Terraria history. Scary stories and mystical stories

What I'm going to tell you about now happened just a few days ago and changed my life forever. Believe all this or not - it is entirely your right. I myself, remembering the details of past events and composing a complete picture of what happened from the last pieces, could doubt the clarity of my own reason, but the flash drive, which I now, without releasing for a moment, squeeze in my hand day and night, serves as the only and indisputable proof that I'm not crazy yet. Whether it was a happy coincidence of circumstances, a blessing of the gods, in which I never believed, whether it was a blind chance - I still don't know what saved me ... However, enough empty words, let's get down to business.
The first day:
My name is ... But, however, it does not matter, because it will not be so much about me. Suffice it to say that I am almost a third year student, one of many who are now taking their final exams and covering their debts. I'm not a diligent student, not a pride of college, but an ordinary guy who still lives with his mother, loves to sit at the computer, digging on Facebook "e or hovering in some new toy. Recently, I became addicted to the game Terraria and sometimes spent whole evenings all night long excavating cave complexes and erecting huge and luxurious castles on the surface.I have already turned off the Internet for two weeks, and there was nothing to pay for it, so I fought with only skeletons and other computer vermin, unable to escape into the desired multiplayer and take part in some large-scale project. Frankly, it didn't really bother me, but it was still boring, so when my friend, whose name also does not play a special role in my story, called me and told me about the release of version 1.0 .5, excitedly listing the tidbits of the changelog, I immediately asked him to bring me the game on the stick, and it turned out that I had made a huge mistake.
The next day, the twenty-fourth of June, I was already uploading a new hacked version of the game to my computer and listening to my friend's “valuable advice” that he had spied on in the official preview. After waiting for him to leave and leave me alone with the desired game, I launched the client, glanced with satisfaction at the inscription "1.0.5" in the lower left corner of the window and went into the single-player game. All maps and characters from 1.0.4 were already carefully packed by me into a zip archive and removed from the corresponding folders so that I could start a new world from scratch. By clicking on "create character" I quickly created a completely ordinary character - a guy, brown-haired, in a bright green jacket, blue pants and brown boots, with a standard skin color. Naturally, the first thing I wanted to do was try a new level of difficulty, so I changed it to hardcore without any hesitation.
I called the character the first name that came to my mind, Matt, but my finger treacherously jumped off the key and instead of M wrote N. I clicked on the sequel before I had time to notice my mistake, so the character was named Natt. I didn't want to create and paint the character again, so I proceeded to create the world, choosing a medium size. The game, strangely enough, didn’t even ask what I want to name the created world, but it didn’t upset me a bit, I still always left the name as standard. A minute later, the world was created and automatically named "! Born". Surprised by this strange name, more like a world generation seed, I started the game.
The first thing that caught my eye after loading the world was its absolutely terrible generation. A friend, of course, warned me that in 1.0.5 Blue did something with the generation of worlds, which made them much less beautiful than before, but I was still not ready for such a dramatic change. After evaluating the new possibilities of the guide and asking him a lot about the purpose of all sorts of nonsense, like acorns or wooden beams, I moved on to the hectic construction of a hut for the first night. In the process of chopping down the tree, it was discovered that to the west of the spawn, just two screens from it, there is an infected zone, which for some time blocked my way to the west. Soon the hut was built, however, rather for show, since Natt danced all night outside its walls, fighting off the persistent zombies with the spear he found and collecting the desired fifty silver from them. The next game day was spent on the construction of small houses for the guide and expected NPCs, and then the usual exploration of the world began, the search for weapons, the extraction of ore and the battle with endless monsters.
During this time, Nett died several times, and each time after his death, the game threw me to the main menu, from where, by re-selecting him from the list of characters, I could start the game on the spawn without all my equipment. Then I was pretty sure that it should be so, and exits to the main menu after death are just part of the hardcore mode, planned by the developers.

Natt is in the finally completed village. I decided to try the gravity potion and filmed the result.
After a few in-game days and out-of-game hours, a dryad had already appeared in my village, and Natt was wearing shadow armor, so my priority goal was to attack Skeletron and destroy the dungeon, after which with a pure soul I could go down to Hell, build myself a farm for alchemical needs and just enjoy the in-game omnipotence. Since the map had already been explored to the east all the way to the ocean, I headed west, devastating the infected zones and killing the worms angry at the destruction of the shadow balls along the way. After some time, the dungeon was discovered, but ...
It looked strange. First, there was no colonnade annex in which Skeletron usually met me. It's just a tower above the entrance to the earth, inside which the damned old man was wandering tiredly, instead of his usual "Come back again at night if you wish to enter" telling me "Come back again at night if you wish to see my Master". I took it as a hint that a new boss was waiting for me inside the dungeon, added by the developers in 1.0.5, and was only surprised that a friend did not mention him to me.
Secondly, which is much more important, walking from the depths of the dungeon and making its way through the broken roof of the tower, a strange, bodily-looking stem, unknown to me, rose. It was textured in the background, but the hook was clinging to it, so I, torn apart by curiosity, climbed up to find out where this stem leads. Three hundred blocks later, when I was almost sure that the stem is exclusively decorative and much more interesting discoveries await me at the bottom of the dungeon, the theme of the world has changed, the background has become a little darker, and the sky has become a bad red color. By analogy with the "Bloody Moon", the "Bloody Sun" immediately occurred to me, which quite accurately described the appearance of the world. Some kind of unintelligible noise sounded in the speakers, similar to someone's quiet muttering, but I mentally attributed this detail to the desire of the developers to make the new location unknown to me as atmospheric as possible.

Dungeon entrance, umbilical cord.
After a couple of screens of climbing up, I shuddered when I saw where the hook was attached. It was a huge, twisted and hunched embryo, the size of a flying island, but consisting not of separate blocks, but solid, like all the monsters and bosses of Terraria. I froze for a second, feeling the rapid beating of my own heart and literally persuading myself to collect my thoughts and rise even higher to visit the back of the embryo. In the end, at one time I had about the same reaction to the Eye of Cthulhu, only he attacked me, and this embryo ... he ... did absolutely nothing, only his chest rose and fell regularly with rhythmic, calm breathing. Having overpowered myself, I climbed onto the embryo in several jumps and, walking along its back and finding absolutely nothing interesting, I hit it with a pickaxe for a test.
There was a terrible scream, almost the loudest and shrill I have ever heard, and Natt was literally torn to pieces for no apparent reason. Frightened, I jumped away from the monitor along with the chair, catching my breath. It's definitely time for the developers to end up with Lovecraft horrors, I thought, especially so sudden. The game returned to the main screen, and I, reaching for the mouse, clicked on "single player" and, hovering the mouse over Natt, was once again dumbfounded. Goosebumps ran down my spine and beads of sweat beaded on my forehead - Nett has changed. He turned gray, turned pale, his clothes faded, and his eyes became dull, as if he had not seen white light for many years, being imprisoned somewhere deep underground. Barely forcing myself to click first at his name, and then at the name of the world, I leaned back in my chair, mentally assuring myself that the developers simply went too far with the realism of their next monster. As soon as the world loaded, I was surprised again, although I thought I was ready for any oddities.
My small village looked as if at least a century had passed in these two minutes of my absence from the world. There were gaps in the walls, cobwebs hung in places, almost all furnishings, except for chests, disappeared, and not a single NPC was visible in the entire village. However, I soon found a reason for this - a little east of the village a small cemetery appeared with the names of all my merchants, guide, dryad and nurse, although, of course, these names were not mentioned anywhere before. Oddly enough, this detail reassured me - I believed that all this was just a cunning and convincing trick of the developers. And when, after a couple of minutes, all the NPCs came to my village again, each of which was no different from the previous ones, I was finally convinced of the correctness of my theory.

Aged Natt in a ruined village.

