The third time Alexei respawned at his spawn point, staring at his empty inventory and completely reset state, he made an executive decision: fuck the spider.
Not literally. God, no. He meant strategically.
"I'm not running away," he told the forest, which didn't care about him. "There's a difference. A tactical retreat to gather better resources is a legitimate strategy."
The forest remained unimpressed.
The way he saw it, rushing in with a wooden sword and getting repeatedly murdered wasn't bravery, it was stupidity with extra steps. He needed better gear. Armor, preferably. Maybe an iron sword. And tools that could, you know, protect him from having his internal organs rearranged.
The problem wasn't that he couldn't fight the spider. The problem was that it wasn't cost-effective to fight it right now.
Yeah. That was it. Cost-benefit analysis. Very rational.
He was not making excuses.
The real issue, he'd realized during his jog back, was that just because he could hold a five-hundred-plus-kilo wooden sword didn't mean his body was actually any stronger. His right hand could swing that weapon around like it weighed nothing, but his left hand still couldn't snap a branch thicker than his thumb.
Game mechanics were weird.
His body was fragile. Probably something to do with how the Minecraft system interfaced with this world's physics. He had the strength output of game-Steve when using MC items, but his base body stats were still "Russian teenager who spent too much time indoors."
To actually fight that spider with any degree of safety, he'd need at least iron armor.
With proper gear, maybe he could tank a hit or two. Then it'd just be a matter of one good swing with an iron sword, and the spider would be the one respawning.
If spiders respawned. Did they? That seemed unfair if they did.
"Mutual destruction is not a valid strategy," he muttered. "That's what people say when they've run out of plans."
He was better than that.
Probably.
The fact that he still had no idea where to find iron ore in this world was a minor detail he chose to ignore for now.
It was barely noon. Between dying, respawning, jogging back and forth, and dying again, only a few hours had passed.
The sunlight here was harsh, way more intense than the weak northern sun he'd grown up with in Russia. Even though his Minecraft body apparently made him immune to temperature extremes, he still preferred shade when he could get it.
Creatures of habit and all that.
First order of business: build a proper base.
Now that he had Minecraft abilities, the desperate need to escape this murder-forest had faded considerably. If anything, this was probably the safest place to hole up while he figured out what the hell he was doing. Giant monsters aside, at least there weren't any cultivators around to start shit with him over "disrespecting their sect" or whatever nonsense passed for social interaction in these worlds.
Following standard Minecraft survival protocol, the smart move was to go underground. Dig down, set up a proper mining operation, maybe find some ore deposits.
But first, he needed materials.
"Step one of any Minecraft playthrough," he said, approaching the nearest massive tree. "Punch wood until your hands hurt. Except my hands don't hurt. So I guess just... punch wood until I get bored?"
He got to work.
The process was still surreal. His fist hit the bark, and instead of breaking his knuckles, the wood just broke. Compressed itself into a perfect cube and zipped into his inventory.
Ten minutes of tree-punching later, he had enough materials to craft basic tools. Wooden pickaxe, wooden shovel, the works.
He found a decent spot near his spawn point and started digging a staircase down into the earth.
That's when he hit the first weird thing.
The blocks beneath his feet weren't normal dirt. The description that popped into his head when he focused on them read: [Silkspore Mycelium].
"What the hell is silkspore mycelium?"
Apparently it was some kind of organic material formed from decades, maybe centuries, of decomposed leaves from the massive trees around him. The stuff was everywhere, packed dense, and took a solid twenty seconds per block to dig through even with a shovel.
Forty seconds if he used his bare hands, which he tested out of curiosity.
He dug down a full five meters before finally hitting dirt.
"You've got to be kidding me."
Five meters of decomposed plant matter. How long did it take for that much organic material to build up? No wonder the ground was covered in ferns and mushrooms, regular plants probably couldn't penetrate through that thick layer of fungal soil.
"Whatever. Keep digging. There's got to be stone down here somewhere."
