The spider never got its hoped-for survival scenario.
The moment it landed in that boat, its fate was sealed tighter than a jar of pickles in a Russian grandmother's pantry.
Alexei stood over the corpse, staring at the mess he'd made. Thirty-plus holes punched clean through chitin and meat, dark ichor pooling underneath, the whole thing looking like Swiss cheese designed by someone with anger issues.
"I could've just aimed for the head... One good drop, right on the brain, and it would've been over in seconds. But no. I had to get creative."
The spider was finally dead.
The experience orbs that had burst from its corpse started drifting toward him. Then they accelerated, swarming into his body.
[Level 6 → Level 17]
"Holy shit!"
His hands were actually shaking slightly as he checked his experience bar. This was more XP than he'd gotten from days of grinding insects and wolves combined.
He knelt down next to one of the spider's massive front legs, placed his hand on the chitinous surface, and focused.
The eleven levels he'd just gained flowed out of him. Then kept flowing. And kept flowing.
[Level 17 → Level 3]
The spider's corpse dissolved into pixels, leaving behind a neat pile of materials.
[Spider Venom Gland ×2]
[Spider Eye ×1]
[String ×2]
[Spider Fang ×2]
[Demon Core (Wood Aspect) ×1]
He picked up the demon core, turning it over in his hands. It was roughly spherical, about the size of a golf ball. The venom glands were squishy and unpleasant. The fangs were curved and sharp, each one as long as his forearm. The spider eye was just an eye.
He gathered everything into his inventory and stood up, surveying the battlefield.
The area around his treehouse looked like a war zone. Gouges in the earth from spider legs. Chunks missing from tree trunks. The ground churned up and uneven, blood and ichor splattered everywhere.
The smell was also getting worse.
First things first: check what he could craft with the new materials.
He ducked back into his treehouse and headed for the crafting table.
Spider eyes, as expected, were alchemy ingredients. Useless until he built an alchemy station, which required materials he didn't have.
Spider fangs combined with sticks and feathers could make Venomfang Arrows, thirty-two per craft. The venom glands could be used to poison regular arrows, sixteen per gland.
"Now I just need feathers." He'd seen plenty of birds in the forest, but none that he'd managed to kill. And he had a feeling that only feathers from assimilated mob drops would work anyway. "Can't catch a break."
The demon core had no recipes available yet. Probably needed more materials to unlock whatever it was used for.
He pocketed everything and went back outside to deal with the terrain.
An hour of digging, filling, and smoothing later, the area around his treehouse looked presentable again. While he worked, he also collected flowers, beige-yellow ones that grew in clusters near the base of the massive trees.
There were other flowers too. Ones with a beautiful blue-white gradient that would've made much nicer dye. But the smell...
He'd made the mistake of getting close to one earlier. The scent hit him: rotting fish that had been marinating in sewer water during the hottest part of summer, mixed with the sharp chemical tang of ammonia.
"Hard pass. I'll take beige over death-flowers any day."
Back in the treehouse, he converted the flowers to dye at the crafting table, then combined them with his wool blocks.
[Beige Wool ×3]
Now he could make a... Wait.
He focused on the wool, trying to place it.
Nothing happened.
He tried again, concentrating harder.
Still nothing.
"No. No no no, don't tell me—"
He checked the wool's properties. Un-assimilated. The dye had stripped the MC properties from the wool, reverting it back to normal materials.
"Are you kidding me right now?"
He'd spent three levels assimilating that wool. And now, because he'd dyed it, he'd have to spend three more levels to re-assimilate it.
"That's six levels total just to have colored wool..."
He sat back, running the numbers in his head.
Okay. Think.
Material blocks always cost one level to assimilate, no matter how they're crafted. Functional blocks cost levels equal to the number of materials used. And, worst of all, if even one ingredient in a recipe is unassimilated, the final product becomes unassimilated too.
Which meant…
If he crafted the bed now, using three unassimilated wool blocks and three already-assimilated planks, the finished bed would still come out unassimilated. And assimilating the bed afterward would cost six levels, the total number of materials used.
Seventy-two experience points.
But if he assimilated the three wool blocks before crafting, the bed would be made entirely from assimilated materials… meaning it wouldn't need to be re-assimilated at all.
Twenty-seven experience points.
And if he was really efficient about it, gaining one level, immediately assimilating one block, repeat, he could save even more. The experience curve meant lower levels required less XP.
Level 0→1: 7 XP
Level 1→2: 9 XP
Level 2→3: 11 XP
Total: 27 XP the standard way, but only 21 XP if he did it one at a time.
72 versus 21.
"Yeah. Okay. I'm doing the efficient method. I'm not wasting experience on stupid mistakes."
