Survivor: Definitely Not Minecraft

I was itching to check out the library, but we agreed that it was necessary to see what else was down there first, especially if there was another room where monsters might have spawned without me knowing. The door in the bend of the hall that connected to the library was a dead end. It led to an unfinished chamber of raw stone which I left as it was. The stargate room was aligned with the cardinal directions, so I thought of our entrance as the South passage. The northern door took us into a short hall that led to another arch.

There were no glowstones here, and when Gastard stepped past the arch with his torch raised high, its light was enough to reveal about half of the cavernous chamber. My first thought was "summoning circle." The floor had been divided into three concentric rings marked out by the same obsidian that composed the stargate, with runes carved into the surrounding stone.

“What is this?” Esmelda asked.

“Magic something or other,” I said. “Let’s avoid crossing those circles, just in case.”

We proceeded along the edge of the room. The corners were recessed, surrounded by more runes and obsidian, and I assumed something was supposed to be placed in each of them to activate whatever this was. The absence made me more confident that we weren’t at risk of activating the previous owner’s trap card simply by being there, and we continued walking along the wall until it brought us back under the arch.

“I’ve never heard of a room like this,” Gastard said, “though it does stink of sorcery.”

“Whoever made this place was like me,” I said. “There’s probably something I can do with it, but I don’t know enough yet to guess.” The summoning circle idea was stuck in my head, but I couldn’t imagine why you would want to summon monsters when they showed up every night anyway.

The West passage brought us to a treasure room that would have made Lord Godwod wet himself. It wasn’t as large as the summoning room or the stargate chamber, but it didn’t need to be. The wall on our left was solid gold, and the one on our right had been constructed from a purplish, semi-translucent crystal. The back wall was regular stone, but it was lined with four columns of locked chests, attached to the wall by a system of tracks. At the center of the arrangement was a stone funnel that I immediately identified as a Minecraft hopper. A lever was set into the wall on one side of the chests, and it was hard not to imagine that we’d stumbled onto a previous survivor’s automatic storage and sorting room.

The promise of new materials to craft with was enough to make my mouth water, but that possibility took second place to what was on display at the center of the room. It was a complete suit of armor, ornate plate mail, forged from a material I could only guess at, white-gold steel. It had sharp lines and edges between the plates that put me in the mind of a suit of power armor, and the helm came with a built-in platinum crown. It was encased in a sarcophagus of clear, glittering crystal.

Esmelda approached but did not touch the sarcophagus. “Diamond?” She said, “Can this all be diamond?”

Gastard grunted his disbelief. “Glass,” he said, “a showcase.”

I’d watched a YouTube video once about telling real diamonds from fake ones. Real diamonds were denser than glass and quartz and would sink faster if you dropped them in water. We weren’t going to sink this sarcophagus, but there was a much simpler test to be done. You could scratch glass, you couldn’t scratch a diamond without another diamond. At least, that’s what Google always told me.

I scraped the top of my knife along the case. Nothing. Just to see what would happen, I produced a stone pick and tried tapping at the corner of the sarcophagus. Rather than causing cracks to appear in the block, they shortly began appearing along the head of the tool, so I stopped before it shattered.

“If it's not a diamond,” I said, “I don’t know what it is.”

“Even using your blessing to craft this,” Esmelda said, walking around the case, “where could you ever find so much?”

I gestured at the wall of wealth to one side of us. “The same goes for the gold. Whoever made this place had his own mines, and could have gathered all of this himself. I just wish I knew who they were.”

“Could all this belong to the Dark Lord?” Gastard asked, his eyes narrowing as if he suspected monsters might pop out of the chests at any moment.

“The Dark Lord is known for his greed,” Esmelda said, “he would not forget a place like this.”

Gastard approached the wall of gold and placed his hand against its gleaming surface. “I fear what it means if such wealth is now below his notice.”

“I don’t think it’s his,” I said. As interested as I was in the gold, I wanted to see what was in the chests more than anything, and started walking toward them as I spoke. “Whoever left me a message in obsidian had good intentions, there had to be other crafter–”

I slammed into an invisible barrier, squashing my nose in the process. Light shimmered up from the floor, a pale blue cascade, emanating from runes etched into the stone that had gone unnoticed before. Gastard drew his sword by reflex, but there was no enemy here, just an ancient security system.

Esmelda approached the barrier, which disappeared a moment after it had flared, and touched it with one finger as I rubbed my nose. Where her digit met the ward, light blossomed, though not as dramatically as it had from me running into it.

“Can you make something like this?” She asked, apparently unphased by the presence of a force field.

“Not that I know of,” I said. There were no force fields in Minecraft, at least not in the unmodded version of the game.

Any attempt to bypass the runes resulted in the rise of shimmering blue energy that resisted my hammer and pick as easily as it resisted my hand. There was no chipping away at the energy field, no slipping through. It was as solid as the diamond box.

Naturally, I tried digging around it.

While I was able to dig through the floor, trying to come back up behind the barrier resulted in the loss of my pick. The stones behind the chests were engraved as well, and the runes enhanced the stone they were inscribed on in a way that made them harder than any of my tools. But I was still using stone. I spent the last of my iron to make a new pick, but it proved no more effective than the stone equivalent, and I stopped trying to dig through the fortified blocks after it began to show wear.

A crafter had made this place, and there would have been no point in bothering with a glowing magic barrier if it could be overcome by basic tools. The gold and the purplish crystal, however, were unprotected. It was maddening to think how valuable the contents of the chests must have been to warrant a magical security system if literal tons of gold had not been worth protecting in the same way, but at least I was rich.

My companions gathered around to watch as I applied my pick to the wall. Gold was slower to harvest than stone, but cracks began to appear in the block soon after I began tapping. It was weird seeing gold break up like that since metals and rocks weren’t supposed to shear in the same way, but it was an aspect of my abilities that was very much in line with the Minecraft aesthetic. In the game, a stone pickaxe would work to mine iron, but it would destroy gold and diamond without rewarding the player with any material drops. I was a little worried that even iron wouldn’t be good enough to get me this gold, but I had nothing better to work with, so I had to try.

It took a full minute, but a one cubic foot section of the gold wall vanished, exposing the basalt behind, and was converted into a coin in my hand. I held it up for the others to see. It wasn’t a coin, it was a full token, and it looked and felt like exactly what it was, gold.

“How much is gold worth,” I asked, “like, Otto asked for five pounds of silver, and that seemed like a lot. Does Drom even use gold as a currency?”

Gastard shook his head. “You have the wealth of a kingdom in this room. I can’t begin to guess its value.”

“It depends on the dealer,” Esmelda said, then pursed her lips. “Most people will never see a gold coin, but they do exist. Dongle would be able to give you a more accurate estimate, but by weight, I would say that gold is about ten times as valuable as silver. What you have here–” her eyes widened as they traveled over the wall, as if she was taking in the sight for the first time. “Gastard is right. It’s too much to begin to say the true value. You could buy Henterfell if Henterfell was for sale.”

“I guess I can pay your dad back for the iron then,” I said. “Trading for materials isn’t going to be an issue, at least.” I took a deep breath. Being fabulously wealthy was cool and all, but it had to be put in perspective. If I started throwing large quantities of money around, it was going to turn heads in Drom. I could potentially work something out with Godwod to get myself a title and make things seem more legitimate, but when it came down to it, this was a war chest. If Kevin ever brought an army over the mountains, this much gold would allow me to raise one of my own.

“It’s going to take me a while to mine all of this out,” I said. “Do you want to check out the library for me, give us an idea of what we have there?”

Esmelda beamed. “I would love to.”