He kept going. And going. And going.
The shaft got darker the deeper he went, shadows creeping in from the edges of his vision. The air felt heavier. Cold in a way that didn't actually affect him but still made his instincts scream: Wrong wrong wrong.
An hour later, he climbed back out of his hole, thoroughly demoralized.
"There's no stone. There's just dirt. Endless dirt. How deep does this go?"
The darkness down there had seriously creeped him out. Maybe it was the complete absence of light, or maybe it was the strange feeling of being buried alive, but either way, his enthusiasm for cave-dwelling had died a swift death.
Which created a new problem.
To make torches, he needed coal or charcoal.
To get charcoal, he needed to smelt wood in a furnace.
To make a furnace, he needed cobblestone.
To get cobblestone, he needed to mine stone.
To mine stone, he needed to keep digging down into that dark, horrible pit.
To see in that pit, he needed torches.
Alexei stared at nothing, his brain stuck in a logical loop of suffering.
"I hate this. I hate everything about this."
There had to be exposed stone somewhere on the surface. Some cliff face, or rocky outcropping, or literally anything that didn't require him to dig through fifty meters of fungus-dirt in complete darkness.
New plan: explore the forest, find surface stone, craft furnace, make torches, then dig properly.
Much better plan. Definitely not procrastinating.
Before he left to explore, he needed a proper base of operations.
He picked one of the massive trees near his spawn point and got to work. Using his pickaxe and bare hands, he carved out a 5x5x3 chamber inside the trunk, basically a treehouse, except the tree was big enough that removing that much wood didn't even make a dent in its structural integrity.
He crafted a door and set it into the entrance before placing a crafting table and a chest inside.
Then he tested the chest.
Nothing happened.
He tried putting items in it. They went in. He could take them out. But there was no magical compression or expanded storage space. It was just a wooden box. A normal, mundane, non-magical storage container.
"Are you serious right now?"
This was bullshit. One of the core features of Minecraft was absurd inventory management. You could carry thousands of cubic meters of stone in your pockets. Chests were supposed to be even better.
But apparently this world's version of Minecraft didn't include that particular convenience.
"Fine. Whatever. I'll just dump extra stuff on the floor like some kind of hoarder."
He emptied out the items he didn't need for exploration, extra wood blocks, spare tools, the handful of seeds he'd accidentally collected. He just left them in a pile on the treehouse floor.
If he died out there, at least he wouldn't drop everything and have to spend an hour collecting it again.
Wooden sword in hand, basic tools in his hotbar, he picked a random direction and started walking.
The chest situation had left him paranoid.
If one Minecraft mechanic didn't work properly, what else might be broken? Or changed? Or just missing entirely?
He needed to run more tests. He had to determine the exact boundaries of what his abilities could and could not do.
As he walked, pushing through underbrush and dodging around giant mushrooms, he started experimenting.
Water buckets... could he make infinite water sources?
Bone meal... would it grow plants instantly?
Cobblestone generators... could he exploit the lava-water interaction?
He didn't have the materials to test most of that yet, but the questions nagged at him.
"If the chest doesn't work, maybe those don't either."
He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he almost missed the glowing mote of light.
A tiny green orb, hovering where he'd killed some insect earlier, drifting toward him.
Experience.
He'd gotten a handful of XP from the bugs he'd killed during his initial exploration. It was not much, perhaps seventeen points in total.
On impulse, he pulled out a wooden plank from his inventory and held it in his hand. He focused on the plank. Then he focused on the experience.
"Come on. Do... something."
The XP orbs touched his skin and absorbed into him like they always did in the game. But this time, he willed them into the plank instead.
The wood changed.
Not physically. It still looked like a normal plank. But something about it felt different. He placed it on the ground.
The plank floated in midair exactly where he'd positioned it, defying gravity completely.
He tried to knock it loose with his sword. The blade bounced off harmlessly. The plank didn't budge.
"It's MC-ified..."