Natt is at the cemetery next to an already rebuilt village.
It took me two more playing days to restore all my uniforms, after which it was decided to go on a second trip to the dungeon. When I reached him, I immediately, without giving myself time to think, went to the old man. Despite the fact that it was late at night, he still kept repeating only "They call me Old Man" and, as it turned out, did not interfere with my promotion. Leaving the obviously buggy NPC on the surface and realizing that I was not destined to see the clothing merchant, I went down into the dungeon. The same umbilical cord twisted along the entire vertical shaft, casting on me bad thoughts about what awaits me at its other end. In the three lateral branches of the main tunnel, I did not find anything interesting, and only at the bottom, where, leaving the umbilical cord, the chains of catacombs diverged in all directions, I began to carry with the prey. Fighting off skeletons and flying skulls, I routinely robbed chests, weighing in my mind what exactly I should take with me and what to leave, and, imperceptibly for myself, moving further and further west.
At some point, I realized that the situation had completely changed. Now I wanted to call this place not a dungeon, but a palace. The floor and walls were made of two-color blocks I had never seen before, pictures of vague content hung on the walls, sofas, long dining tables made of carved ebony wood, vases of flowers hung on the floor, huge crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and all this was depicted down to the smallest detail, which only allows the maximum resolution of objects. I’m unlikely to be lying if I say that I had an idea of ​​how to craft at least one of the items I saw there. All my attempts to break anything with a hammer or explosives are guaranteed to be crowned with failure. Enemies have also changed - skeletons have been replaced by people, as if randomly generated players with randomly issued game weapons. Swordsmen, mages, archers and demolitionists - they all attacked me in a single crowd, behaving much smarter than the usual AI, as if ... As if I were really playing against living people.

