The Dark Lord of Crafting

I was just thinking how weird it was that I hadn't had any trouble from spawns when a squid attacked me. After picking out a route through the swamp, I'd climbed down from the mushroom cap and returned to trudging through murky, ankle-deep water and spongy fungal ground. Zombies splashed around the shallows, hunting whatever they were hunting, ignoring me, and one of them disappeared.

It looked like it tripped and went under, but it didn't resurface. The water rippled and stilled. One more reason to avoid swimming, but I'd been staying away from deep pools already. Watching the water made me less cognizant of the canopy. This biome didn't have birds or squirrels, though it included gnats the size of horseflies. The insects were distracting and, I assumed, poisonous, but they had yet to figure out how to crawl into the gaps in my armor.

Clouds of them flowed through the swamp, and I batted the stragglers that took an interest in me. Then a squid fell on my head. It wrapped its arms around my helm and squeezed. There was a grating sound that made me glad I'd opted for full iron rather than venturing out in another Walking Dead disguise. These things had beaks.

I'd been keeping my ax at the ready since arriving at Zombie Island, and I swung up at my head a little harder than was advisable. It cut into the body of the squid thing, which I was now wearing like the extravagant crown of an insane marine biologist, and the impact had me clenching my teeth. Fortunately, I didn't do any damage to myself, and after a few less vigorous chops, was able to scrape the still wriggling mob off to plop into the shallow water.

The squid's coloration matched the Bedlam Wart exactly, even mimicking the grainy texture of the stalks. Another overhand swing was enough to finish it before it could slip away, and when it stopped moving, I grabbed one of its tentacles and picked it up to examine it. Dead, its skin smoothed, and the camouflage shifted to a mottled yellow-green.

What had Celaeno called these things? Kulu. I thought it was a little bigger than the one that had attacked me on Plana, or that I'd seen in the valley. Seven arms, all of different lengths, and a nasty beak. The grinding sound had been its attempt to bite through my helmet. How big could they grow to be? The kraken drawing on the map was getting more and more ominous.

Harvesting the squid got me two coins, leather and ink. Cool. At least it hadn't sprayed me. Over the next half hour, I spotted a few more of them hiding among the caps. Their camouflage was perfect, but as long as I let my eyes relax as I scanned the areas ahead of me, their presence was obvious. If I was developing a spiritual sense like the demons had, it was subtle. Kind of like staring at one of those images that looks like a vase until you realize its two faces in profile. Once you see the trick, you can't unsee it.

I reached the mycelium ridge that shared a border with the lake and spotted an easily climbable section. Though cutting out a staircase was always an option, I preferred making as little an impact on the environment as possible. For all I knew, the squid I killed had sent out some ultra-sonic screams to its momma. Hopefully not, but you never knew.

Half-formed stalks bulged out of the ridge, serving as convenient handholds to get me to the top. When I arrived, the area looked relatively clear of monsters. While I wasn't about to complain about the absence of spawns, it was bothering me. Why would monsters appear around me in Plana and not here? In the Nether, skeletons and ghasts popped up all over, making crossing any kind of distance a massive hassle.

Comparatively, my swamp journey had been smooth sailing. Too smooth. Was there a day and night cycle in play despite the absence of a sun and moon? That was something I would have to ask Bojack about when I got back.

To my left, the lake appeared peaceful. There were gnats flying across it in swarms, and a few spots where vibrant pink mushrooms peeked out of the water. Otherwise, it was an undifferentiated surface, a flat plane of black glass that covered a few square miles. Zombies had been common around the edges of the swamp, but there were none on the shore of the lake.

Out of curiosity, I hacked off a piece of the fungal ridge and tossed it into the water.

The pale clump of mycelium barely splashed, bobbing on the glassy surface. For long seconds, nothing else happened, and I considered chopping a few more chunks to continue the test. Then it went under. While I had seen nothing grab it, I was sure it hadn’t sunk. It had been pulled.

A moment later, it popped back up; still buoyant and bobbing more dramatically than ever. I tossed another chunk and was rewarded with a repeat performance. This time, I saw what was doing the grabbing. I only saw the edge of it; a tentacle as thick as my leg, with suckers as wide as my fist. I was pretty sure I’d read somewhere that an octopus could taste with its suckers. Is that what the kulu was doing, tasting whatever caused a disturbance, and releasing what it found to be unappetizing?

The portion of the ridge I was occupying was about ten paces across, rising well above the water. Still, there was no way to guess how far a giant kulu could stretch its arms. I moved away from the verge and got a good look at the sinkhole.

It was several hundred feet in diameter, but narrowed quickly, and the bottom occupied by a layer of stagnant water. The upper layers appeared to be a mixture of bedlamite and mycelium cake, many portions of which appeared dead; dry and bone white, almost like bleached coral. Fifty feet below me, on the opposite side of the sinkhole, was a cave.

The ridge narrowed as it curved along the sinkhole, but mushrooms jutted at odd angles all along its circumference. Not wanting to get any closer to the lake than I had to, I grabbed a few wood tokens out of my pack, quickly converted them into coins, and made myself a worktable. I crafted a plank bridge a few feet across and ten feet long, then dragged it along the ridge to get the to first mushroom.

Bringing the bridge upright, I edged my way onto the stalk, and it dipped a few inched under my weight. It was a part of the ridge, and didn't seem to be in any danger of popping off, so I got a few feet further out and let the bridge fall onto the next mushroom. That one was growing straight up out of the sinkhole, and the cap took the weight of the other end of the bridge with the barest puff of spores.

