The second arrow hit, and Alexei's soul nearly evacuated his body through sheer panic.
He scrambled sideways, shield raised, moving in a crab-walk until he was sure he'd reached cover behind the treehouse wall. Only then did he allow himself to stop and think.
Health: 1.5/10.0
Hunger: 0.0/10.0
Right. Healing. He needed to heal.
He opened the furnace, grabbed the cooked cod, and bit into it without bothering to savor the taste, chewing while his health bar stayed stubbornly low.
One fish. Health didn't budge.
Two fish. Still nothing.
Hunger: 5.0/10.0
Three fish.
Hunger: 8.0/10.0
Health: 1.5/10.0 → 2.0/10.0
There it was. The familiar regeneration tick.
According to Minecraft logic, you needed at least eight hunger to regenerate health. And each point of health cost 1.5 hunger to restore.
Which meant he needed to keep eating just to maintain the regen.
He pulled out more fish and kept eating, monitoring his health bar as it slowly climbed.
Health: 2.5/10.0
Health: 3.0/10.0
As his health increased, the blood that had been seeping from his wounds slowed. Then stopped entirely.
The arrows embedded in his flesh started moving. New tissue was growing, pushing the foreign objects out like his body was rejecting a splinter.
The arrow in his head popped free first, clattering to the ground. The one in his arm followed seconds later.
Even his torn sleeve repaired itself, fabric knitting back together as if it had never been damaged.
Health: 10.0/10.0
He touched his forehead where the arrow had been.
"So that's how healing works here."
The whole process had taken nearly ten minutes and three cooked fish. Not the most efficient healing system, but it beat dying.
Now. The skeleton.
He still had no idea where it had come from. In all his days here, he hadn't seen a single vanilla Minecraft mob spawn. Just the strange local wildlife.
"Maybe it's not an MC mob? Maybe it's just a skeleton from this world that happens to use a bow?"
But that didn't track. In the game, skeletons were blocky and almost cute in their pixelated simplicity. What he'd glimpsed through the mist was nearly two meters tall with realistic human proportions.
Then again, the wolves here looked realistic too, and they still followed MC mechanics.
One thing was certain: the skeleton wasn't that strong.
Thanks to game mechanics, he couldn't be one-shot killed by a headshot as long as he had health remaining. He'd tanked two arrows without a shield and survived. With a shield? That thing could draw its bow until the string caught fire and it still wouldn't break his defense.
"Alright. Time to rush this guy."
He grabbed his shield, switched his off-hand to his stone sword, and broke the remaining block sealing the entrance.
The skeleton had wandered back during his healing session, currently about thirty or forty meters away, shambling between trees.
As Alexei stepped out of the treehouse, he finally got a good look at it.
Definitely an MC skeleton. The proportions were more realistic, sure, but the movement patterns were identical to the game. And that faint purple glow on its head...
"Is that an enchanted golden helmet? Oh, you've got to be kidding me."
The moment he cleared the doorway, the skeleton's head snapped toward him. Its bow came up, arrow already nocked.
Twang.
CLANG.
The arrow hit his shield and bounced off. He barely felt the impact.
Twang.
CLANG.
Second arrow, same result.
He charged.
The distance closed fast. The skeleton tried to backpedal, but he was faster. He slammed his shield forward.
CRACK.
The shield caught the skeleton in the ribcage, sending it staggering backward. His stone sword followed immediately, a brutal overhead swing that connected with the skeleton's pelvis. The sound was like someone hitting a xylophone with a sledgehammer.
But the skeleton didn't shatter.
It got knocked back about two meters, bow flying from its hands, and went into the exact same damage animation as in the game.
The skeleton tried to retrieve its bow. Alexei didn't let it.
He dropped his shield entirely and switched to two-handed grip on his sword, unleashing a rapid combo. One strike. Two. Three. He didn't give it time to recover between hits.
Five swings total. The skeleton collapsed mid-animation, body dissolving into pixel smoke.
[Bone ×1]
[Arrow ×2]
[Level 0 → Level 1]
The enchanted helmet didn't drop. Shame. But arrows were arrows, and he needed those. He collected the drops and was about to head back when he heard rustling from nearby bushes.
"Oh, what now?"
A zombie shambled into view.
Blue-green shirt, tattered and stained. Dark blue pants that looked like they'd been through a shredder. Face covered in rotting flesh, jaw hanging at an unnatural angle, eyes clouded and dead.