Path to the palace, generated "monsters".
Finally, my path ended up in the last huge room, similar to a throne room, on the walls of which, in gilded frames, hung portraits of people unknown to me. At the western edge of the hall, on a golden throne, sat someone who, according to the pop-up inscription, was called The Father. In his presence, all the enemies attacking me immediately became neutral and hastily left the throne room, as if afraid of their, no doubt, master. Father got up from his throne and, slowly descending the steps, walked over to Natt and began a conversation. He was distinguished from all the other creatures of Terraria by the incredible detail of actions - he blinked, gestured freely when communicating, realistically rearranged his legs, even sometimes thoughtfully scratching his own beard, and at the same time did not look like a scripted scene.
When he spoke to me, a wide window of dialogue opened. Not a thin strip with prepared text at the top of the screen, but a wide interface on which words appeared one at a time, as if the Father dictated them to an invisible handwritten. Instead of buttons to continue or end the conversation, there was a small field at the bottom, in which you could write whatever you wanted and enter to answer the Father. At that moment it did not even occur to me to try to write something meaningless or on the l33t-spike to check how my "interlocutor" would react to it, I was too scared and excited by everything that was happening to me.
My father, in vague terms, told me that the embryo above the tower is a devilish child that must be killed for the good of the whole world, and who can only be killed if you go down even lower, into a certain Womb, in order to find the base of the umbilical cord there and cut it. My father ignored any of my questions about his personality, but he answered one question - “What happens if I don’t do this?”. My father turned to face the screen, looking directly at me, and said, "You will die." At that moment it seemed to me that I even heard his voice uttering these simple words, which, however, frightened me much more than even the terrible find in the sky. They, and I now understood it for sure, even though I refused to believe it, were not addressed to my character, but to me, sitting in front of the screen and trembling with fear. And again, I could hardly reassure myself with the thought that all this was part of a beautiful and very convincing innovation, a quest from an NPC, although a large number of strange things I saw haunted me.
My father fell silent and did not say another word, not answering the many questions that I tried to ask him. I had no choice but to return through the empty corridors of the palace back to the dungeon, tormented by a vague and bad presentiment. Having reached the umbilical cord, I felt a strong, spontaneous desire to close and delete the game, once and for all, so that I would never go into it again and not tell anyone exactly what happened to me today. Unfortunately, then I was able to overcome this desire, once again convincing myself that so far nothing happened that, in theory, could not be added by the developers to the new version, and began to go down the umbilical cord.
After a while of the descent, really strange things began to happen. First, the melody of the dungeon gradually faded away and changed to the one that sounded when I saw that embryo. Secondly, the usual monsters have disappeared, and those rustling sounds that are usually played when worms or bone dragons appear, but no one like that has ever appeared in the speakers. Gradually, the blocks that made up the passage, which already seemed to me endless, began more and more often to be replaced by new ones, unknown to me, more like half-dead, realistic greenish flesh, and over time, the background also changed to a constantly pulsating pale tissue with trembling green veins ... It even seemed to me that I could smell a sickening smell coming from this strange place, although now I am almost sure that it did not seem to me at all.
Without a doubt, this was the Womb, but the umbilical cord was still not going to end. I was really scared - today I was going to play in the "sandbox", kill bosses, experiment with innovations and features, in a word, have plenty of fun, but certainly not spew out bricks with a machine-gun burst. On the other hand, up to a certain point it was really interesting, I wanted to go through this unexpected quest and finally make sure that there are no oddities in the game. Alas, this did not happen.
Over time, monsters finally appeared in the Womb. They were strikingly different from all other monsters in the game - solid pieces of overly realistic meat, each time different, some were many times larger than the character and could only crawl through the tunnels, some, on the contrary, were several pixels in size and flew in flocks. When hovering over any of them, neither the name nor the number of lives was indicated, the amount of damage incurred did not pop up on impacts (although it was possible to kill the monsters, albeit very problematic), and the only loot from these creatures were the torn off body parts. Subsequently, I showed them to the guide, which, as soon as I tried to transfer limbs, heads or internal organs to his crafting help window, immediately and quickly went as far away from the character as possible until he got stuck in the nearest hole or died in any way way.
As I went down, the Maw revealed two more strange qualities. When I finally suspected that, as for a medium-sized world that I was creating, this tunnel went too deep, and came into the Maw with a depth gauge equipped, it stubbornly showed “????? feet below ”, having gone wrong afterwards and on the surface. Once dressed in the Womb, the depth gauge instead of all the numbers began to show question marks, determining only the number of numbers and the "higher-lower" level. However, the five-digit depth indicator really scared me. Even large maps ended at a depth of five thousand blocks, and here the average goes already more than ten thousand ...
The second and most frightening of the newly discovered oddities of this place was that the lower Nett descended, the less any light sources shone. At about twenty thousand blocks, if I was not mistaken in my calculations, nothing could disperse the darkness that enveloped this place. Torches, glowing lamps, water candles, thrown fallen stars, miner's helmet, spells, night vision potions, meteor armor, space pistol shots - nothing at all. We had to move in pitch darkness, and only every two or three screens were blue wandering lights, imperceptibly similar to those with which deep-sea fish lure gullible smaller fish. It was really scary - to move to the quiet groans of the "music" of this place and the rustling of invisible worms in the walls, to jump across dark spaces in which new unknown monsters were waiting for me, to huddle fearfully to the lights and catch my breath between these jerks. The umbilical cord, which sometimes fell into the lighting zone of the "fireflies", still indicated to me that I was on the right track. Soon I found a golden chest at one of the fireflies, which contained three Night's Edge swords and one called Mystery Blade, which looked like a bloody Muramasa. When I tried to take it, the inscription “Not yet” was displayed at the bottom of the screen. I could get only one Night's Edge, however, and it was enough for me headlong. As it turned out, only the swing of this blade could slightly dispel the darkness of the Maw, and from that moment the "fireflies" ceased to come across on my way down.
At that moment, I was finally able to break away from the game. It was already getting dark outside the window, although I started playing early in the morning, and I suddenly realized that I hadn't eaten or drank anything all day. Returning to the last "firefly" and, just in case, having built a hastily made wooden dome around me, I curtailed the game and stood up. My lips were dry, and my heart was beating treacherously loudly when, frightened by every rustle, I went into the kitchen to take at least a sip of water and have a snack on a hastily prepared sandwich. Mom had not yet returned from work, so the empty, dark apartment looked frightening in the light of recent events. Before I had time to pour myself a glass of water, a terrible cry came from the room, exactly the same one that I heard then, on the embryo. I literally felt my hair on my head stand on end and, dropping the glass, ran back into the room.
The game was expanded to full screen, and the inscription "You were slain ..." was burning in the middle of the monitor. The dome I built was spattered with blood from the inside, which looked like it was real, flowing down the wooden walls and dripping regularly from the low ceiling. The floor was littered with overly detailed limbs and entrails, and something unintelligible flashed in the background, after which the game immediately flew to the main menu. With a trembling hand, I fumbled for the mouse and, without any desire, mechanically clicked on "single player". Nett disappeared.
At that moment, I was close to screaming in horror. Just as one last straw can break a camel's back, this detail seemed to be enough to make me completely crazy. I hit the power button on the system unit, turned off the computer, and, having drunk a double dose of sedative-sleeping pills, tried to lie down and fall asleep in order to understand in the morning that it was all a dream or my imagination being played out. I had nightmares, as if my room had become part of the Womb: the walls pulsed with streaks of cadaverous-blue veins, something disgusting and frightening was swarming in the corner, and the same umbilical cord was reaching out to me from the monitor screen ... Twice a night I woke up in a cold sweat, turned on the lamp and calmed himself for a long time.
Second day:
Needless to say, the next morning I had absolutely no desire to play Terraria? Without even turning on the computer, I got dressed, had breakfast and went out to get some fresh air to unwind a little. This walk had a calming effect on me - against the background of the beautiful immutability of the real world, yesterday's virtual horrors seemed far-fetched and petty, so I decided to call the friend who brought me the game and tell me about everything that happened. He listened to me with excited interest - he himself had not yet played 1.0.5, having spent all yesterday fighting the viruses that had flooded his computer, but he perceived everything that happened to me the same way I wanted to understand it, that is, as just very elaborate quest from the developers. In the end, curiosity overcame my fear and I returned home and turned on the game again.
Natt really went missing, so I had no choice but to create a new character, the black girl Alice. "! Born" loaded and I continued to play. Nothing has changed in the world, NPCs walked aimlessly around the restored village, occasionally wandering into the cemetery, which I never dared to demolish ...
The cemetery ... Something in it caught my attention, something I remembered that could help me ... Tombstones! Likewise, there was a tombstone at the place where Natt died, and it should have written exactly how he died! Not that I doubted that it was some kind of "background" creature, it just became damn interesting to know what would be written there. Plus, in about the same place there was a chest with swords, without which I did not want to continue the descent, and it was not possible, because the devil knows how long it would take to descend lower and lower.
Armed with supplies that I had prudently kept in a chest in case of another unexpected death, I was about to head towards the dungeon, when I suddenly found belatedly that I was completely devoid of health potions. I returned to the merchant, talked to him, went to the trade menu, skimped and, already ending the conversation, realized that something was wrong. He turned again and froze - "Ah, they will tell tales of Natt some day." I didn’t know how to understand this, it seemed that the merchant was aware of Natt’s death and seemed to be hinting at something ... However, from the next appeal, everything fell into place - “Natt, is it? I’ve heard good things, friend! " The merchant apparently mistook my character for Nat because of some glitch. However, not only the merchant, but also all the other NPCs, each of which had "personal" appeals to the player - "Hey, Natt, wanna buy a big freaking gun, huh?" , “My god, Natt, were you bathing in lava ?!”, “Natt? Such a good name ... I'll name my next bomb N.A.T.T.! " and the like.
The glitch was insignificant, but it was quite enough for a bad feeling to reappear in my soul. Fully armed, I went west again and, reaching the entrance to the "dungeon", began a long descent. This time, it seemed to me that the blocks of the Maw started much closer to the palace than before, as if it was growing in size, eating blocks of stone and bricks of the dungeon, and it was scary. In addition to the depth gauge, I also had a watch with me. Immediately after entering the Womb, they went wrong and stopped showing the time, displaying only "wo: mb", "hæ: ll" and "pa: th" depending on where Alice was at the moment.
This time it was clearly darker in the Womb than the previous one, and the ominous music in the background gradually became louder and clearer. Moaning voices began to break through the bone-chilling, gloomy music, which consisted mainly of the measured booming beats of drums and the low notes of a string instrument, which I associated only with sinners from the second circle of Dante's Hell, and whose believability threw me into shiver. They were heard before, but now it has definitely become something more than a simple surround sound. At the same time, as far as I could see in the dim light of the flashlights, something was happening to the background of the Womb. It seemed that some faces or body parts began to appear on it, but no matter how hard I looked, I still could not finally make sure that this was not the fruit of my agitated imagination.
I continued to descend, and the monsters became more realistic and scary. Trying, for the sake of interest, to go into the dark side tunnel, departing from the central path with the umbilical cord, I almost immediately stumbled upon something that caused me a hundred and fifty damage in one blow and, jumping back, chaotically brandished my sword. Immediately, as if mockingly, a firefly flew in from the central tunnel, illuminating my enemy. It turned out to be a giant half-decayed head without a lower jaw and with a sprawled long tongue, which was drawn so realistically that I felt gagging and jerked away from the screen, just not to see it again. When I finally, having mastered myself, turned back to the screen, the head was gone, only a dead end made of the same pulsating flesh and a "firefly" rushing back. I didn’t want to stay in the dark corridor, especially after what had happened, so I returned to the umbilical cord and continued going down.
I soon got to the place where Natt died. Everything remained in its place - a golden chest, an improvised dome that did not save the character from death, his body parts, blood everywhere, a tombstone ... Seeing this sight, despite the fact that everything was drawn, I felt sick. Bodies disappear after death? In Terraria, there is no such realism of murders? There is no blood in it, is there? Damn it, this is all a game ?!
I pulled myself together. Yes, it's a game. Yes, the realism of death is a feature from the developers, as well as the whole place. Yes, I'm already tired of deceiving myself with this stupid excuse, but what else could I say? Everything that happened to me and my characters could well be justified by the logic of the developers, although some intuitive part of my mind resisted this thought. Alice went to the tombstone and I read the cause of Natt's death.
“Natt has been taken by Mother”
What?! The devil knows how many times over the past two days I was seized with panic, I wanted to immediately exit the game, delete it and never remember my failed journey through the Womb again, but I lacked the courage. Stupid, absurd thoughts were spinning in my head, I imagined what would happen if I did not kill that Child, which Father had warned me about, I imagined how I, the real one, would be swallowed up by pulsating walls at night or even worse ...
Stop.
In the midst of all the madness that washed over me, one intelligible thought made its way. Father, Child, Womb and Mother. These names, in spite of their simplicity, were definitely not accidental, they contained some secret meaning that I had not yet discovered. And if I had already seen the Father, the Child and the Womb, then this is who the Mother is, I had not the slightest idea. My rationalistic ego clearly said that it would be some kind of boss at the bottom of the Womb, for whose sake this whole frightening quest is being performed, it has already drawn me a giant worm or something similar, from which the umbilical cord begins, but the only trouble is that this place is not obeyed rational judgment. More precisely, it obeyed, of course, but as if disguised as reality, so as not to betray its essence. These thoughts made me even worse, but I had to continue.

