The Secret of Minecraft



Load up Minecraft, then find a pit of lava at the bottom of an area of land and jump in while having full diamond armor equipped. After that, sink until you only have half of the average amount of hearts. You will suddenly fall into a room built out of obsidian. There, you will meet someone called the Gatekeeper. After you kill him, the eastern wall will fall away to reveal a hall of pure diamond blocks. After walking for about a minute or so, you will enter a large tunnel of glowstone.

There you will meet the final boss: a creature so otherworldly that it cannot be described in normal words. It looks hyper-realistic, and he has at least twice the amount of health as the Ender Dragon. If you manage to kill him, a door will appear opposite the hall of diamond. It leads to the opposite of the Nether... but after entering you'll find it is only much, much worse. Here, it seems that the true game of Minecraft begins.

Once you enter this land, all you will see is a floor of a glass-like block, although it emits a dim light. You can see that the sky is dark, but it too has a faint glow. As far as you can see, even at full render, there is nothing but this glowing dark sky and glowing pale floor. Then, you suddenly realize that a strange noise is sounding, one that must have gone unnoticed as it hadn't stopped since you entered this world. It sounds familiar, but you know without a single second guess that you have never heard it before, and you feel you will hear nothing but. The glow becomes darker,

The game gets darker as if the sun were setting, but I saw no sun at all. During this time, the strange noise gets more poignant. Almost shrill, almost extrasensory in its depth.

Stars begin to appear in the sky, but they are not the typical square blocks that populate Minecraft so thickly. Instead, they are perfect spheres. They seem to have a resolution so high that it seems they are created by some sort of god.

They started to sway through the sky in rhythm of the blank noise - rising and falling. At this point my game started to lag, unable to render this dance of perfection.

I tried to turn down my render distance, but at the first touch of the button, my screen was filled with otherworldly faces - pale gray contorting faces against an opaque white fog.

They changed with each frame, which at the point was at approx. 1 per second. I couldn't figure out what was happening, so I opened task manager and shut down java.exe.

When I restarted my game minutes later, the Minecraft message in the home screen read, "Don’t you ever, ever stop the cloud." The yellow letters crept up until almost the entire window was filled, but I still managed to make it to the world selection.

To my surprise the world was only .5 MB large. I didn't know how, it was so laggy and even a world newly-rendered without anything done to it is larger than half a megabite. Something seemed wrong. Once I clicked it, over a minute of loading screens popped up, but they all read, "loading the cloud," or, "rendering the cloud."

When this otherworldly place finally loaded, it was again this supposed night time of dancing circles and shrill noise. I decided to explore. As I walked, nothing changed. For over 20 minutes, I just held down the W key and watched as nothing changed except the lightly-luminescent floor. I failed to notice the most gradual change of all.

The sound had been slowly became melodic, or should say, un-melodic. I’ve often read about the tritone, the "devils note," the main basis of all the metal music I listen to, but this was different. I could feel my nerves tingling as it played. Before I could even think about what the fuck kind of music this was, I saw a cloud in the distance. As I walked it grew larger... and larger... and larger... and larger... and larger... and larger.

Remembering that this wall of cloud was what had frozen my game before, I expected the same strangely detailed grinning faces that had covered my screen, but once I was right up against it all I saw was the same block formations that Notch called faces.

I saw the faces of skeletons and zombies and creepers. Even though they had the resolution of many years gone by, they seemed to portray an emotion. I could see tears fall from them, as small as a single pixel; they trickled from these blocky faces.

It reminded me of the mausoleum where my aunt was buried.

I decided to do what they game is meant for: I chipped away at the face of a creeper. I had no pick, no shovel, no axe - in fact, my entire inventory had been lost. I didn't know why, but it seemed that I was too far into a mystery to turn back.

As I picked away, the face shed more tears. The godlike stars still fell and rose to the haunting demonic music. That’s when I broke through and a vast explosion of raping fire spewed from the opening.