It moaned, and started shambling toward him.
Then a second one emerged from the bushes.
Then a third.
"Oh. That's what that smell was."
He'd noticed a faint rotting odor when he first came outside. Now he knew the source.
"MC zombies spawning too? What changed? Why are vanilla mobs showing up now?"
Questions for later. Right now, he had three walking corpses that needed to be put down.
The stone sword made short work of them. Five hits per zombie, same as the skeleton. They moved even slower, telegraphed their attacks more obviously, and had zero ranged capability.
[Rotten Flesh ×7]
[Level 1 → Level 3]
He stared at the rotten flesh in his inventory. Morbid curiosity got the better of him. He pulled one piece into his hand.
The smell hit him immediately.
"This smells like a dead rat that's been drying in the sun for three weeks. Why did I think this was a good idea?"
He shoved it back in his inventory before his stomach could make any executive decisions about vomiting.
Still, he couldn't just throw it away. Rotten flesh was an ingredient in the More Crafting mod. Specifically, it was used to craft mob spawners and spawn eggs.
Getting the materials for those was years away, probably, but hope was free.
He spent the next twenty minutes patrolling the area, looking for more mobs.
He found two more zombies. That was it. Whatever had caused the spawn wave seemed to have ended.
The sun came up properly, burning away the mist. No more mobs appeared.
Total XP gained from six mobs: 23 points.
"Way faster than fishing."
He was heading back to the fishing spot, already planning his day, more fishing, maybe upgrade the treehouse walls to proper logs instead of planks, when he rounded the bushes and froze.
"What the..."
"Moo."
Standing at his fishing spot, calmly eating the mycelium blocks he'd used to hide his infinite water source, was a cow.
Not a normal cow. A mooshroom.
Brown fur with yellow undertones, brown mushrooms growing from its head and back, stubby legs, and an expression of stupidity that suggested this animal had never had a complex thought in its life.
"I found a mooshroom in this forest?"
"Moo." The mooshroom looked up at him, chewing slowly, then went back to eating mycelium.
As it ate, the mycelium block disappeared and was immediately replaced by a plain dirt block.
Very Minecraft.
He rushed forward, hands reaching out to touch the creature.
It didn't run. It didn't even seem bothered. Just kept eating while he examined it from every angle.
The mushrooms on its head were real. The fur was soft. The body temperature was warm. This was a living mooshroom, just existing in the middle of a murder-forest.
"This is so rare. Even in the game, mushroom islands are mythical. I've seen red mooshrooms maybe twice. Never brown ones. And here's one just... standing at my fishing spot. Eating my blocks."
An idea struck him.
In Minecraft, you could use a bowl on a mooshroom to get mushroom stew. And if you fed it flowers first, you'd get suspicious stew with random status effects.
This violated biological logic. Cows didn't produce soup. That wasn't how mammals worked. But this was a Minecraft cow in a Minecraft-physics world.
"I have to test this."
He pulled out a wooden bowl he'd fished up. Held it in his hand, focused on the mooshroom, and triggered the interaction.
The empty bowl filled instantly with brown liquid.
Steam rose from the surface. The bowl was warm in his hands. His stomach growled despite having just eaten fish. The stew smelled incredible.
He was about to take a sip when he noticed the mooshroom staring at him with an expression that clearly communicated: "Really? You're going to do that? Right in front of me?"
"What? It's just... I mean, this is normal. This is how the game works. You produce mushroom stew. That's your thing."
The mooshroom's expression didn't change.
Alexei felt oddly judged.
"Fine. I'll turn around. Give you some privacy or whatever."
He turned away, bowl raised to his lips...
Behind him, he heard a wet splatter.
He turned back slowly.
The mooshroom had lifted its tail. And from beneath that tail, a stream of brown liquid was pouring onto the ground, pooling in the grass. Brown liquid that looked exactly identical to the mushroom stew in his bowl.
Except the ground-puddle had more mushroom chunks visible.
He stared at his bowl.
Then at the puddle.
Then back at his bowl.
"...Oh no."
The bowl, which had been comfortingly warm moments ago, suddenly felt very wrong in his hands.
He looked at the thick, chunky liquid in his bowl.
The mooshroom mooed contentedly, mushrooms bobbing on its head.