One of the many photographs of the Womb. Each and every one was unsuccessful, and sometimes the outlines did not coincide with the place that I was trying to shoot. Pictured here is Alice with Night's Edge.
I took out another Night's Edge from the chest, and, lighting it up with waves, I continued walking down the umbilical cord, fighting off the "organic" monsters. Several times I wanted to stop and, if not leave the game, then at least go to At the same time, it seemed to me that I had already sunk a good forty thousand feet below sea level, and return to the spawn, or, even more so, build a dome around me again and pause the game for sure I didn’t want to, so, fighting hunger, thirst and fatigue, I continued and continued to descend. Voices in the background became even louder, already overlapping the music. They whispered to each other in a language that I could not even roughly identify. more like imitation of hawk scream than human speech, and moans eventually developed into sobbing, crying and sometimes even screams of pain. I muffled the speakers so that my mother would not hear strange sounds through two walls, but it did not help much.
Suddenly everything changed. The screen twitched, went out for a second, lit up again and, although at first glance nothing changed, I almost immediately noticed that the background was deformed and seemed to flow to where Alice was. I got scared and ran down even faster, not staying in place for a second, but something in the background was faster. The voices ceased whispering and drew out a long, drawn-out note, at first low, like the rumble of a cello, then rising and rising, until finally they turned into a shrill and terrible screech. At the bottom of the screen, “It's wrath has awoken” flashed, and the flesh of the Womb in the background twisted, something large, several times larger than the character, was detached from it, oblong, with sharp steel teeth and, having increased almost the entire background screen, closed its jaws on Alice, and then immediately disappeared again. Simultaneously with the terrible and insanely realistic creak of closed jaws, the voices fell silent, cutting off the high note.
I, frozen, stared at the monitor with glazed eyes, unable to even move before this spectacle. When it was all over, I forcibly unclenched my clenched fists and reached for the keyboard to understand what had happened, but Alice did not move the way I wanted. She, turned to the screen with her left side, slowly swayed, as if she was keeping balance on one left leg, then suddenly, with an animation completely impossible for Terraria, she turned to the screen with the other side and fell. She was missing the entire right half of the body, which was bitten off by this something, and you could see absolutely everything, the insides, bones, the cross section of the skull, everything was damn realistic, as if a real person was cut with a perfectly straight blade, photographed and made a body texture for Alice ... In the middle of the screen the inscription "You were slain ..." flashed melancholy and, after a second, another one - "... again ...", after which the game again flew to the main menu. Alice has disappeared from the character roster.
My heart was beating so that, it seemed, at any moment it would pierce the chest or break at all, unable to keep up with such a pace, but my thoughts were empty. It seemed like a kind of quiet hysteria - I seemed to be watching myself with a distance, without thoughts and worries, while I had to die of fear. Probably, at that moment my nerves could not withstand all this load, and I surrendered to this devilry. Whatever it was, I thought, and whatever it cost me, but I have to reach the end. Still aloof, I went into single player, created a new character, an old man named Erich, loaded! Born and continued the game.
Here my sanity returned to me, instantly enveloped in a sticky web of fear. Now, it seemed, not only did the game not want to let me go, but I also became dependent on the mystery that awaited me at the end. In the world, as far as I saw, nothing outwardly changed, so I, still insanely frightened by what had happened, began to arm Erich. The merchants still mistook the character for Nat, but now they seemed to be more cautious, more distrustful. Until a certain time, I took it for the fruit of my own agitated imagination, which adjusted fantasies to reality, but then ...
Then something unexpected happened. Having crafted the Phoenix Blaster (yes, by this time I had already been to Hell and made sure that it was impossible to get into the Womb through it, as well as simply getting below the usual edge of the map), at first I waited a long time for the meteorite to fall to make cartridges out of it, but then, without waiting, he went to the arms dealer in order to buy it, albeit bad, but still some kind of ammunition. Even then, when, during a conversation with him, the same window opened as in a conversation with Father, I clearly understood that something terrible was about to happen.
- Natt? .. Stop ... You’re not Natt. You’re not! - the words were printed one at a time, as if the merchant pronounced them, - What have you done? I… I know… gods’ pain… blood… womb… They’re all gonna pay… They’re all gonna die, Natt, can you hear me ?! THEY'RE ALL GONNA DIE !!! And you, devil child, you will be the first one!
With an extremely drawn movement, he drew a pistol, apparently from his shoulder holster, twitched the bolt, and shot Erich twice in the head. I shuddered - the sounds were not at all what they usually were. Not the pitiful beeping of a weak toy pistol, but real, loud and echoing shots, accompanied by a clearly audible release from the safety lock and the sound of falling shell cases. The bullets went through Erich without causing him any harm and crashed into the wall, and the arms dealer backed away, lowering his weapon. For a second, I saw real, genuine horror on his face and “Well then ...” was added in the still open window. The window closed, and the merchant, turning around, ran through the open doors of the houses, in each of them thrusting several bullets into their inhabitants. The sounds of shots were heard from the speakers literally like a machine-gun burst, and at the bottom of the screen there appeared the inscriptions "Matha-Naeg'on killed Clayton Brawl", "Emilio Consigliori had tasted Matha-Naeg'on's deal", "Airwing Skyslide has been shooted by Matha-Naeg'on "And the like. I ran after him, on the run with horror examining the results of the real massacre that Matsa committed in just a few seconds. Bullets accurately found their victims, blood already abundantly watered the walls, furnishings, sometimes whole torn pieces of meat lay next to the immovable corpses. After running through all the houses, I realized that the crazy merchant was in the cemetery.