But first, he needed to deal with the wolf corpse.
He grabbed his fishing rod and settled in at his usual spot. Five hours of fishing should get him back to level six, plus whatever random loot the game decided to throw at him.
Time to zone out and let the RNG gods decide his fate.
[Raw Cod ×1]
[Raw Cod ×1]
[Water Bottle ×1]
[Raw Cod ×1]
[Raw Salmon ×1]
[Pufferfish ×1]
Cast, wait, reel, repeat. His casting technique was getting good now. He could drop the bobber within a two-meter radius of his target point almost every time.
The purple glow appeared beneath the water. He reeled in fast.
An enchanted book.
"Yes! Lure II! That's actually useful!"
Lure increased bite rate. Faster fishing. More loot per hour. This was... He stopped mid-celebration.
"How am I supposed to apply this? I don't have an anvil. I can't even make an anvil without iron."
He stared at the book in his hands.
"This is the worst kind of tease. It's like finding car keys when you don't own a car."
He tossed it in his inventory and kept fishing.
[Raw Salmon ×1]
[Raw Cod ×1]
[Disarm III]
Another enchanted book.
Disarm.
It was a mod enchantment. Every level after the first added another 20% chance to knock a weapon out of an enemy's hand, and he could pick it up afterward. But sadly, it only worked on melee weapons.
"Another book I can't use."
[Raw Cod ×1]
[Tropical Fish ×1]
[Enchanted Bow]
He pulled it from the water, examining the weapon.
[Bow: Power III, Punch II]
[Durability: 127/384]
About one-third durability remaining. The enchantments were solid, Power boosted damage, Punch added knockback. This would shred anything he hit.
If he had arrows.
Which he didn't.
Five hours of fishing later, he'd finally clawed his way back to level six. The sun was setting.
Time to deal with the wolf.
He walked over to the sealed wooden box he'd built around the corpse days ago. Stone axe in hand, he started breaking the blocks.
The moment the seal broke, the smell hit him.
"Oh god—"
He staggered backward, eyes watering, stomach lurching.
"That's... urgh... that's so much worse than I thought it would be."
The forest was hot and humid to begin with. The wooden blocks he'd used had zero preservation properties. Of course the corpse had rotted. What else was it going to do?
"Just... get it over with fast. Hold your breath, grab the corpse, assimilate it, done."
He backed up several meters, took the deepest breath his lungs could hold, pinched his nose shut with one hand, and reached toward the corpse with the other.
[Level 6 → Level 0]
The wolf's body dissolved into pixels as the assimilation completed.
[Tempest Wolf Hide ×1]
[Spoiled Meat ×3]
[Bone ×2]
The moment the corpse was gone, he released his nose and gasped fresh air.
With the disgusting wolf corpse finally dealt with, he headed back into his treehouse and sealed the entrance.
The bloodstains that had been seeping into the floorboards were gone now, assimilated materials apparently didn't hold onto evidence. The only smell was the faint, pleasant scent of wood.
The tasks left for today: fish for experience, assimilate the wool, make the bed.
Twenty-one experience points. Not even an hour of fishing.
By the time he finished, the sun was setting.
He stood in his treehouse, staring at the freshly crafted bed.
"Do you know how long I've been sleeping on a wooden floor?"
He flopped onto it dramatically, spreading his arms wide.
The mattress was thin. The frame was rough wood. It was approximately as comfortable as sleeping on a park bench covered with a blanket.
But it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.
He fell asleep smiling.
---
Day Eight.
Alexei woke up on the floor, his blanket kicked halfway across the room.
His back was pressed against the familiar planks. His brain, still half-asleep, struggled to process this information.
"I remember making a bed. I went to sleep on the bed. So why am I..."
He propped himself up on one elbow and looked at the bed.
His legs were still on the mattress. Everything from the knees up was on the floor. If viewed from above, his body formed a perfect ninety-degree angle with the bed frame.
He sat up fully, rubbing his face.
He grabbed the clothes he'd stripped off last night, the dark blue martial arts getup that had come with his transmigration, and put them back on. His hair was a complete disaster, sticking up in every direction like he'd been electrocuted.
He'd been ignoring it for days now, just letting it fall past his shoulders. Easier than trying to style it with no mirror and no product.
At least the leather armor looked decent. He pulled the helmet, leggings, and boots from the armor stand by his bed and equipped them.
Armor: 2.0/20.0
Two points of armor. In Minecraft terms, that meant his skin now had roughly 60% of leather's defensive properties. Not exactly bulletproof, but better than nothing. At least knife wounds would be survivable now.