I walked across, squatted down, and pulled the plank bridge over to me. Repeating the process got me around the sinkhole without having to come within hopping distance of the lake, and once I was above the cave, I switched the ax out for the pick and mined my way down. So far, there hadn't been any obvious signs of other Survivors having been in this area. But that was likely because of the growth and regrowth of the fungus, which could have easily covered over any changes they made to the landscape.

The cave, however, was too squared off to be natural, or whatever passed for natural in Bedlam. Its sides were flat, and there was no fungal growth inside. The tunnel ran about thirty paces deep, pure bedlamite, but the far wall was patched with Warp Stone. Maybe they'd run into water and plugged the holes. Side passages had been dug out at regular intervals, packed close together, and I explored a few dead ends before finding something promising.

Most of the side passages ended as they began, channels cut just wide enough to walk down. One, however, had been expanded. A stair led downward, and a torch hung affixed to the wall at the lower landing. It wasn't as bright as it should have been, as if the gloom of Bedlam had disheartened it to the point where it was barely willing to glow, but I collected it anyway.

I estimated the stair had brought me roughly to the level of the base of the sinkhole, and the next passage led back toward the outside. At its end, I found a large chamber, twenty paces wide and half as deep, completely mined out. No mobs, no artifacts. The walls themselves were blank bedlamite, but the room came with an unusual sensation.

It wasn't anxiety, exactly. A sense of wrongness, of being out of place. The feeling was localized, becoming stronger the closer I came to the far wall. Pickle Rick was giving me a tug that corresponded with the feeling. The Fortune enchantment at work.

I set the torch on the floor and started mining toward the wrongness. Bedlamite left behind thin clouds of dust after being mined. They settled quickly, but it was a unique feature. Either Bedlam prevented my abilities from working perfectly, or there was something up with the material itself. After harvesting ten blocks, I was rewarded with something other than a coin.

It looked like a house centipede, gray, leggy, and unsettling. Also, it was eight inches long. It appeared in the space the block I was mining had occupied, made a noise like two rakes rubbing together, and scuttled at me.

Stabbing it with a pickax seemed like the only reasonable response. The point went through its body with a crunch, but its legs kept scrambling, and it made the sound again. I lifted the pick and hit it repeatedly. Bug juice squished out around what had been its head, and I felt bile rising in my throat. Zombies were one thing, trolls, sure. But giant bugs; count me out.

The thing, which must have been the Beddlemite the materials log had mentioned, was disgusting and disturbing in a way that no other mobs had been. I could imagine myself keeping a wyvern as a pet. Even trolls, with their canine features, had a certain appeal if they weren't trying to smash your brains out, but there was nothing redeemable about a giant house centipede.

Maincraft had an equivalent mob called a Silverfish. They infested certain blocks, and they would come to each other's aid if you didn't kill them in one blow.

Fiddlesticks.

The rakes-having-intercourse sound came again, this time from multiple directions. Four more of the things had popped out of the walls, the nearest one close enough to land on my boot.

"Butternuts!" I swore, attempting to shake it off. The Beddlemite refused to be dislodged, instead crawling up to my ankle and spitting a viscous fluid that sizzled and steamed against the iron of my boot. I kicked it with my other foot, and it bounced away. The others were already closing, and what commenced was the most horrifying game of whack-a-mole imaginable.

They weren't tough, but they were fast. Killing one gave another the moment it needed to hop onto the back of my leg. The super-suit stuck in a diamond box back on Plana came with gauntlets, but none of the armor I'd crafted myself had included gloves. Grabbing a ten-legged, acid spitting insect the size of a cat was out of the question, so I awkwardly slapped at it with the pick while hustling to the exit as quickly as I could.

I knocked it off and stomped it like an avenging angel that had had it up to here with sinners. More appeared, though thankfully not in the tunnel itself. Half a dozen of the noisy, skittering awfuls were rushing me from every corner of the room. I used the pick like a golf club to knock one away and stomped another, only to have a third make it all the way to my abdomen.

Acid steamed against the lower section of my chestplate, and I scraped it off with the pick before hopping onto its segmented body with both feet. The battle was heated, frantic, and small-scale, and I'd never been more freaked out by a fight. I couldn't stop to think. They just kept coming, and by the end, I'd smashed at least twenty of the chitinous mobs.

The rake sounds finally subsided, and I held my pick up in both hands as my head swiveled to look for more. I tasted blood, but only because I'd bitten my tongue. My jaw gradually unclenched as I realized the room was vacant once more. There was discoloration all over my armor where their acid had done its work. It hadn't eaten completely through, and the metal wasn't steaming anymore, but those spots were definitely weak points.

If I had bothered to name any pieces of the set at an anvil, the System would have shown me the damage to its durability. As things were, I would just have to avoid getting hit any more.

Continuing to mine was nerve-wracking, and I paused as each block popped to make sure no more beddlemites had appeared, but I seemed to have triggered all the mobs in the vicinity. The sense of wrongness drew me on, and after mining out a stunted passage for myself in the back wall, I found what I was looking for.

It looked like bedlamite, but with all the cavities and pores filled in by obsidian. Only the ore was darker than obsidian. Black glass without the glossy reflective quality. This metal absorbed light and gave nothing back.

Atreanum.