The last successful shot, Erich and Matsa-Nig "he
In the morning twilight, when the moon had already disappeared behind the horizon, and the sun had not yet come out, Matsa-Naig "he was kneeling at the farthest grave, whispering something under his breath, and his indistinct whispering was already coming from the speakers. Instantly I understood. that he had already heard this whisper in the depths of the Womb, among dozens of other frightening monologues. Matsa-Naig "he took the clip out of the pistol, examined it, pronounced" The last one "clearly and, finally looking over his shoulder at Erich, put the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Blood, mixed with brains, meat and fragments of a skull, flew out of the back of his head in a stream, and Matsa himself, turning with a gaping wound to the screen, fell on his side and froze.
"Now all of them are dead, Natt" belatedly appeared at the bottom of the screen.
The sun did not rise, and the dusky sky took on a bloody hue. Time stood still, and now even the newly crafted watch showed only "pa: th". However, I didn't care. A separate section of time simply fell out of my memory, and I came to my senses only when Erich stood at the entrance to the dungeon, which had already ceased to be such. Now each block, which was once a brick, has become part of the very organic matter of which the womb consisted, and the clock at the entrance immediately switched to "wo: mb". Obviously, the dungeon simply ceased to exist, becoming part of the Womb.
Having descended to the place where the palace used to begin, I ventured to move away from the umbilical cord and go west, in order to see the Father again. All those randomly generated characters that attacked me here before have changed significantly. Now they looked as if they had been hastily sewn from the torn pieces of their own bodies, and the weapons I was familiar with were replaced by bloody hooks, similar to medieval instruments of torture. Each of these walking dead were whispering something that I already heard in the round dance of voices that followed me in the womb. When, finally, I made my way to the throne room, everything looked radically different there - the portraits of aristocrats on the walls changed to sprites of those organic monsters that I met in the womb, all furnishings were half rotted, and in the place where they used to be the throne of the Father, the same head with a severed jaw towered. Unable to withstand this sight any longer, and barely restraining myself before not screaming at the whole apartment, I, without stopping, rushed to the umbilical cord, continuing my descent, without imagining my own goal. Already blindly orienting myself in the darkness that surrounded me almost immediately, I got to the very golden chest where Natt died and opened it. Inside lay one "Night's Edge" and the same "Mystery Blade". The latter still could not be picked up, so, armed with the remaining Night's Edge, Erich continued to advance deeper into the Maw, illuminating his path with brief flashes of weapons.
After, as far as I understood, fifty thousand blocks of depth, the cursor disappeared from the screen, and soon all other interface elements, leaving only a blank screen with the character and the Womb. Escape no longer opened the inventory, and picked up items were no longer highlighted in the pop-up caption. Monsters from the background, like the one that killed Alice, continued to appear at great depths, but against them I literally immediately worked out tactics - first I went down as far as possible, then abruptly changed direction and went up. Deadly bites passed by, even if such maneuvers and greatly slowed my progress down. Some of the side tunnels previously encountered in the Womb were partially overgrown with flesh, although it was quite possible to get into them, if desired, but I did not want to.
From about seventy thousand blocks deep, the monsters from the background stopped appearing. It seemed that the game realized that it wouldn’t take me now, and now it was hastily working out a different tactic. At a certain moment, the voices died down, and they were replaced by rustling and chomping, which clearly sounded to me like the sound of rotting meat being thrown into the mouths of starving dogs, and the surface of the blocks organizing the tunnel began to change. Almost immediately, I noticed that the organics began to move, as if they were covered with thousands of small tentacles, and some kind of synchronicity and regularity appeared in the previously disordered pulsating movement of the walls. Now this place looked like a living organism, striving to absorb the invading enemy.
Soon, prickly growths began to appear on the walls of the Maw, the tentacles lengthened, and the previously simply pulsating flesh began to shudder rhythmically like muscles. From somewhere there was a quiet squelching sound, growing louder and louder with each repetition, until it finally turned into a distinct inhuman scream. Something seemed to be approaching from the depths of the tunnel, and the walls of the Maw responded to every cry of this unknown creature. The screen began to blink, and it was absolutely impossible to determine whether the Womb or the monitor itself was darkening, and in the intervals between screams, "white noise" passed along the edges of the screen. Due to too loud noises, I tried to turn off the speakers, but the switch itself seemed to be stuck, and I simply could not force myself to tear myself away from the screen for a second and remove the cord from the outlet. However, he did not want to.
And again, at the peak of the heart-rending scream, an indefinable shadow swept behind Erich. More precisely, she seemed to merge into him from the background, and I lost control of the character. Erich jerked convulsively and somehow unnaturally slowly turned to the screen. His mouth moved silently, as if Erich was trying to say something, but I could not read anything on my lips, no matter how hard I tried. Suddenly, the old man arched his whole body and, with terrifying ease, thrusting his hands into his chest, tore it open with the disgustingly realistic sound of tearing skin and breaking bones. But instead of entrails, a skeleton or anything else, there was only a pulsating darkness inside, blacker than the blackest color, which, as if reluctantly, released thin tentacles from the chest of the still standing old man and launched them into the rest of his body. Erich looked up from the place where he was caught by this something, slowly rose into the air and began to change. The legs lengthened and became covered with spiny growths, an additional pair of limbs grew out of the shoulders, like either praying mantis sickles, or folded wings, the head was pulled into the denser torso, and in the middle of the former chest an eye opened with three pupils, each of which, moving independently of the others, slid across the screen, focusing almost immediately on ... Me? What had just been my character turned on its hips, gathered into a ball and jerked right onto the screen, instantly expanding in size. The last thing I saw this time was a paw outstretched to the screen, in the palm of which its mouth bared with thousands of small and insanely sharp teeth. "Finally, you were slain ..." - flashed on a black screen, and the game flew back to the main menu. The luminaries in it did not move, the sky acquired the same red hue, the music disappeared, being replaced by the general hum of the voices of the Womb, and the only item was “See the end”.
Probably, I was still in a state of extreme stress - only this can explain the fact that my hand did not reach out to the button to turn off the computer or monitor, not to the cord going from the outlet to the power supply, not to the phone, but to the mouse in order to click on the only possible option. I simply didn’t have the strength to scream, and, without noticing myself, I bit my tongue to pain and was now convulsively swallowing salty blood. It seemed that every cell of my body was shaking, fear completely occupied my consciousness and took possession of my thoughts. Not fear of something obvious, of the realism of what is happening to my characters, no, but an animal fear of the unknown, of what awaits me at the bottom of the Womb.
But that was the end. Even if nothing had changed in the main menu of the game, and the last blade, "Mystery Blade", would not have been waiting for me on the way to the Womb, I would have understood with crystal clarity that this would be my last descent into the Womb, I just felt would. And now I just had to find out how it would end. Don't get me wrong: if I saw myself from the outside, then in the morning I would force myself to delete the game and forget about it, but it's one thing to watch from the outside, and quite another to participate in it myself.
The world loaded immediately, even without creating a new character and loading. The character turned out to be Nett, as he was from the very beginning, without any kind of armor. The interface never appeared, and it was simply impossible to open inventory or chests. The world is still "stuck" at the stage of bloody twilight, absolutely nothing has changed in the village, the bodies of NPCs, without disappearing anywhere, lay in their places in constant, extremely realistic poses, and their blood still covered the walls and floor. Nett was equipped in a very strange way - he had an instrument in his hands when I needed it. If I, who was sitting behind the screen, wanted to use the grappling hook, then Nett did so; if I wanted to shoot, he shot, if he hit with a sword, he beat, dig - he dug. He literally guessed all my thoughts, even when I tried to misuse a tool or weapon.
However, the amendment. It was simply impossible to use tools or weapons for their intended purpose. Three changes took place all over the world: absolutely all monsters, both ordinary and organic, disappeared from it, and in places under the ground, pieces of pulsating flesh began to appear, exactly the same as the Womb was made of. It became impossible to rebuild the world - even ordinary blocks of earth were not broken from nowhere with a red-hot pickaxe taken from nowhere. The only thing that remained working and unchanged was the hook, which I had to resort to several times on the way to the former dungeon. In addition, a watch, now showing wo: mb everywhere, and a depth gauge were permanently equipped on Nett.
I made my way to the Maw while simultaneously examining what this world had become. He was corroded by an infection that had come from the Womb - where it touched the surface, instead of grass, the very moving shoots grew, and the trees turned into twisted limbs of the color of raw meat. The contaminated ponds were turning crimson, as if they were filled with ... blood? I didn't even want to think about it, so as not to go crazy. Instead of one of the hills on the way to the west, I found a huge pile of stirring meat, which I did not even dare to touch, enclosing it with a wooden dome. And, as already mentioned, monsters have disappeared all over the world.
It was even more frightening than those incredible horrors lurking in the darkness of the Maw. If any monster could be tried to be explained as AI, then behind the emptiness, gloom and decisiveness of this world, it seemed, someone's cold-blooded and cruel mind was hiding, who put on a play in which I was assigned the role of a victim. Then I could not even roughly imagine how right I was in these terrible and hectic thoughts.
When I got to the entrance to the former dungeon, I suddenly wanted to see the Child. The umbilical cord was still growing through the roof of the organic tower and, grabbing onto it with a hook, Natt climbed up. It was no longer an embryo. When I saw it for the first time, it occupied a total of four screens, like a flying island, but now ... Now it took up much more space and looked like a fully formed human baby. He was ready to be born, but what did his birth just mean for this world and, which is much more important, for me? ..
