Sunday, October 17, 2010

Day 8: Straight Down to Hell

Once again, I got the urge to go journey deep within the earth. I haven't seen any diamond since that one unfortunate day and thought that perhaps they are more plentiful the deeper one goes. For convenience, I decided to extend the ladder in the underground fortress, which I'll call Dunkelheim. I have explored much deeper than Dunkelheim, but didn't want to go traveling through the labyrinthine chambers every time I wanted to plumb the depths.

As before, I dug a 2 wide hole into the ground, placing ladders and harvesting coal along the way. Down and down I went. Probably about 20 cubes deep at the very least from when I started. Finally, I broke a rock and struck lava. Now, I don't know how exactly, but at this moment, I burst into flames. At this point in my life, I'd never been on fire before. Little did I know it at the time, but this certainly would not be the last. I flew up the ladder as fast as I could, hoping that the flames would naturally dissipate. This was not the case. I ate 2 pieces of cooks ham along the way to keep myself alive. Thank the gods that I decided to build Dunkelheim around an underground lake. Never have I felt so relieved as when I darted into the water and the burning was quenched. "Holy shit, that was fucking close," I panted aloud. I got some more food from Dunkelheim and decided to head back to the deep hole. Into the hole I threw several cubes of dirt. This seemed to plug up the lava, so I headed back down.

Once at the bottom, I carefully expanded horizontally and explored. I found a few patches of gold and thought, "Ha! I knew there would be rare minerals down here." Knock, knock, knock went the pick ax until some ore popped out of the destroyed block. I quickly jumped down to pick it up and just as quickly burst into flames. I have no idea how this happened, but regardless, I scurried up the ladder and died half way. This was especially terrible because I was wearing my full set of steel armor at the time. That's about 24 bars of steel. Bad times.

This bursting into flames stuff happened another handful of times before I realized, "hey, why don't I just direct the underground lake water into this chamber so that I don't have to fly a mile up every time I catch on fire." With a little effort I was able to pull it off. Because of some strange law of physics, the water could not flow onto the squares adjacent to the ladder, so I had to expand the hole. The one unfortunate part of this process was that I all 15 or so torches got extinguished as the water poured downward. Tis a small price to pay for safety!

And safe it now was! I expanded the chamber and directed the water flow at any magma discovered along the way. It went wonderfully. This was the smartest I had ever used water before. I continued to expand and create bridges over the water and after a short while I broke into a huge magma chamber and a few branching paths. My hard work paid off as I harvested several chunks of silver ore and plenty of coal. This deep, deep area will be the launching point for my next excursion. I am determined to find more diamond.

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