The third wolf corpse was a problem.
Not just because Alexei didn't have enough XP to assimilate it, but because leaving a fresh corpse sitting around was asking for trouble.
Even someone who'd never set foot in wilderness knew the rule: blood attracts predators. He'd read enough survival stories, both the realistic kind and the wildly implausible webnovel kind, to understand that basic fact.
Fresh meat + strong smell = dinner bell for everything with teeth within a kilometer.
His solution was simple.
He grabbed his stone shovel and started digging up the blood-stained blocks around the corpse. Each block he removed automatically made the blood on its surface drip down to the next layer. Dig two layers, fill in one. Repeat until the evidence was buried.
The stone shovel made the work go fast, cutting digging time from twenty seconds per block down to under fifteen. Within half an hour, the area around his treehouse looked undisturbed.
As for the corpse itself? He dragged it a safe distance away and stuffed it into a pit. One block of dirt on top, pat it down, done.
Out of sight, out of mind. Hopefully out of smell range too.
Back inside his treehouse, he headed straight for the crafting table to check what new recipes had unlocked from the wolf materials.
As expected, the system had adapted. If it could handle silkspore wood, a material that didn't exist in vanilla Minecraft, then wolf parts from magical creatures should work fine too.
Five new items appeared in the crafting menu:
Tempest Wolf Leather Helmet
Tempest Wolf Leather Chestplate
Tempest Wolf Leather Leggings
Tempest Wolf Leather Boots
Formed Wind-Aspect Core
The armor followed standard leather armor patterns, same arrangement of materials, just using wolf hide instead of regular leather.
The core was more interesting. Four unformed cores could be crafted into one complete core. No idea what it did, but it was probably magical bullshit of some kind. None of it mattered right now. He didn't have enough materials to craft anything except maybe boots, and regular leather ones worked fine.
What mattered were the wolf meat and bones. Food and utility items.
Speaking of food...
He walked over to the furnace and pulled out the single cooked cod he'd left smelting earlier.
Time to satisfy his curiosity.
In all his years playing Minecraft, he'd eaten thousands of these things. Cooked cod was one of the most common food items in the game. But he'd never tasted real cod in his life. Living in Moscow, far from the sea, meant seafood was either expensive, or questionable. The fish hadn't shrunk during cooking, still about twenty centimeters long, golden-brown and crispy-looking.
He took a bite.
It was salty. Naturally salty, the way ocean fish tasted. Crispy texture, like fried small fish where you could eat the bones and everything. They crunched between his teeth, not unpleasant.
The sound effect from the game, that distinct crunch-crunch-crunch, made way more sense now.
The taste was better than expected but not mind-blowing. Honestly, it felt wasteful to just roast it. This fish would've been amazing braised with some seasoning.
But hey. Curiosity satisfied. He'd finally eaten Minecraft cod in real life.
He sat back down at his fishing spot as he'd started thinking of it after two straight days of grinding.
His casting technique had improved dramatically. Within a two-meter radius, he could drop the bobber exactly where he wanted it.
Time to get back to work.
[Raw Cod ×1]
[Raw Cod ×1]
[Tropical Fish ×1]
[Raw Salmon ×1]
The hours blurred together in that pleasant, mindless way that fishing always seemed to cause.
The gacha-like randomness was dangerously addictive. Every cast could be junk or treasure. You never knew.
And then... purple glow.
A faint violet shimmer appeared beneath the water's surface as something took the bait.
His eyes widened. He flicked his wrist, reeling in.
[Fishing Rod ×1]
The rod that emerged from the water was emitting a soft purple aura.
"Treasure pull!"
He grabbed it from his inventory, examining the details.
[Fishing Rod:
Mending I
Curse of Vanishing I]
"...Huh."
His enthusiasm deflated slightly.
Mending was decent in theory, the rod would repair itself using experience orbs. But with his Deconstruction ability, durability was never an issue. He could just break down damaged tools before they shattered and craft new ones.
And the Curse of Vanishing? Annoying. If he died, the rod would disappear.
"It could be worse. At least it looks cool."
The purple glow was pretty nice.
He swapped out his old fishing rod and immediately deconstructed it.
[Stick ×3]
[String ×2]
Two string.
He checked his math. That brought him to eleven string total.
One more and he could craft his final wool block. Three wool blocks meant bed. Bed meant sleep instead of lying on a hard floor like some kind of medieval peasant.
But that could wait.
First, he needed to deal with the last wolf corpse. Convert it into materials before something else showed up to claim it.
He stood, stretched until his spine popped, and headed for the entrance.
He mined the blocks sealing it.
The moment the opening appeared, every instinct he'd developed over the past days started screaming.
The forest had gone quiet.
Not peaceful quiet. Wrong quiet. The kind of silence that meant something very large and very dangerous was nearby.
"Oh, blyat..."
He slammed the blocks back into place and switched his tool to the shield.
Half a second later, something massive hit the outer wall.
The entire tree shook. Dust and wood chips rained down from the ceiling.
"That goddamn spider. It tracked the blood here."
He'd buried the corpse, but apparently not well enough. Or maybe the spider's sense of smell was just that good.