I couldn't stay on it. It was just ... disgusting, or what? Nett jumped down, I didn't even think about the fact that he could break. However, this did not happen - the infected blocks next to the tower seemed to bend, stopping the fall of Nat, and after a second they pushed him out. The womb does not want me to perish, I thought then; it had prepared a completely different death for me. I caught myself on the fact that I was already identifying myself with Nat, and I felt creepy. In any case, the only way was the way down, and now I had to go through it. Natt started downhill.
The womb had changed only in one thing - all the side passages and branches, including the former palace, were overgrown, and now the path along which I walked did not leave an iota from the umbilical cord. I never met a single monster, but at times it seemed that somewhere on the verge of darkness and shadow, silhouettes appear .... Characters? NPC? Sometimes it seemed to me that I saw in the shadow of a grinning Mats-Nig "she with a hole in her skull, I notice the shadow of a changed Erich slipping in the background, I see a gray-haired Natt and the others who have met me over the past two days and for whom I have played. the disgusting smell of the Womb, which had come from nowhere, was hammered, but the voices disappeared. Absolute silence, only the sounds of the character himself, the measured, hoarse breathing of the Womb and my frantically beating heart. It was even scary to open my mouth and say at least something, it seemed that the Womb would hear me ...
Meanwhile, Natt made it to the golden chest. There was still no cursor, and the entire interface had not appeared, so I wondered how I would get the last sword out of there. However, this was not needed - as soon as I brought Natt to the chest, he himself, again, with an animation that did not exist in Terraria, opened it and pulled out a blade. It looked intimidating - it oozed blood, insanely realistic blood that dripped from the blade with every movement, echoing in the speakers. In addition, it could not be used more often than once every five seconds, but the light from the impact illuminated the entire screen at once, although it quickly faded away. Armed with the last sword, Nett continued his descent, and meanwhile I was recollecting the events that had occurred in the Womb with the previous characters.
Here Natt died, the dome under which I had hoped to hide him, and so it disappeared, and the blood was still flowing down its walls. Here I turned to see that very severed head, but now the passage is overgrown with the flesh of the Maw. Here, something brutally killed Alice, blood still flowed from the very place, as if the corpse had not disappeared anywhere. Here the Maw first began to change, tiny tentacles still stirring on the pulsing walls. And here something got into Erich and tried to attack me. With each new swing of this slow sword, not only a picture appeared on the screen, but also an image of the same place when the Maw was more normal, or something, appeared in my memory ... In any case, when I saw the monsters, it was much easier for me. I knew who I needed to hit, I had a rough guess of what I needed to be afraid of, I saw the target. And now ... Sheer uncertainty. And it was depressing.
Suddenly the Womb was over. The passage widened and led me into a huge cavity, similar to an enlarged Hell, in which instead of blocks of dust and hellish stone there was flesh and bone, and instead of lava - blood. The depth gauge, as if waiting until I see what is displayed on it ?????? feet below, disappeared along with the clock, leaving me alone with the darkness. I have overcome a hundred thousand blocks of depth, and now is the time to find out why all this happened at all.
The cave led me west, but not for long. After some time ... a palace appeared. The one that was in the dungeon, but changed. Each cell in it consisted of carefully mixed parts of the bodies of people and monsters. The floor, walls, furnishings - absolutely everything was in its place, as in the former luxurious palace, but that beauty was replaced by filth. It was disgusting: hands, legs, heads, wings, bones, slugs, bats, whole parts of bosses lay like bricks in the walls - everything mixed in order to create this eerie place.
Almost immediately I went out to the main hall. The portraits in the hall were replaced with images of all my dead characters and NPCs. Nett, Alice, Erich, Matsa-Nig "he, all the other merchants - they were all depicted in the portraits as they were at the time of their death. At the farthest edge of the hall, instead of a throne, there was again the same head from whose forehead the umbilical cord began. , and on her fallen out tongue, like on a throne, Father sat, bored leaning on his hand and looking at Nat and the remains lying in front of him ...
The remains of all those who were depicted in the portraits.
Father slowly got up from his "throne", keeping as arrogant as before, went down the steps to Natt and spoke. I shuddered - Father's voice sounded not in the speakers, but right in my head.
“So you came, Natt. We can finally end this. Do you have something to say before you die?
“I… I…” I didn’t even notice that I didn’t have a microphone. And it was so clear that in order to communicate with the Father, he was not needed. I barely squeezed out the only question that tormented me the most at that time - Who are you ?!
- And ... - he stretched a little disappointedly, - If you haven't guessed yet ... In your world, I am an error in the generation of virtual data. Let's put it this way: because of a hole in the code of my world, someone was created who was supposed to be responsible for the troubles of the whole world. I am the answer of the card to a question that never crossed your mind simply because it is beyond your boundaries of thought. Who cursed the old man guarding the dungeons? Who created the dungeon itself? Where do monsters all over the world come from? Where did the zones of infection and the eyes of Cthulhu come from? For you, this is all the invention of the developers. For them, too. But this is not enough for my world. I am the consistency of all evil that has infected the innumerable worlds that you create for your amusement. And that gives me the right to some ... privileges ...
His father walked past Natt and, being behind, turned to the screen with the left side of his body, which he had never turned before. There ... It wasn't even dark or lack of texture. There was an absolute, sucking void, to which it was scary to touch through the glass of the monitor, which seemed to absorb absolutely everything that was nearby.
- That's better? - a bit of cold mockery of a sadist tormenting his victim flashed in Father's voice, - What do you want to know now? Who is the Mother, what is the Child, why did I lure you into the Womb?
I nodded convulsively, unable to utter a sound, but Father, it seemed, was enough.
“Well, there’s nowhere to rush, you’re not going anywhere anyway,” to my relief (if this word is generally applicable to the state in which I was), Father again turned to the screen with the “normal” side and returned to the “throne” ", - Mother ... I must admit, I am surprised that you did not guess. The Mother is this whole world, and the Child is my kind of successor, whom she raises through the Womb I have created. But there is one small difference - I am limited by the framework of these fictional worlds, but the Child is not. As soon as it is born, it will be in both worlds at once, Natt, and in yours and in mine. It will create a new Womb in your world and infect it just like it infected this one. But it’s impossible to create anything outside of one world by the forces of one world, which is why we needed sacrifices, Nat. Yes, sacrifices. Each of those you choose to call your characters is an invader to this world. You lowered him into the Womb and literally fed him to the Mother, who, with the help of the received energy, raised the child. Then the inhabitants of your village became separate individuals, the result is known to you. And now, Natt, you are here, and you are the last living soul in this world. All the rest have already gone into the expense of supporting Mother until the time you get here. You are the last link in my plan, Nat, and I thank you for coming on time. Now, be so kind, die.
- DIE YOURSELF! - I shouted it in a full voice, already not at all aware of what I was doing, and Nett ran at Father, brandishing his sword. With horror, I realized that I could see a smug smile on his lips, but it was too late. At that moment, when the sword was supposed to cut him in half, Father went into the background, with an ostentatious movement, he pulled the blade out of Natt's hands and chopped off his head with one blow. A bloody fountain burst out of the neck, and the body sagged heavily, but this was not the main thing either ...
The screen shook and started blinking. Several bodies fell from the ceiling, and Father, throwing his sword over his shoulder, stood and with a smile looked directly at me through the monitor. The last thing I saw then was the inscription “The Child was born” at the bottom and immediately hit the power button of the system unit with my hand. The computer immediately and readily shut down, but this seemed to me not enough. Obsessed with the only thought to immediately delete the game and everything associated with it, or better simply format the disk, I turned on the computer again. He turned on without any loading and immediately showed me a shaking screen with Father walking through the remains of all my characters. He looked at me and calmly said, "It's too late."
I looked down at my hands. To my indescribable horror, the keyboard turned into the same organic matter from the Womb, and the keys on it were replaced by a whole forest of slimy tentacles clinging to my fingers. The mouse became covered with bones, becoming like a chest, from which, instead of a cord, the same umbilical cord came. The screen blurred, and the walls of the system unit turned into the walls of the Womb. I screamed and dashed backwards and fell with the chair. At the same time, there was a stomp in the next room and my mother burst into the room.
- What's happened?! - I could not answer anything, just pointed my finger at the computer that had become quite ordinary. Crazy, as my mother told me later, looking at him with a glance, I jumped to my feet and, as if possessed by something, tore off the side cover from the system unit. Inside I saw this time an absolutely real piece of flesh from the Womb, formed in place of the hard disk, which pulled its thin slimy tentacles towards me. Then, grabbing the entire system unit at once, pulling out the cords and dropping the monitor on the floor, I ran to the window and threw the system unit right into it, knocking out the glass. The sistemnik flew twelve floors and crashed into a car parked below, and I lost consciousness on the spot.
I think you yourself understand what happened next. They tested me for a long time for drug use, for mental state, and as a result, they found nothing but severe overwork and stress, aggravated by a temporary clouding of mind. I was prescribed some pills, and for the third week I have been sitting without a computer, but that was all. We paid compensation to the owner of the car, but in the system, which was searched at the time when I was passed out, we did not find a hard drive, which I was constantly raving about. The only evidence that all this was not delirious is the pictures I took throughout the game. I dictate this text to my friend, because now I am afraid to approach the computer ...
And you know what? I will not tell you "do not play Terraria." This is stupid, I myself understand, even from the point of view of the story told by the Father, not in every world the quintessence of evil is generated. I just want to say ... There are times when you shouldn't give a damn about this damn curiosity. Don't repeat my mistakes.
PS: Since then, I have been dreaming of the Womb every night.