The armor auto-fitted to his body once equipped, which was convenient. No awkward adjustments or uncomfortable chafing.
"Right. Today's agenda."
If this were a normal Minecraft playthrough, he'd be underground right now. Strip mining for iron, looking for diamonds, building farms. But this wasn't a normal playthrough. This was a world where ore veins apparently didn't exist in any predictable pattern. Mining randomly would be like searching for a needle in a planet-sized haystack.
So. Alternative plan.
"Build an outdoor fishing spot."
The area outside was probably safe now, he'd killed the wolf and the spider, and his respawn point was inside the treehouse. No more risk of getting spawn-camped by monsters.
And more importantly: fishing mechanics.
In Minecraft, if water wasn't exposed to sunlight or moonlight, fishing time doubled. But if you fished in rain, or if there were fish nearby, time decreased by 20%. The effects stacked.
Currently, he needed 20-60 minutes per catch. Cut that in half and it became 10-30 minutes.
Massive improvement.
He got to work.
The new fishing spot was thirty meters in front of the treehouse, far enough to not attract predators to his door, close enough to reach quickly if something went wrong.
Four blocks of water instead of the cramped two-block indoor pool. Surrounded by wooden planks for now, though he'd replace them with mycelium soil once he had enough experience. He left one block of air space above the water so the bobber wouldn't hit the ceiling when he cast.
At night, he could cover the whole thing with dirt blocks to hide it from passing monsters.
He sat cross-legged by the water's edge, flicked his one-meter fishing rod, and watched the bobber arc through the air before landing in the center.
Less than fifteen minutes later, the bobber jerked. He pulled.
[Fishing Rod ×1]
The rod that emerged was glowing faint purple.
"Oh hell yes! Starting strong!"
He checked the stats.
[Fishing Rod:
Unbreaking I
Luck of the Sea II]
Unbreaking gave a chance to not consume durability when used. At 83 points, this rod should last at least a hundred casts.
Luck of the Sea increased treasure drop rates.
"This is way better than my old rod. Sorry, but you're being replaced."
He swapped to the new one and kept fishing.
By sunset, his rod's durability had dropped to 31 points.
His inventory had gained:
Three tripwire hooks.
One [Protection III] enchanted book.
One enchanted bow with [Flame I, Power II].
Seventeen assimilated silkspore logs.
Twenty assimilated mycelium soil blocks.
And more fish than he knew what to do with.
The bow was interesting. Flame set arrows on fire. Still useless without arrows, but at least his collection of "cool items I can't use yet" was growing.
He headed back to the treehouse, sealed the entrance, and went to bed early.
Tomorrow he'd wake up before dawn. Get some fishing done in the quiet morning hours before the forest woke up.
---
Day Nine.
Alexei woke up from a nightmare, gasping, covered in cold sweat.
He'd dreamed he was being chased through the forest by the spider again. Except this time it could talk, and it kept screaming about how he owed it money for emotional damages. Then the wolves showed up, also demanding payment. Then the snail. Then every insect he'd ever killed formed a union and filed a class-action lawsuit against him for wrongful death.
He'd spent the entire dream running from lawyer-monsters while they served him legal paperwork.
"That was the stupidest nightmare I've ever had," he muttered, sitting up and rubbing his face. "My subconscious needs therapy."
He got dressed, strapped on his leather armor, grabbed his shield, and dug open the entrance.
The sky outside was still dark, pre-dawn, maybe 4 or 5 AM based on the faint lightening along the horizon. Mist hung heavy in the air, reducing visibility to maybe twenty meters.
In the distance, near yesterday's fishing spot, he thought he saw a figure.
"That better not be a zombie or I'm going back to bed."
He focused, trying to make out details through the mist.
An arrow shot out of the fog, moving way too fast for him to dodge.
"Oh sh—"
THUNK.
The arrow pierced through his forehead and burst out the back of his skull.
For a split second, his vision went white. Then cleared, except now there was an arrow sticking through his head.
He staggered backward two or three steps, arms windmilling for balance.
His hand came up automatically to touch the wound. The arrow shaft was cold and slick with blood. He could feel the exit wound at the back of his head.
Health: 5.0/10.0
He hardly felt any pain, just the deeply uncomfortable sensation of having a foreign object lodged in his skull. He grabbed the arrow's fletching and pulled.
Blood sprayed. His health bar started plummeting immediately.
"FUCK!"
He shoved the arrow back in the way it came, feeling resistance as it pushed through tissue and bone.
His health stabilized.
Health: 4.5/10.0
"Okay, new rule: don't remove arrows."
THUNK.
A second arrow slammed into his arm, the one holding his sword.
Health: 1.5/10.0