The Legend: The Mystery of Herobrine Book One - The Start of a Quest Read online

course of the rail line, there was a different type of rail – one that had gold parts in it. These parts of rail had a small torch next to them with a strange red orb at the top of it. The rails seemed to glow in the dark and whenever the mine cart would run over them, it seemed to give it a hefty boost in speed.

  When the tunnel ended, I found myself traveling on a narrow, one block bridge above a giant lake of lava, dozens of feet below, inside a giant cave. The cave was in fact so gigantic, that I couldn’t even see the ceiling.

  The bridge on which I was traveling was so long that I now could see Jerry, who was not that far away from me as I thought. Apparently, once he saw me going down in my mine cart, it didn’t take him that much in order to jump in his own mine cart and go down after me.

  I finished crossing the bridge and found that the road went spiraling down into a deep chasm, a giant sinkhole deep into the ground. The way down was pretty steep, and the railroad was peppered with a lot of those “special rails” that boosted the speed of the mine cart as it passed over them. I was now rushing at an incredible pace. The patterns in the cave wall seemed to melt away and blend into each other. We could have passed a giant reserve of gold and iron or whatnot and I couldn’t have told it.

  The road abruptly went horizontally and for a moment I was afraid that I would pop out of the mine cart. Luckily, I didn’t. I stayed glued to the inside of the mine cart. We then passed through yet another tunnel. The air inside the tunnel was pitch black, except for the end of it, where I could see a dim red light. We sped through the tunnel at an amazing pace and when we reached the end of it, I could see a giant cave ahead of us. The wall that was directly in front of me was half blown away revealing a beautiful forest. For a moment I was locked in time. Where are we? Is that the…

  But I didn’t have quite enough time to finish thinking about it, because the railroad came to an abrupt stop.

  I fell…

  Mine cart and all, I fell. The fall was pretty long, or maybe it just seemed that way, because I was taken by surprise by the abrupt stop after such a long journey.

  When I finally came to my senses, I was neck-deep in water, struggling against the current to try and get to shore. By the time I got to dry land I saw that Jerry wasn’t far behind me.

  Jerry got out of the water and slowly walked up to me, looking in every direction, trying to get a better look at our new surroundings.

  “Well, I have to say, Mike, you really outdid yourself this time. Where are we?”

  “I don’t know. At least it was exciting,” I said to him.

  “It really was. I’ll give you that. But really, where in Herobrine’s name are we? I mean, we...that track was really long and all of this doesn’t just appear. Somebody must have built it, either a lot of people, or just some guy who had a lot of spare time and spare materials. But man, why is the last part missing?”

  “I have no idea, Jerry.”

  “Either way, we should get a move on. If someone’s out there it’s better that we find him or them first.”

  “Should we go back, though?”

  Jerry turned around and looked at me.

  “Well, you were the one who was craving for adventure, weren’t you?”

  If my avatar could smile, it would have had the biggest grin ever on his pixelated face.

  “Let’s go!” I shouted.

  And so we walked along the shore of the lake until we reached the exit to the forest.

  It didn’t take much time until we found a herd of cows, gnawing away at some patch of grass.

  I quickly ran up to them and started harvesting leather and meat. From the looks of it, it was going to be quite a long adventure ahead of us, so every bit of resource counted.

  Once I attacked the first cow, the others scattered into the woods. I started giving chase and Jerry wasn’t far behind me. Once we managed to catch up to the last cow we saw a small wooden sign. Somehow it appeared that we had found our way to a small dirt road. The sign said: “The Village is near”. The two of us followed the dirt road and in a couple of minutes we found yet another sign that said: “The Village is near,” but this time the sign had another small sign behind it. That one said: “Intruders beware.”

  We continued our trek through the forest, following the narrow dirt road that gradually turned into a much wider gravel road. The way we saw it was that we weren’t intruders. We were just travelers, explorers, adventurers on some epic quest to find some hidden civilization. After all, Minecraft is also about using your imagination, isn’t it?

  So we continued our travel and eventually we saw tall wooden walls and an even taller tower, also made out of wood.