Terraria is an indie sandbox adventure game created by Re-Logic. In this game you can explore the world around you, work on the creation of objects and structures, and also fight against randomly generated enemies. The musical component of the game was developed by the "Resonance array" studio.

Re-Logic started developing Terraria back in January 2011 using Microsoft's XNA toolkit. The version of the game for the Windows operating system appeared on May 16, 2011. On this day alone, 50 thousand copies of the game were sold, and the number of online players reached 17 thousand. During the first week of being on Steam, 200 thousand copies of the game were sold - thanks to this "Terraria" overtook the famous "Portal 2" and "The Witcher 2". Last January, Terraria sold 2 million copies.

In March 2013, a version of the game appeared for the Xbox and PlayStation consoles. In Europe and Australia, the release for game consoles took place on May 15 last year. In August 2013, a version of the game for iOS devices appeared. The developer of this version is a company from the Netherlands, Codeglue.

Recently, the official website announced that the game will be ported to OSX and Linux. In support of this information, the developers have provided screenshots of "Terraria" against the background of the desktops of these "operating systems".

However, this is not all the "niceties" from the developer company. If you've played Terraria on Windows before, you can now transfer your created game worlds and characters to Linux and OSX. In addition, users of different operating systems can fight on the same server - as a result, a kind of cross-platform gameplay will be released.

If you previously bought the Windows version of the game, then the version for Linux and Mac OS will get you absolutely free. It is really very convenient: at home you can play on a desktop computer with Windows, in the service - on a laptop with Linux, during class - on a modern laptop from Apple.

You can buy the game in the service of electronic distribution of games -.

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What I'm going to tell you about now happened just a few days ago and changed my life forever. Believe all this or not - it is entirely your right. I myself, remembering the details of past events and composing a complete picture of what happened from the last pieces, could doubt the clarity of my own reason, but the flash drive, which I now, without releasing for a moment, squeeze in my hand day and night, serves as the only and indisputable proof that I'm not crazy yet. Whether it was a happy coincidence of circumstances, a blessing of the gods, in which I never believed, whether it was a blind chance - I still don't know what saved me ... However, enough empty words, let's get down to business.

The first day:

My name is ... But, however, it does not matter, because it will not be so much about me. Suffice it to say that I am almost a third year student, one of many who are now taking their final exams and covering their debts. I'm not a diligent student, not college pride, but an ordinary guy who still lives with his mother, loves to sit at the computer, digging on Facebook, or hanging in some new toy. Recently, I have become interested in playing Terraria and sometimes spent whole evenings excavating cave complexes and erecting huge and luxurious castles on the surface. I had already turned off the Internet for two weeks, and there was nothing to pay for it, so I fought with only skeletons and other computer vermin, unable to break out into the desired multiplayer and take part in any large-scale project. Frankly, it didn't really bother me, but it was still boring, so when my friend, whose name also does not play a special role in my story, called me and told me about the release of version 1.0.5, excitedly listing the tidbits from the list changes, I immediately asked him to bring me the game on a flash drive. As it turned out later, I made a huge mistake.
The next day, the twenty-fourth of June, I was already uploading a new hacked version of the game to my computer and listening to my friend's “valuable advice” that he had spied on in the official preview. After waiting for him to leave and leave me alone with the desired game, I launched the client, glanced with satisfaction at the inscription "1.0.5" in the lower left corner of the window and went into the single-player game. All maps and characters from 1.0.4 were already carefully packed by me into a zip archive and removed from the corresponding folders so that I could start a new world from scratch. By clicking on "create character" I quickly created a completely ordinary character - a guy, brown-haired, in a bright green jacket, blue pants and brown boots, with a standard skin color. Naturally, the first thing I wanted to do was try a new level of difficulty, so I changed it to hardcore without any hesitation.
I called the character the first name that came to my mind, Matt, but my finger treacherously jumped off the key and instead of M wrote N. I clicked on the sequel before I had time to notice my mistake, so the character was named Natt. I didn't want to create and paint the character again, so I proceeded to create the world, choosing a medium size. The game, strangely enough, didn’t even ask what I want to name the created world, but it didn’t upset me a bit, I still always left the name as standard. A minute later, the world was created and automatically named "! Born". Surprised by this strange name, more like a world generation seed, I started the game.
The first thing that caught my eye after loading the world was its absolutely terrible generation. A friend, of course, warned me that in 1.0.5 Blue did something with the generation of worlds, which made them much less beautiful than before, but I was still not ready for such a dramatic change. After evaluating the new possibilities of the guide and asking him a lot about the purpose of all sorts of nonsense, like acorns or wooden beams, I moved on to the hectic construction of a hut for the first night. In the process of chopping down the tree, it was discovered that to the west of the spawn, just two screens from it, there is an infected zone, which for some time blocked my way to the west. Soon the hut was built, however, rather for show, since Natt danced all night outside its walls, fighting off the persistent zombies with the spear he found and collecting the desired fifty silver from them. The next game day was spent on the construction of small houses for the guide and expected NPCs, and then the usual exploration of the world began, the search for weapons, the extraction of ore and the battle with endless monsters.
During this time, Nett died several times, and each time after his death, the game threw me to the main menu, from where, by re-selecting him from the list of characters, I could start the game on the spawn without all my equipment. Then I was pretty sure that it should be so, and exits to the main menu after death are just part of the hardcore mode, planned by the developers.

Natt is in the finally completed village. I decided to try the gravity potion and filmed the result.

After a few in-game days and out-of-game hours, a dryad had already appeared in my village, and Natt was wearing shadow armor, so my priority goal was to attack Skeletron and destroy the dungeon, after which with a pure soul I could go down to Hell, build myself a farm for alchemical needs and just enjoy the in-game omnipotence. Since the map had already been explored to the east all the way to the ocean, I headed west, devastating the infected zones and killing the worms angry at the destruction of the shadow balls along the way. After some time, the dungeon was discovered, but ...
It looked strange. First, there was no colonnade annex in which Skeletron usually met me. It's just a tower above the entrance to the earth, inside which the damned old man was wandering tiredly, instead of his usual "Come back again at night if you wish to enter" telling me "Come back again at night if you wish to see my Master". I took it as a hint that a new boss was waiting for me inside the dungeon, added by the developers in 1.0.5, and was only surprised that a friend did not mention him to me.
Secondly, which is much more important, walking from the depths of the dungeon and making its way through the broken roof of the tower, a strange, bodily-looking stem, unknown to me, rose. It was textured in the background, but the hook was clinging to it, so I, torn apart by curiosity, climbed up to find out where this stem leads. Three hundred blocks later, when I was almost sure that the stem is exclusively decorative and much more interesting discoveries await me at the bottom of the dungeon, the theme of the world has changed, the background has become a little darker, and the sky has become a bad red color. By analogy with the "Bloody Moon", the "Bloody Sun" immediately occurred to me, which quite accurately described the appearance of the world. Some kind of unintelligible noise sounded in the speakers, similar to someone's quiet muttering, but I mentally attributed this detail to the desire of the developers to make the new location unknown to me as atmospheric as possible.

Dungeon entrance, umbilical cord.

After a couple of screens of climbing up, I shuddered when I saw where the hook was attached. It was a huge, twisted and hunched embryo, the size of a flying island, but consisting not of separate blocks, but solid, like all the monsters and bosses of Terraria. I froze for a second, feeling the rapid beating of my own heart and literally persuading myself to collect my thoughts and rise even higher to visit the back of the embryo. In the end, at one time I had about the same reaction to the Eye of Cthulhu, only he attacked me, and this embryo ... he ... did absolutely nothing, only his chest rose and fell regularly with rhythmic, calm breathing. Having overpowered myself, I climbed onto the embryo in several jumps and, walking along its back and finding absolutely nothing interesting, I hit it with a pickaxe for a test.
There was a terrible scream, almost the loudest and shrill I have ever heard, and Natt was literally torn to pieces for no apparent reason. Frightened, I jumped away from the monitor along with the chair, catching my breath. It's definitely time for the developers to end up with Lovecraft horrors, I thought, especially so sudden. The game returned to the main screen, and I, reaching for the mouse, clicked on "single player" and, hovering the mouse over Natt, was once again dumbfounded. Goosebumps ran down my spine and beads of sweat beaded on my forehead - Nett has changed. He turned gray, turned pale, his clothes faded, and his eyes became dull, as if he had not seen white light for many years, being imprisoned somewhere deep underground. Barely forcing myself to click first at his name, and then at the name of the world, I leaned back in my chair, mentally assuring myself that the developers simply went too far with the realism of their next monster. As soon as the world loaded, I was surprised again, although I thought I was ready for any oddities.
My small village looked as if at least a century had passed in these two minutes of my absence from the world. There were gaps in the walls, cobwebs hung in places, almost all furnishings, except for chests, disappeared, and not a single NPC was visible in the entire village. However, I soon found a reason for this - a little east of the village a small cemetery appeared with the names of all my merchants, guide, dryad and nurse, although, of course, these names were not mentioned anywhere before. Oddly enough, this detail reassured me - I believed that all this was just a cunning and convincing trick of the developers. And when, after a couple of minutes, all the NPCs came to my village again, each of which was no different from the previous ones, I was finally convinced of the correctness of my theory.

