Chapter 10. The Start of a New Life
Morning was coming. After all that stress, Steve was very tired and wanted to just fall down on the floor and doze off. He still couldn’t believe what had happened. He didn’t even know what caused the nightmare that he had seen, and he was dying to know, in spite of being afraid of what it might be. But he didn’t have time to relax, so he kept stumbling along the shore, flinching from every little noise and looking over his shoulder every other minute. The morning wasn’t warm, as it was on the first day of Steve’s life; it was cold and somewhat misty. After a while, sunlight dispelled the mist and a thought-provoking image appeared before Steve’s eyes: a zombie, standing right next to him. At least, he looked like one – he had a poisoned body, moved slowly and kept his arms extended forward as he walked, not to mention the rattle-like noises. After the first rays of sunlight touched his head, he immediately burst into flames and died, letting out one last moan. The zombie’s body disappeared a few seconds later, and the few particles that were left got dispersed into the air. Steve looked around: all the skeletons and zombies that he saw were dying one by one. “So it’s the daylight that kills them! Maybe once they’re all dead it will be over?” thought Steve, happily. But it wasn’t so simple: the zombies and the skeletons were dead, but the spiders and the long-bodied green creatures – creepers, as Steve had decided to call them - showed no sign of burning to death. They were still lurking around in the sun, persistently looking for food. Meanwhile, Steve had to find a shelter, where he could hide from them and live, or, to put it more accurately, to survive. Having found a small pit in the ground, he started digging, going deeper and deeper underground. It took him a very long time, because Steve was working so slowly. Thinking that a forty-cube deep pit should be enough for trying to survive in volatile conditions, Steve started expanding his room. Then he masked the entrance to his hideout and put down the chest, the furnace and the workbench. After finishing the bed and arranging the torches, he went outside to look for food, as he hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day.
Looking at the lurking spiders and creepers reminded Steve that he still didn’t have an adequate weapon or any sort of body armor. He climbed back down to his shelter, opened the chest and started looking for items that could be helpful for crafting weapons and armor. A few minutes later, he found thirty-two cubes of iron ore, a couple of planks and five sticks. He also found some long-forgotten mushrooms in one of the chest’s compartments. Now that he had found them, he didn’t need to go outside; he could just cook a mushroom soup instead, and he got to it right away. Having finished cooking the soup, he only had a few things left to do: make his shelter a little cozier by crafting a wooden floor and placing a table and a seat there. Steve melted the iron ore into iron bars, which he used to make a door that he placed next to the entrance. He also made a lever for opening the door out of a stick and a stone and attached it next to the door.
Now he was completely relaxed, and could finally eat his soup. After finishing his meal, Steve couldn’t do anything else, being so exhausted from the last two days. He didn’t know how much time had passed and whether it was day or night. It didn’t matter at the moment, anyways, so he just went to bed and immediately fell asleep.