  “Wow, that’s quite an impressive watchtower,” I said to Jerry.

  “It certainly is. We’d better be careful,” cautioned Jerry.

  When we got closer to the walls we could see that they also had quite a large wooden gate that was made out of a different type of wood than the rest of the wall. The gate was shut, though.

  We got closer and closer and when we were about ten feet from the gate we heard a voice coming from the tall watchtower.

  “Who are you? Stay right where you are, not a foot closer, or else,” said the voice.

  “We are not thieves! We’re friendly,” said Jerry.

  “We’re just travelers passing by! We came through the mountain. We found your underground railroad,” I said to the voice.

  There was a tense pause, after which the voice shouted.

  “You what? You came through our mine? Did you steal anything? Did you destroy anything? You better not have stolen anything!”

  “We didn’t steal anything. We just found your railroad and it took us into that cave underneath the mountain. Honest,” said Jerry.

  “I’m going to let you in. But you better not do anything funny, I’m warning you. There are more of us than you, so we could easily send you to your respawn point,” said the voice.

  “We won’t try anything funny and we won’t steal anything. Promise,” said Jerry.

  “Okay. I’ll take your word for it. I’m going to open the gate. Walk slowly. No funny business!”

  And after a few seconds, the large doors opened with a “whoosh”. We slowly walked past the gates and into what we discovered was the outer circle of the camp.

  “That’s far enough,” said a guy in iron armor. He had an iron breastplate, iron grieves and iron boots but his helmet was made out of black leather. He wielded an iron sword that glowed purple.

  “Stay right there”, he said. “You don’t look like thieves to me.”

  “How exactly do thieves look?” I asked him.

  “Don’t get smart with me, noob,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I replied.

  “So, you got this far. But in order to actually have access inside the village, you need to pay a fee.”

  “What fee? What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Okay we’ll pay,” said Jerry.

  “Excellent. If you don’t pay that wooden floor that you’re standing on will open and you’d be swimming in quite a bit of lava. So, you just made a wise decision, my friend.”

  “What’s the fee?” I asked.

  “Well you just put some things in that wooden chest over there and one of my friends will see if it’s good enough or not.”

  It was then that I saw that the guy wasn’t alone. There were four more guys, all armed with bows, standing behind stone barricades on both our sides.

  Jerry was the first one to go. He slowly walked up to the chest and deposited some goods. After he was done, it was my turn. I slowly walked up to the wooden chest and opened it. I had a lot of coal, iron and gold in my inventory. I also had quite a large amount of food and other miscellaneous blocks, such as stone, gravel and wood, but I doubted they would have been interested in that. What I also had was an emerald. But I wasn’t going to give them that, now was I? After all, they couldn’t search me, or anything. And so I deposited about ten blocks of gold and ten blocks of iron, as I saw that Jerry had done the same thing.

  After I deposited the so-called “fee”, I slowly backed away. As I backed away, an archer stepped out from behind the barricade and walked up to the chest to check the contents. He took a quick look and turned to the guy with the sword and the black helmet.

  “Yup. It’s okay, they can pass,” said the archer.

  “Did you hear that, guys? You can pass. Follow me.”

  The guy with the sword and the black helmet turned around and walked up to the stone wall that separated the outer area from the actual village.

  The stone wall didn’t have a gate like the wooden one; it had a small passage, also made from stone that had a set of iron doors on each end. When we got close enough to the passage, we saw that the iron doors were open.

  We passed through the passage, walking right behind Mister Black Helmet. The four archers walked closely behind us and when the last of them passed through the passage, the set of iron doors closed behind him.

  The inner yard was awesome. It seemed that behind all those walls lied a small village with houses made out of stone, bricks and wood. There was grass everywhere, and narrow gravel blocks formed intertwining roads that crawled all around and in between houses and other buildings. In the middle of the yard there were small houses, all bunched up together. They were mostly built out of wood, with a sturdy stone foundation. They had three or four small windows and a wooden door. Long-nosed villagers hustled and bustled in and out of these small