I backed away as fast as I could, expecting to die, but I had a full health bar; in fact, the fire had done nothing to me. I stepped nearer, nothing. I stepped into the fires, a sound unusually realistic resonated, and I knew my flesh was burning. It made no difference, my health was fine, so I stepped into a 1x2 hall that housed the flame.

I walked down this hall, only seeing the flame and hearing the sound of my flesh burning. Then a voice arose, it was deep, it was the sound that the demonic gods of our dreams seem to speak in. It said:

"THIS IS YOUR SCOURGE. THIS IS YOUR PASSION. THIS IS THE PURIFICATION." When the last resounding syllable sounded, I walked into a vast hall. It was like the Nether, but it was more beautiful, almost dystopian. Fire still burned, lava still fell, but in cascading geometric shapes that seemed to complete the world. I saw other people too, the same low definition versions of myself that I had not seen in so long.

But I also saw horrors: Creepers, Zombies, and Skeletons - all chained, all in bondage. Weeping, crying, being tortured for fun.

I saw them tied to a table, their entrails being torn out with picks as the people laughed. Their hissing and growls were now replaced by terrified shrieks and cries. All the spilled blood could be seen so clearly; it was like watching it flow from my own face. I could see the anatomy of these creatures as clearly as they would have been in some grotesque biology textbook.

A human looked over to me, walked away from the zombie he was bludgeoning, looked me in the eyes, and said, "Prepare for your Hell, scum."

He hit me and my hearts fell, I ran, not knowing why I was the enemy. I ran as he chased me, chanting, "Your Hell is the prison of our kind. Prepare to taste the pain that you have given our brethren."

As I ran, the haunting music still played. But I could hear myself, not the sound of my burning flesh, not my heavy breath. But I heard myself hiss.

I ran and ran and ran as the chants chased me...until they faded away. I was in a small room - fire outside illuminated it - but it was still filled with a dense darkness. I heard the same demonic voice say,

"YOU HAVE BECOME YOURSELF. YOUR DISGUISE OF HUMANITIES SKIN HAS BURNED AWAY! YOU ARE NOW PURE OF BODY AND OF SOUL! GO FREE YOUR PEOPLE AND UNMASK THE HELLISH FIGURES THAT CAPTIVATE THEM!"

Not knowing what to do I, turned around. A creeper was staring me right in the fucking eyes. I tried to run but only ran into the other side of the small room. Going back, I had seen a mirror.

I looked in the mirror; the image of a disgusting writhing creeper looked in my eyes. I realized I no more hearts. Not that they were empty, they were gone. I walked into the fire outside and only my hissing vocalizations were heard. A mob of humans came after me, chanting the forbidding chant. Backwards, forwards, in latin, growling, screaming wailing, they chanted, "Vox es mundi, inferno captivare ANTI-DEI."

I tried to run, but I was frozen. As they surrounded me, I hissed. I wailed, shrieked. The screen became perfectly detailed, as if it mirrored the world. The music grew louder, as did everything; my ears rang from the barrage of senses. Then I exploded.

I the creeper, I the monster, I the terror, I the murderer. I sacrificed my wretched self for my similarly wretched comrades. The thing I used to fear I had become. The thing I used to be, I crushed.

I had become the saviour of the deadly walking terrors that plagued the world. My world, the hell of my former kind, the Earth, the captivating prison that entertains us with its seemingly endless landscape.

Released from the Hell, I finally reached my true form: the monster, the thing that chases the prisoners from their gilded cell. The saviour.

The screen was blank. All I heard was the hissing and growling of the terrors. I understood what they said. They worshiped me. The sound continued. It grew louder until my speaker buzzed and my ears rang. I tried to turn it off, but nothing happened. I cowered, I cried, I fell in the corner.

All I could do was contemplate what this meant. I felt as if I was the one who was trapped in this earthly cage. I thought about suicide, finding this other world of terrors, but it quickly passed.

I gathered myself, touched the computer, and continued with my life, the hissing and shrieking still sounding. Even as I write this, I feel my praise, coming from our grotesque dungeon masters.