Descension & Ascension

Chapter 4: Layer Transfer

Karenna Stone was now in a much better place than when she started her journey, but she felt that she could use a backpack. She knew that the tanks for liquids required glass, which could only be obtained by smelting sand in a furnace. Lacking sand, the trans woman decided to go exploring for desert or a beach. There was also another step of one of her missions. To access Familiars, she needed the FamGuide, which was created by infusing any book with the eye of a slain spider, Bombplant gunpowder, rotten flesh from a slain zombie, and a bone of a slain reanimated skeleton. She returned to the village and stole a rhyming kids' book that was written decades ago to infuse it. She made the cows and pigs breed, intending to harvest them once she returned with the needed resources.

She wandered for a while in the direction away from the village she used to live in, and found a desert with plenty of sand and cacti. She took a lot of sand and multiple cacti, the latter without hurting herself. It didn't hurt as much as she thought it would.

It became night by the time she went back, so she teleported back to her house and slept in a bed to skip the night. In the morning, she somehow turned the cacti into part of a hose after removing the spines and replaced the outline of the infinite water source with sand to allow the sugar cane to grow. She had no sugar cane to spare for the moment, but used gold and made a nozzle for the hose. She used her furnaces to turn spare sand into glass, and the glass was combined with iron to make tanks for liquid. At that moment, Karenna remembered to harvest her crops and animals, which she did while replanting crops and leaving two of each animal alive, aware that a single opposite sex couple was not nearly enough to recover a population. She cooked the meat in her furnaces, but planned to hold onto it, since meat didn't go bad as far as she knew.

All of this took the rest of the day, so she went to bed again. When she woke up again, she made the hose nozzle with a lever made from a stick and cobblestone, a refined gold ingot, and an iron ingot.

Combining the two fluid tanks, the sleeping bag, a chest, a refined gold ingot, and four pieces of leather, Karenna made a Traveler's Backpack. She could put it on with a chestplate at the same time, so she did so. She made another ax and pickax, each with an iron head, and put them in the tool slots.

She decided to spend the rest of the day in search of diamonds, having made a waypoint to the level of her mine where they could be found in the highest frequency. When she felt sleepy, she went back into her home and went to sleep.

Karenna made the Familiars Guide, and when she opened it up, she already had two of the things in it, which were a chicken, an ocelot, and a golem made of snow. The chicken gave her the ability to glide for two seconds, after which she would fall as normal. The ocelot made her sprinting faster. The snow golem threw snowballs that dealt damage to Memphi and nothing else. She set her familiar to the ocelot, seeing the faster sprinting as more useful than the brief gliding. The first thing listed that she needed to unlock was a 1-Up, which was a single use familiar that brought her back to full health after she suffered what would have been fatal damage, warning that it had to be unlocked again after it saved her life. The next was a guy she hadn't heard of whose ability let her roundhouse kick her enemy. Another one was an inanimate cube that let her walk on lava and not fall in it or suffer the logical effects of being so close to it. Another one was a Neofinian that let her teleport by literally taking away some of her blood, though she was confident that she'd be able to replace it. An upgrade from the chicken that was considered a separate familiar was a fairy that let her glide for any distance, meaning that having it made her immune to fall damage. A humanoid figure that had pure white eyes was another option, and it did the same thing as the Neofinian. She was confused but believed the book. The next was a golem made of iron, which tossed enemies into the air, dealing a small amount of normal damage but also dealing fall damage. Another one looked to be a different style of fairy, but this one claimed to play hot and cold whenever diamonds or emeralds were nearby, starting with cold within a certain distance and saying how close Karenna was. The next was a guy whose power was calling down lighting to strike a target, mentioning that it could strike the same place twice. Another was a girl in a frog costume whose power made Karenna jump higher and made her immune to fall damage, but she still fell quickly. After that was a reanimated skeleton, complete with a bow, that fired arrows at enemies without needing Karenna to attack them first. Following the skeleton was what looked like the oversized spiders but was a more reasonable size due to the small size of Familiars. It let her climb walls if she moved slowly. The second to last one was a reanimated skeleton riding the spider, which combined the skeleton and spider effects. The final one was a squid that let her hold her breath underwater for longer.

Karenna knew she had to go to Pyrony afterwards. She decided to go down into her mine and use her diamond pickax on the layerstone on the bottom floor. She made a way back to her home, but layerstone took a while to break, so she was impatient.

Elyon contacted her and asked, "How did you know how to get to Pyrony?"

She replied, "You said that it was below Mai and never said that layerstone was indestructible, so I figured I'd dig and end up in it."

"Hold your horses! You need a way to secure your entrance to Pyrony. That can be some cobblestone and a wooden trapdoor. To protect yourself, I'd recommend either enchanted iron armor or diamond armor to survive."

"How do I enchant things?"

"You need to make an enchanting table. It takes layerstone, diamonds, and a book."

She mined more layerstone and went up to the diamond level to mine diamonds for the enchanting table. She made a diamond mace to replace her iron one, and since she didn't feel like making her own book, she sneaked back to the village to sacrifice another book. She settled on a book made out of an unusual, waterproof material. Elyon said to her, "Now make bookcases to allow yourself to get better enchantments."

Karenna did not want to spend more time with those even though she knew how to make them, so she enchanted the iron armor and the diamond pickax, sword, and mace that she had with as high of levels as she could get. It was not the best, but her armor would protect her more and be more durable, while her sword and mace would both deal more damage to everything and her pickax would last even longer.