned, the entire mechanism sprang into action. The chains clinked as the wheels spun, and there were pops from the other side of the door that sounded like muffled gunshots as it unlocked.

“What was the point of that?” Gastard asked.

“Only a Survivor could open it,” I said. “I don’t think any of the other kinds of heroes can use coins.”

The door swung open at a touch, revealing a comfortable sitting room. Lounge chairs, a desk, and a hearth, all bathed in the soft yellow light of an enchanted diamond set in the heart of the stone ceiling. Gastard and I split up to explore. Given the nature of the door, I would have been very surprised to find any soldiers hiding out in the upper levels of the way station. The rest of the doors were wooden and lacked any discernible security features. We found a bedroom, a pantry, and a shaft with a ladder leading to the roof of the structure. Then there was the crafting room.

The Dark Lord’s forge was not as fiery as the pits of Mount Doom. It wasn’t an evil a forge in the traditional sense. A different crafting tool dominated each corner of the room; an anvil, a worktable, a furnace, and what I immediately recognized as an enchanting table. Its body was a four-foot-tall block of obsidian, polished like a mirror. Diamonds the size of my fist sat in each corner, and a leather cover spread over the top, cut in the shape of an equal-armed cross.

An open book rested atop the leather, its pages marked by intricate runes in a minuscule script. The middles of the pages had been removed, perfect squares, as if Kevin had been planning on hiding drugs in there. It was less impressive than the entire chamber dedicated to enchanting that we had found in the abandoned base, but far more convenient. If I was lucky, I could take it with me.

“To think this mattered so little to him he left it unguarded.” Gastard walked in a circle around the room and came to a stop at the bank of chests hanging from the far wall. It was the same system as the one I’d seen before, though smaller. The chests were arranged around a hopper, and there was a lever to one side that caused them to rotate on a track.

“It wasn’t unguarded,” I said, “just not guarded very well.”

I checked the chests.

All but one chest was brimming with coins, as opposed to tokens or medallions. He could do the conversion, but he had only made the effort for one of these material stores. I guessed that this was an aesthetic choice, everybody likes full chests, and if you had a storage system instead of having to carry everything on your back, the larger denominations wouldn’t be a necessity. Converting coins into tokens took time, not a lot of time, but some, and it must have been easier to pour everything he collected into the hopper and forget about it.

Two of the chests contained granite, red, and regular. He’d also left behind wood, clay, and sand, in addition to a type of token I’d never seen before. It looked like frosted glass, but I didn’t think that was what it was. Both sides of the coin were etched with a snowflake.

I dropped one to the floor.

It was a block of ice. One cubic foot. I stared at it, and my reflection stared back at me.

“Well,” I said. “That’s something.”

Gastard touched the block, and his hand came away wet.

“Cold,” he said. “I suppose these would serve as a ready supply of water once they melted.”

In Maincraft, you didn’t need to drink, and water was functionally infinite. You could pick up water in a bucket, and when you poured it out, it would count as a source-block. Source blocks generated water as game physics dictated, flowing down hills and into pits, and if you picked them up again, all that went away. My buckets didn’t work that way. So if there wasn’t a mechanic built into the System for collecting large quantities of water, harvesting blocks of ice was the next best thing. You could always store water in buckets and bowls, but I supposed this was slightly more straightforward, if still weird.

“It wouldn’t be the most efficient thing in the world,” I said, “but there’s enough here to keep a lot of people from dying of thirst.”

Gastard nodded. “This is only one way station.” His eyes settled on the diamond-studded enchanting table. “He could have a room like this in each of them. It beggars the mind to consider what resources he has gathered in the heart of his realm if he leaves so much behind.”

A pair of iron buckets rested beside the furnace, along with another chest. This one wasn’t as full as the others, but there were at least a hundred coal coins in there, enough to keep the furnace running for a long time. We were on a clock, given the looming threat of a demon-led army assaulting the way station, but I couldn’t resist trying one thing.

I grabbed a handful of sand coins and slotted them into the furnace along with coal, and it sprang to life.

“What are you doing?” Gastard came to the furnace, holding out his hand to feel the heat that was already radiating from its lower oven.

“Sand should convert to glass,” I said. “He has a lot of sand here, but there I haven’t noticed any glass incorporated in this build. I just wanted to make sure it works like I think it will.” While the furnace was doing its thing, I set about merging granite coins into tokens. You could never have too much stone. Gastard watched me with a frown.

“I’m going to the roof to keep watch,” he said.

“Mhm.” I was completely absorbed in my task. My hoarding instincts had taken over, and there was no fighting it. I needed these materials. I needed all of them. The sound of a coin being dispensed from the furnace brought me out of my absorption.

It was two coins.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

[Glass Fragment]

Add a touch of class with this fragment of glass. What build wouldn’t be improved by a little extra shimmer? A result of smelting low-quality sand, enough of these fragments can be restored into a full block. Be careful not to cut yourself.

