Minecraft: The Island: Chapter 18–Epilogue

“You weren’t born yet when I discovered the Five P’s: Planning, Preparing, Prioritizing, Practice, and Patience. And now”—I held up a theatrical fist—“Perseverance, which is just a fancy way of repeating my first lesson of not giving up! But when you put it with the other P’s, it makes a cube!”

“How fitting,” I told their butts, “in more ways than one. ’Cause if you laid all these P’s out on the ground, you could fold them up into a cube, which is what this whole world’s made of.” I took a moment to let this profound epiphany sink in, and took from their munching sounds that they were as impressed with me as I was with myself.

Yes, I know, I’d promised to leave that part of the island exactly as I found it, but I reasoned that if I didn’t mob-proof the environment with torches, then I risked damaging it further with more mob attacks. Sometimes you have to compromise an ideal in order to save it.

This was a whole new level of crafting. Not the basic, generic items like a pickaxe or a bed. This was a clear, specific, unique image.

Surveying the underground canyon made me realize how thoroughly mined-out it was.

The walls actually looked like some hungry creature had taken huge bites out of them, which I guess wasn’t that far from the truth.
The side tunnels had been equally ravaged.

I blanched as a miniature, halfling, baby zombie raced toward me from a small hole in the wall.

Balancing between verve and vigilance, I crept to the bottom of the slope and stared in pure shock down the length of an artificial mineshaft.

If the second theory was true, then it bolstered my original notion that these materials were coming from someplace beyond my island.

No chance for a shield-and-strike maneuver here.

“Guys,” I called to my four-legged posse.

My second expedition into the mineshaft ended almost as quickly as it started.

I had a new threat to deal with, a curveball that totally demolished my ironclad theory of mobs only spawning in darkness.

Within those delicate pages I found ready-made teachings just waiting to be absorbed.

Without questioning why the words were written in my language—or, for that matter, what my language actually was—I flew back up to the surface, into my house, and into this new tome’s teachings.

The music didn’t really deserve the name. I don’t know what my tastes were back home, but this sterile, repetitive noise was about as pleasing as zombie flesh.

Given my first three forays, I think I expected to just trip over a library.

“Risk and reward,” I said, lowering my bow and starting down to the bottom of the chasm.

“They’re called Endermen,” I told Moo when I made it back up to the surface, holding up the Wildlife guide. “But it doesn’t explain much,” I continued. “Except that they’re neutral.”

Reading on, I said, “There’s more here I don’t understand about endermites and enderpearls, whatever those are, and some really cryptic stuff about Endermen building the world. Don’t ask because I don’t know, but it must have had something to do with the block of stone it was holding.”

Moseying down for another sure-to-be successful mining adventure, I couldn’t have been in a better mood.

What I wasn’t ready for was an age-old enemy waiting to sabotage my new, seemingly invincible winning streak.

The dim redstone torch I’d thought inferior to a brighter coal version was actually a source of energy, and that energy could be transmitted by a trail of redstone dust.

It scuttled out of the darkness toward me, greenish-blue and about half the size of its surface cousin.

It reeled as its partner struck, injecting another murderous dose. Parry, slash, smoke!

Let me just say, for the record, that my thoughts hadn’t been this frazzled in a long time. I’d been so used to winning, so used to things going my way, that when confronted by a genuine challenge, my mental recovery time was way out of whack.

This time the fangs sank deep. I screamed from the noxious fluid, cutting furiously at the entangling net.

Sealing the hole, then gulping milk, I groped for a rash and reckless Plan B. Would you have tried to mine a staircase down the wall next to the spawner?

Back into the tunnel and the pitch-black unknown. I fled blindly, whistling arrows in pursuit.
Running, panting, murky stone racing past me on all sides.

“Help,” I whimpered softly, tracing and retracing the same nondescript steps.

By the ninth or tenth day, I had found enough iron and coal to forge tools, weapons, and a whole new suit of armor.

Plan B, I thought, gloomily sealing up the breach. Plan B meant trying to tunnel far enough around the mob-infested passages to hopefully break through into another open shaft.

A zombie lurched around the corner, cracking its fist on my face.

Unlike the compasses of my world, the needle didn’t point north. Instead the book said it always faced my “original spawning point.” Not immediately helpful, when you consider that was the bottom of the ocean, but since it always faced the same direction, I could use that consistency to keep me from getting turned around.

Last but not least, you don’t need to hear every detail about the masses of machines I learned how to build and test and weave into my elaborate, meticulous plan.

I just scooped up the molten cube, watched the residual lava dissipate, and prepared for more arachnid stragglers.

I’d won my first tactical engagement swiftly, silently, and without so much as a scratch.

“Dispense with this,” I said, laughing at my joke as the relentless shafts hammered those boneheads like the machine guns of my world.

Well, I realized that the blast had only hurt the bank itself, while the shallow, underwater blocks were unscathed.

“Yeeehaw,” I started to yell, but was suddenly smothered in a deluge of water.