Either way, he was about to have a very bad time.
Outside, the spider answered his unspoken question by ramming something through the freshly placed log block.
A leg.
A massive, chitinous spider leg covered in bristling steel-like hairs tore straight through the wood and started thrashing around inside his treehouse.
It scraped against the walls, sending splinters flying. The leg was easily as thick as his torso.
"What the fuck—"
The whole scene was bizarrely grotesque. Like something out of a horror movie, except it was broad daylight and he was the protagonist who'd forgotten his genre.
After a few seconds of blind searching, the leg withdrew.
Then, one by one, eight pitch-black eyes appeared at the hole, scanning the interior of his treehouse.
Looking for him.
His heart hammered against his ribs.
He'd missed his chance. He should've chopped the leg while it was inside. One good swing with the stone sword and the spider would be down a limb.
He raised the sword, ready to strike if it tried again... The leg came back through.
"Are you serious right now?"
The spider was giving him a second chance.
He didn't waste it.
He aimed, judged the angle, and brought his stone sword down.
CRACK.
The leg exploded, shattering into chunks of chitin and meat. The stump remained connected by a single tendon about as thick as a baby's arm, stretched like a rubber band.
Outside, the spider's shriek was inhuman. It scrambled backward, all seven remaining legs churning, trying to pull the severed limb free.
But the angle was wrong. The broken piece was wedged tight inside the treehouse, caught on the interior walls.
The spider pulled. The tendon stretched. The spider kept pulling.
From inside, Alexei watched as the creature literally tried to rip its own leg off to escape.
"Yeah, that's not comfortable, is it?"
He wasn't about to pass up this opportunity.
He circled around to the other side of his treehouse and started digging a new exit. The spider had wide-angle vision, the moment he emerged, it spotted him.
Especially when it saw the stone sword in his hand, still dripping with its blood.
Its struggling intensified. It screeched louder. Then it tried to angle its abdomen toward him, preparing to shoot web. But the range was too close. The webbing couldn't deploy properly, it needed distance to expand into a net.
And Alexei had come prepared.
The instant he saw the spider's silhouette through the trees, he started building. MC-ified wooden planks, stacking rapidly to create a pillar that lifted him up and over the spider's defensive position.
Always take the high ground.
The spider realized too late what he was doing. It tried to retreat, but its severed leg was still stuck, anchoring it in place.
Alexei reached the top of his pillar, raised his shield in his off-hand for protection, and swung his stone sword at the spider's abdomen.
CRACK.
A full quarter of the spider's rear section simply ceased to exist. Chunks of exoskeleton and internal organs exploded outward, flying more than ten meters before hitting the ground.
The force of the blow launched the spider four or five meters backward, and the stuck leg finally tore free, taking with it a two-meter length of white, semi-translucent tendon that dragged behind like a whip.
Alexei landed back on the ground, shield raised, ready to finish the fight.
The spider stood back up. It was missing a quarter of its abdomen and leaking fluids from a wound that should've been fatal, yet it was still moving.
And the hatred radiating from all eight eyes was intense.
"I should've built more than two walls," he muttered, gripping his shield tighter. "I should've made a proper bunker."
But hindsight was always perfect, wasn't it?
The problem was his body. Despite all the Minecraft bullshit making him stronger than he should be, he was still human. His reaction speed had limits, and at this range, those limits mattered.
Five meters separated him from the treehouse.
And the spider was between him and safety.
The creature suddenly accelerated.
Its seven remaining legs moved so fast they blurred.
Five meters vanished in less than a second.
When it reached him, three of its front legs reared up and came down.
CLANG! CLANG-CLANG!
His shield took multiple hits. The force drove him back, his feet skidding in the dirt.
The wind pressure from the spider's charge funneled into the narrow gap between wooden walls, whipping his hair and clothes around. Even though he'd blocked every strike, the sheer power behind them was terrifying. And he was holding a shield plus a stone sword, together weighing at least eight tons thanks to MC material compression.
If one of those legs hit him directly, he wouldn't just die. He'd be paste.
He quickly swapped his sword back to a wooden plank, preparing to seal the gap.
The moment the sword's weight disappeared, the spider's next strike hit different. The leg punched into his shield, nearly knocking him flat on his ass.
"Shit—!"
He fumbled the plank back to sword form, barely managing to block the follow-up attack.
New knowledge unlocked... Raw materials and blocks had no weight in MC physics. But crafted items? They weighed the total sum of their materials.
Another strike. His shield shuddered, durability dropping.
CLANG!
Looks like an MC shield can be broken by attacks other than axes, hit it hard enough and it still works!
CLANG!
The spider wasn't slowing down. If anything, it was speeding up, each attack coming faster than the last.
This was bad. A days ago, he'd been a nobody, a dropout gamer from Moscow who couldn't even remember the last time he'd been in a fight. Now he was trying to tank hits from a monster that could crack stone with its legs.
"How the hell do I—"
CLANG! CLANG!
At this rate, he had maybe twenty seconds before the shield broke completely. Then he'd be defenseless.
