The Dark Lord of Crafting

Infinity was boring. Most of the islands were too far away to look like anything other than blurry shapes. The cart sped up as it went along, but after a few minutes, it seemed to reach its maximum speed. Not that I could be sure what that speed was, given the lack of reference points and how weird everything looked without a proper horizon. The void was cold, though not uncomfortably so. Actual space would have had my eyes freezing over as the air ejected from my lungs, but the between space of Bedlam felt like a temperate evening. Besides the unmitigated silence, the air was unnervingly unscented.

I don't normally pay that much attention to background odors unless something really stood out. But being outdoors comes with a lot of atmospheric baggage. The scents of grass, of floating pollen, the earth itself. Here there was nothing. A faintly tinny scent emanated from the redstone tubes underneath the cart. Aside from that, it was like I was breathing sterilized air, except without the residuals of a sterilizing agent.

The Dragon Ball island was shaped like a sword, not too wide, but extending basically forever on its long side. It gradually reduced in size until it was just one more textured shape in a sea of distant geometric figures. The desert was a saucer and took longer to become indistinct. My car was getting nowhere fast. I could flick it into reverse, but that wouldn't get me any closer to my goal. But whoever had put this mode of locomotion in place had done so with a destination in mind, hadn’t they?

How had they navigated this place before they installed a magic cart? I'd been thinking of Bedlam as the Nether, which was basically Maincraft hell. But it was reminding me more of the End. That biome had islands like these, though those were less varied in their composition, and if you fell off, you died. Maincraft was an unusual game in that the world was truly open. It generated procedurally. The farther you traveled, the more it expanded. It was the same for the End as the Overworld. You could keep exploring forever.

I didn't want to do that. To island hop in the End, you could use an item called an Elytra. It was basically a jetpack powered by fireworks, and it had a limited range, so if you weren't paying attention, it was a good way to lose all your gear by dropping into the void. From what I could recall, you couldn’t craft Elytra. You had to find them in the End. Had they found some here?

Though I was thinking of my predecessors as a group instead of an individual Survivor, for all I knew, what I'd discovered could have been crafted by one guy. The amenities at the base were definitely more of a one-man thing. But I wanted to think of myself as part of a community, a brotherhood, even if everybody else was dead. Everybody but Kevin.

There had been other Survivors, once, and then other heroes. And now there were none. Was Kevin himself that dangerous, or was it that aligning himself with the demons had given him advantages Mizu's champions couldn't match? The System had compensated for all my deaths by adjusting my attributes until I was legitimately superhuman. Not a top level cape, of course, but probably around Captain America levels. But before my deaths had triggered the System's intervention, it had been rewarding me for how long I survived.

The original achievement had come after only a day. Then a week. Then it had slowed down. But when was the last time Kevin had died? Being the Dark Lord of an empire that wasn't actively at war had to be relatively safe. The bad guys weren't trying to kill him, he was the bad guys. How many achievements would the System grant me if I lived for a century? Was there an upper limit, or did you keep getting stronger?

The last thing I needed was to find out that Kevin was Superman. I would have to ask Bojack if he had ever seen the Dark Lord do a deadlift. Until then, I was happy to be able to swing a stone sword around like it was a toy.

Another asteroid grew ahead of me, identical to the first. It contained a similar junction, though this one only had three directions; forward, back, and to the right. No extra supplies, but as the cart ground to a stop, I spotted a framed parchment resting on the wall beside the junction switch. I'd never been so relieved to see a map.

It wasn't incredibly detailed, but the location of the base was marked with the word "Portal," and the islands I'd already passed had labels as well, and were loosely outlined in the drawing. They'd named Dragon Ball Island “The Roost”, and the desert was “Skyworms”. That was about right. But the map’s scale was either way off or the positions of the islands had changed drastically since their survey. I assumed both. There was supposed to be another island right next to the portal, “Snakehouse”, but I hadn't seen it. Not that I would have been enthusiastic about visiting a region named Snakehouse, anyway.

So the islands did move, but maybe they did so in constellations, caught in each other's gravity. The map looked old, its ink faded in places to near transparency. Was there something keeping the asteroids at a stable position, or was the cart keyed to seek them out even when they shifted? Either way, there was a network in place, and it seemed to be in working order.

Five more islands were labeled, but the only one that mattered to me was "Zombie Swamp." The zombie part wasn't great, but of all the monsters that Bedlam offered, they would be the easiest to deal with. The kraken looking drawing above the swamp on the map gave me pause. Could it be ornamental? A kind of generalized, "here be monsters" like what you saw on fantasy maps?

I doubted it. But that's where I needed to go. Pulling the lever beside the map caused the track to clank into a new position. I was going right. A moment later, the cart was once again flying into the darkness.