His hands were shaking slightly as he mined the block back into his inventory.
If he could convert regular items into proper Minecraft blocks using experience, then he wasn't limited to just the materials he could mine. He could pick up anything from this world and turn it into a usable game resource.
"Okay. This is—"
More information suddenly flooded into his mind, like someone had just dumped a file directory directly into his brain.
Mods.
He had mods.
Not just base Minecraft mechanics, mods had been pulled through with him during the transmigration.
The knowledge of what they did came automatically once he focused on the concept. Like the information had always been there, just waiting for him to remember it.
[More Crafting] - Allowed him to craft items that were normally impossible in vanilla Minecraft, such as tridents, Totems of Undying, End Portal frames, spawners, and a bunch of modded items he'd never heard of, like "Defense Cores" that auto-attacked hostile mobs, or "Acceleration Torches" that sped up time for nearby blocks.
[Enchantments] - Added a massive library of new enchantments on top of the vanilla ones. He'd have to experiment to see what they all did.
[Deconstruction] - Let him break down any item back into its component materials just by holding it and thinking "deconstruct." Instant recycling.
Plus three minor mods: Better Animations Collection, Seed Protect, and Autofish for fishing rods.
His mood considerably improved, he continued his trek through the forest, occasionally smacking ferns as he passed.
His inventory gained wheat seeds automatically, apparently ferns counted as grass for drop purposes. He also picked up a handful of strange fruits that appeared in his hotbar without him consciously collecting them.
I must've brushed against them while walking.
He pulled one out to examine it.
[Bloodweb Berry]
The fruit was about the size of a baby's fist, deep red and glossy, and looked almost exactly like a tomato from Earth.
His mouth watered involuntarily.
"It's been hours since I ate. Do I even need to eat? I don't feel hungry..."
But the berry looked so normal. And it smelled fine when he held it up to his nose, slightly sweet.
"When in Rome," he muttered, and took a bite.
The texture was soft, yielding easily between his teeth.
The taste was...
"Blyat..."
Overwhelming fishiness exploded across his tongue, like someone had liquified rotten seafood and condensed it into fruit form. The smell hit his sinuses a second later, making his eyes water.
"Oh god..." He tried to spit it out, but he'd already swallowed. "What the fuck—"
His heart started racing. His vision doubled, the forest spinning around him in sickening loops.
He stumbled, tried to catch himself, and went down.
His chest felt tight. His limbs weren't responding right. Everything was going dark at the edges.
"Poisoned," he managed to think. "I poisoned myself like a complete—"
Darkness.
[You Died!]
[Cause of Death: Toxin - Bloodweb Berry.]
[Score: 17]
[Respawn]
---
When Alexei's consciousness slammed back into his body at the spawn point, the harsh noon sun had been replaced by the dim orange glow of sunset.
He'd been unconscious for hours.
"Son of a bitch."
He respawned immediately, appearing back at his starting point.
Standing there in the fading light, he felt completely numb.
"Don't eat random shit from an alien world. That's like, survival rule number one. Why the hell did I think that was a good idea?"
The worst part wasn't dying, he was getting used to that, disturbingly enough. The worst part was the wasted time.
He'd spent the entire afternoon lying unconscious in the forest, slowly dying from berry poison, instead of making progress on literally anything useful.
Now it was almost night. He'd have to sleep on the ground or stumble around in the dark trying to gather materials.
"This is fine."
He paused, an idea forming.
He pulled up the crafting menu and checked the recipes.
[String + String]
[String + String]
→ [Wool Block]
String could be crafted into wool. And wool could be crafted into a bed.
He knew exactly where to find string.
The spider's web.
That massive web he'd gotten stuck in twice now, covering dozens of square meters in the spider's feeding grounds. There'd be more than enough web there to harvest several blocks of string.
"The spider should be gone by now, right? It's been hours."
He nodded to himself, already starting to walk in that direction.
"Just grab some web, craft a bed, and come back. Nothing's going to go wrong."