[Iron Dust]

Enough ore to smelt a single nugget, though not a full ingot. You’ll get there someday, champ.

There was iron in the sand, which was the source of its dark color. The vast ocean of resources now available to me stretched before my mind’s eye. It was functionally infinite iron. The only limit was the time constraint. I could guess that the System was playing off of how copper was treated in the game. Copper ore had to be combined at a crafting table into raw copper before it could be smelted into an ingot. The ingots could also be combined into blocks if you wanted to use them as a building material or ran out of room in your inventory.

The furnace took about a minute to process a single block of sand, but there was no reason I couldn’t have multiple furnaces running at once. It would be days before I ran out of coal, and then I would still have hundreds of logs ready to be converted into charcoal to replace it. But I was getting ahead of myself, I didn’t have days to play around here.

Kevin’s worktable was crafted out of a gray hardwood I didn’t recognize. It also came with gold trim, a set of carpentry tools, and a fancy silk cover. It looked way cooler than anything I’d ever made in ways that were hard to quantify. It wasn’t just the superior materials, the lines were cleaner, and every piece included little artistic flourishes. Kevin had a higher Artisan skill; not surprising, given how long he’d been operating in this world.

I quickly threw together another furnace and got it cooking, then a third. It wasn’t like I would run short on stone. Then I went back to hoarding, merging coins into tokens, and tokens into medallions, before stuffing them in my backpack.

Once nine ore coins had rolled into the dispenser, I was in such a rush to bring them to the worktable that I slipped on the water pooling around the ice block. The excess heat of multiple working furnaces was turning the room into a sweat box and it was melting rapidly.

I harvested the ice, and instead of receiving an ice block coin in return, got a handful of what my System informed me were [Ice Chunk]s. It had lost too much of its volume to return me a full block, but it was nice to know that ice could be broken down into smaller units.

All the iron dust combined into a single unit of iron ore, which looked like a sparkly gray rock with reddish undertones. It was bigger than an ingot, but far short of being a full block itself. I slotted it into one of the furnaces and went back to stealing resources, converting dust into ore into ingots as it became available.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

Achievement: Hoarder (3)

Now that you have collected over fifty medallions of a single material, it’s official, you have a problem. New material unit unlocked: Cabochon.

The chests weren’t huge, two feet wide by one and a half feet deep and tall. Still, that was enough to fit thousands of coins even when they weren’t arranged particularly neatly. Between all six chests, it would have taken me days to convert them all into higher value units. Nine coins to a token, nine tokens to a medallion; eighty-one blocks, and it was as condensed as I’d been able to make any material so far. Now, nine medallions became a single cabochon.

It wasn’t a coin anymore. It was a crystal, a single smooth, smoky-looking marble that represented seven hundred and twenty-nine cubic feet of dark sand. The gem looked to have been shaped and polished rather than cut, with a domed top and a flat bottom. Hours passed as I converted mass quantities of stone, wood, clay, and sand into a few small pouches of gemstones and a backpack stuffed with somewhat organized tokens and medallions. The furnaces were working overtime all the while, producing glass fragments and iron dust for me to craft into ingots.

It was almost morning when Gastard returned, covered in gore.

“Jesus,” I said, “what happened to you?”

“Koroshai on the roof,” he said, making a seat out of the anvil as he cleaned his blade with a cloth. “Phantoms as well. It was an eventful evening.”

“They’ve been spawning up there all night?”

“Periodically, I was never overwhelmed.”

“You could have gotten me for help.”

“I was not overwhelmed.” He shrugged, then wiped the sweat and grime from his brow. “Why are there so many furnaces?”

I explained what I’d been doing and showed off my collection of fresh ingots.

His eyebrows raised. “So much,” he said, “you could make us both full sets of plate and have ingots to spare.”

“That’s the plan,” I said, turning to the worktable to get started. “Any sign of the enemy?”

“I could see them, but they haven’t moved. There was a mist obscuring my view, but they have constructed a bridge to cross your gap. If they don’t march in the morning, I expect they will be here shortly after night fall.”

The reality sank in, and I felt like a moron for having spent the second half of the night gathering resources instead of preparing to defend the way station. I’d gotten carried away.

“What do you think I should do?” I said. “Barricades? Traps?”

Gastard examined his blade in the torchlight and frowned.

“The troll dulled her edge.” He produced a whetstone, and set to work sharpening his blade. “Do what you can. From what the stories say of demons, some of them can sunder a castle gate with a word. But this one was hindered by a gap in the road, so perhaps he is not so powerful.”

Demonic magic was a big question mark. Depending on what they were capable of, they could render any preparations I made moot. A part of me wanted to grab my loot and get out of here before the army arrived. Gastard would have had something to say about that. I pushed away my doubts and started crafting helmets. This would be the last night I wore a zombie mask. Mizu has sent me to this world to be a hero, and now that we had a defensible position, I had a few ideas about how to deal with an army at my door, demon or no demon.