The wheels continued to squeak as they spun pointlessly beneath the cart. Either the void was extremely quiet, or the sound didn't travel well here. The journey went on and on, and as the cart didn't require a pilot, I sat down and rested my head against the back of the iron basin. Above me, clusters of floating islands hung frozen in the darkness. Not that they weren't moving relative to me, but they were so far away that they appeared stationary. The jostling of the cart, it behaved like it was traveling along an actual track, was somewhat soothing, rocking me from side to side. My eyes drifted shut.

Thump.

Had I actually fallen asleep? That was a stupid move. If nothing else, the cart could have run into something, or taken me to the wrong junction. I jumped to my feet. This wasn't the void anymore.

The air was so pungent that it made me miss the emptiness. "Earthy" would have been a generous description of the malodorous environment, and a more honest one would have been "corpse-like." A short tunnel, open on both ends, provided some cover as I climbed out of the minecart and surveyed my surroundings. Dark waters and fungal colonies doing their best to LARP as trees. The stalks were bone white, but the caps ranged from brown to pink and purple and blue. Drawn in the right style, it could have been a happy-looking place, a pastel fairy kingdom.

It wasn't.

The colors, for all their variety, were muted, as if a painter had gotten his palette together and then accidentally spilled gray over the entire wheel. I glanced at the cart. It had landed on the tracks, and a pair of fences had automatically popped out to keep it from bouncing back into space. The fences attached to the tunnel, with buttons so they could be opened and shut manually. Despite being made of wood, the dampness of the swamp hadn't affected them, and nothing was growing across their sanded planks. A rune stood out from each of their rungs, the meanings unguessable, though the purpose was unmistakable.

A preservation effect. I needed to get me some runes.

Beyond the tunnel, the ground was a soggy mix of decomposing, better left unknown, organic matter and shallow pools of stagnant water. The solid areas seemed to be mostly mycelium, the root structures of the mushrooms, and the air was thick with spores. Breathing it in settled a bitter taste on the back of my tongue and dried out my throat. My status screen had long claimed I was immune to poison and disease, and it looked like I was going to be putting that to the test.

Just in case it would help, I pulled the hem of my tunic out from under my chest-plate and tore off a section to use as a bandana to cover my mouth, because iron headgear alone wasn’t doing the job. It was better than nothing. I tested the path forward with my boot, and aside from the squelching, it seemed stable enough. From what I could see, "Zombie Swamp" had been an apt designation for this place.

There were shamblers mixed in among the vegetation, mostly dormant, but some of them were moving about in their awkward shuffle, occasionally grabbing for whatever morsels they saw floating in the water. Glowing green moss provided a hint of illumination among the stalks, but if Beleth hadn't given me his eyes, I would have been blind. No sun in Bedlam, only darkness and bioluminescent fungus. And lightning, but this island didn't have a storm.

Except for the sloshing water and the occasional moan of a shamblers, the swamp was deathly quiet. I heard frog-like croaking, but the sound was intermittent, as it attracted the shamblers. A group of them were swiping at the water, splashing around like a bunch of drunk guys at a pool party. I kept my distance, wondering why they weren't gunning for me the way they did when they appeared in Plana. The closest zombie was a hundred feet away, and I intended to keep it that way.

So far, nothing had spawned around me.

The swamp was overgrown, odd bulbs and things that weren't quite flowers rising out of the shallows. More spores puffed when they were stepped on, but I was either resistant to infestation or setting myself up for a very uncomfortable death. It was a lot warmer on the island than in the void. Heat was a byproduct of decaying matter, and under my armor, I was sweating.

Stormbringer was in my hand, and as I went along, I harvested a few of the different varieties of fungus on principle. It all showed up as either "Bedlam Wart Stalk" or "Bedlam Wart Cap" in my materials log. The colors didn't seem to matter. I found a mushroom that was as thick as a redwood and cut myself a staircase to climb to the top and try to get the lay of the land.

The flesh of the fungus was softer than wood, but sturdy enough to support my weight. My boots left imprints, but didn’t sink, and from the top I could see what I was looking for. The swamp was broad, and it centered on a body of water as black as the void. The lake ran up against a mycelium ridge that had grown up around a sinkhole the size of a quarry. It looked barren, but there could always be monsters hiding in the bottom of the hole.

A kraken could hide in that lake, too. I would steer clear. It had been smooth sailing so far, not even a single phantom to harrass me, so maybe I could find what I was looking for without a catastrophe. My biggest worry was that there had been atreanum here once, but the previous Survivors had already stripped it all. If that was the case, I was screwed. It wasn't like I could build my own invisible rail system to fly around to the other islands. Bedlam might have been infinite, but my patience wasn't.

I spent a few minutes picking out a route to the sinkhole with my eyes and set off.