Running back to the treehouse? Suicidal. That five-meter gap might as well be a kilometer with the spider in the way. Every one of its legs was a weapon.
Chopping through a tree to escape? Even worse. Mining created animation locks. The spider would skewer him mid-swing.
He was going to die again.
Wait. The fishing rod. The cursed one.
He still had it equipped. If he died with it, the Curse of Vanishing would trigger and it'd disappear forever.
Oh hell no. That rod took hours to fish up.
He couldn't spare a hand to drop it, not while blocking attacks. But he needed to get rid of it before... Something in his inventory caught his attention.
The boat.
He looked at the spider.
Then he looked at the boat icon in his inventory.
There's no way that works. The spider's way too big. The boat capacity is like, two square meters maximum.
CLANG!
Then again, dying is guaranteed.
The spider lunged, all three front legs striking simultaneously.
He blocked.
CLANG-CLANG!
Okay. I'm doing this.
He had one shot. The moment he swapped items, there'd be a gap in his defense.
If his timing was off by even a millisecond, he was dead.
Ten more seconds of relentless assault. The spider was attacking so fast now that individual strikes blended together into a barrage.
Now!
He swapped.
Stone sword vanished. The palm-sized boat appeared in his hand. He swung it forward, under the spider's body, and triggered the placement. The boat materialized beneath the spider's.
At the same moment, a spider leg thrust directly at his face. No time to raise the shield. The sharp tip was already past his guard, moving toward his eye...
Whoosh.
The spider teleported backward three meters.
He stared.
The spider stared back.
"...Did that work?"
The spider tried to stand. Its legs scrabbled uselessly against the boat's interior, but something was gluing it in place. It couldn't get up or move. It could only thrash around.
"The boat trap worked!"
He wanted to laugh.
"Get wrecked!"
His triumph lasted exactly two seconds.
The spider, still stuck in the boat, whipped one leg out.
CLANG!
"Oh, come on!"
The spider might be immobilized, but it could still attack. Its legs had enough reach to cover the entire area around the boat.
He tried to approach from different angles. Left side, leg swipe. Right side, leg stab. Above, the spider could rear back and strike upward.
Every approach was blocked.
"I can't get close."
He sealed the gap in his wooden wall with a plank, then chopped his way back to the treehouse. At the crafting table, he made a dozen stone swords, loading them into his hotbar.
"If I can't stab you up close, I'll just throw swords at you. Problem solved."
He jogged back to the boat-trapped spider, selected a stone sword, and wound up like he was throwing a javelin.
"Die!"
He hurled it with all his strength.
The sword sailed through the air, spinning end over end, and... CRASH.
It hit the ground three meters in front of him.
Then, because it weighed five hundred-plus kilos, it punched straight through the mycelium soil and buried itself up to the hilt.
He stood there, arm still extended in his throwing pose, staring at the sword sticking out of the ground.
"...That was just a warm-up throw. Didn't count."
He grabbed another sword.
Adjusted his angle. Put more arc into it this time.
CLATTER-THUD.
It went slightly farther. Slightly.
Still nowhere near the spider.
Third attempt. Same result. Maybe a meter of difference.
"What the... why can't I throw these?!"
The spider, having a rare moment of intelligence, seemed to figure out what he was trying to do.
It let out a sound that could only be described as laughter.
He ripped open the wooden wall protecting him and started building straight up the side of the massive tree, pillar-jumping as he went. Wooden planks stacked rapidly beneath his feet, lifting him higher and higher.
The spider's mocking stopped immediately. Its screeches turned panicked as it realized what he was doing.
It thrashed harder, legs gouging deep cuts into the ground and nearby trees. One strike tore a chunk out of his treehouse wall.
But it couldn't escape the boat.
Alexei kept building until he was more than ten meters up, positioned directly above the spider's head.
He looked down. Perfect alignment.
He put the shield away and drew two stone swords, one in each hand. Held them point-down, arms extended.
"You know what the best part about gravity is?" he called down. "I don't have to throw straight. I just have to let go."
The spider screeched louder.
Alexei released both swords.
They dropped, spinning as they fell.
The spider jerked its head to the side. The swords missed its brain but tore clean through its neck instead, sinking in up to their hilts.
Dark fluid spurted from the wounds. The spider screeched.
Alexei pulled out two more swords. He dropped them.
The spider twisted. The swords hit lower this time, puncturing its thorax in two places.
Its remaining eyes locked onto him with hatred.
He dropped two more swords.
The spider dodged. The blades grazed its carapace, cracking the exoskeleton but not penetrating.
It was learning his timing.
Two more swords.
Dodge.
The spider's movements were getting more erratic. But it wasn't giving up. It believed it could outlast this human. That eventually he'd run out of swords.
And then it would be free.
And then it would kill him.
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It would be nice if you could leave feedback through comments or reviews. I started working on this at the end of November last year. During the first week, the update will be 5ch/week. After that, the update schedule will slow down because I need time to write. As of today, I have only completed 40 chapters since I began last year. However, the later chapters are much longer. Most chapters are over 4k words, and the newest ones exceed 6k words.