Aged Natt in a ruined village.

Natt is at the cemetery next to an already rebuilt village.

It took me two more playing days to restore all my uniforms, after which it was decided to go on a second trip to the dungeon. When I reached him, I immediately, without giving myself time to think, went to the old man. Despite the fact that it was late at night, he still kept repeating only "They call me Old Man" and, as it turned out, did not interfere with my promotion. Leaving the obviously buggy NPC on the surface and realizing that I was not destined to see the clothing merchant, I went down into the dungeon. The same umbilical cord twisted along the entire vertical shaft, casting on me bad thoughts about what awaits me at its other end. In the three lateral branches of the main tunnel, I did not find anything interesting, and only at the bottom, where, leaving the umbilical cord, the chains of catacombs diverged in all directions, I began to carry with the prey. Fighting off skeletons and flying skulls, I routinely robbed chests, weighing in my mind what exactly I should take with me and what to leave, and, imperceptibly for myself, moving further and further west.
At some point, I realized that the situation had completely changed. Now I wanted to call this place not a dungeon, but a palace. The floor and walls were made of two-color blocks I had never seen before, pictures of vague content hung on the walls, sofas, long dining tables made of carved ebony wood, vases of flowers hung on the floor, huge crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and all this was depicted down to the smallest detail, which only allows the maximum resolution of objects. I’m unlikely to be lying if I say that I had an idea of ​​how to craft at least one of the items I saw there. All my attempts to break anything with a hammer or explosives are guaranteed to be crowned with failure. Enemies have also changed - skeletons have been replaced by people, as if randomly generated players with randomly issued game weapons. Swordsmen, mages, archers and demolitionists - they all attacked me in a single crowd, behaving much smarter than the usual AI, as if ... As if I were really playing against living people.

Path to the palace, generated by "monsters".

Finally, my path ended up in the last huge room, similar to a throne room, on the walls of which, in gilded frames, hung portraits of people unknown to me. At the western edge of the hall, on a golden throne, sat someone who, according to the pop-up inscription, was called The Father. In his presence, all the enemies attacking me immediately became neutral and hastily left the throne room, as if afraid of their, no doubt, master. Father got up from his throne and, slowly descending the steps, walked over to Natt and began a conversation. He was distinguished from all the other creatures of Terraria by the incredible detail of actions - he blinked, gestured freely when communicating, realistically rearranged his legs, even sometimes thoughtfully scratching his own beard, and at the same time did not look like a scripted scene.
When he spoke to me, a wide window of dialogue opened. Not a thin strip with prepared text at the top of the screen, but a wide interface on which words appeared one at a time, as if the Father dictated them to an invisible handwritten. Instead of buttons to continue or end the conversation, there was a small field at the bottom, in which you could write whatever you wanted and enter to answer the Father. At that moment it did not even occur to me to try to write something meaningless or on the l33t-spike to check how my "interlocutor" would react to it, I was too scared and excited by everything that was happening to me.
My father, in vague terms, told me that the embryo above the tower is a devilish child that must be killed for the good of the whole world, and who can only be killed if you go down even lower, into a certain Womb, in order to find the base of the umbilical cord there and cut it. My father ignored any of my questions about his personality, but he answered one question - “What happens if I don’t do this?”. My father turned to face the screen, looking directly at me, and said, "You will die." At that moment it seemed to me that I even heard his voice uttering these simple words, which, however, frightened me much more than even the terrible find in the sky. They, and I now understood it for sure, even though I refused to believe it, were not addressed to my character, but to me, sitting in front of the screen and trembling with fear. And again, I could hardly reassure myself with the thought that all this was part of a beautiful and very convincing innovation, a quest from an NPC, although a large number of strange things I saw haunted me.
My father fell silent and did not say another word, not answering the many questions that I tried to ask him. I had no choice but to return through the empty corridors of the palace back to the dungeon, tormented by a vague and bad presentiment. Having reached the umbilical cord, I felt a strong, spontaneous desire to close and delete the game, once and for all, so that I would never go into it again and not tell anyone exactly what happened to me today. Unfortunately, then I was able to overcome this desire, once again convincing myself that so far nothing happened that, in theory, could not be added by the developers to the new version, and began to go down the umbilical cord.
After a while of the descent, really strange things began to happen. First, the melody of the dungeon gradually faded away and changed to the one that sounded when I saw that embryo. Secondly, the usual monsters have disappeared, and those rustling sounds that are usually played when worms or bone dragons appear, but no one like that has ever appeared in the speakers. Gradually, the blocks that made up the passage, which already seemed to me endless, began more and more often to be replaced by new ones, unknown to me, more like half-dead, realistic greenish flesh, and over time, the background also changed to a constantly pulsating pale tissue with trembling green veins ... It even seemed to me that I could smell a sickening smell coming from this strange place, although now I am almost sure that it did not seem to me at all.
Without a doubt, this was the Womb, but the umbilical cord was still not going to end. I was really scared - today I was going to play in the "sandbox", kill bosses, experiment with innovations and features, in a word, have plenty of fun, but certainly not spew out bricks with a machine-gun burst. On the other hand, up to a certain point it was really interesting, I wanted to go through this unexpected quest and finally make sure that there are no oddities in the game. Alas, this did not happen.
Over time, monsters finally appeared in the Womb. They were strikingly different from all other monsters in the game - solid pieces of overly realistic meat, each time different, some were many times larger than the character and could only crawl through the tunnels, some, on the contrary, were several pixels in size and flew in flocks. When hovering over any of them, neither the name nor the number of lives was indicated, the amount of damage incurred did not pop up on impacts (although it was possible to kill the monsters, albeit very problematic), and the only loot from these creatures were the torn off body parts. Subsequently, I showed them to the guide, which, as soon as I tried to transfer limbs, heads or internal organs to his crafting help window, immediately and quickly went as far away from the character as possible until he got stuck in the nearest hole or died in any way way.
As I went down, the Maw revealed two more strange qualities. When I finally suspected that, as for a medium-sized world that I was creating, this tunnel went too deep, and came into the Maw with a depth gauge equipped, it stubbornly showed “????? feet below ”, having gone wrong afterwards and on the surface. Once dressed in the Womb, the depth gauge instead of all the numbers began to show question marks, determining only the number of numbers and the "higher-lower" level. However, the five-digit depth indicator really scared me. Even large maps ended at a depth of five thousand blocks, and here the average goes already more than ten thousand ...
The second and most frightening of the newly discovered oddities of this place was that the lower Nett descended, the less any light sources shone. At about twenty thousand blocks, if I was not mistaken in my calculations, nothing could disperse the darkness that enveloped this place. Torches, glowing lamps, water candles, thrown fallen stars, miner's helmet, spells, night vision potions, meteor armor, space pistol shots - nothing at all. We had to move in pitch darkness, and only every two or three screens were blue wandering lights, imperceptibly similar to those with which deep-sea fish lure gullible smaller fish. It was really scary - to move to the quiet groans of the "music" of this place and the rustling of invisible worms in the walls, to jump across dark spaces in which new unknown monsters were waiting for me, to huddle fearfully to the lights and catch my breath between these jerks. The umbilical cord, which sometimes fell into the lighting zone of the "fireflies", still indicated to me that I was on the right track. Soon I found a golden chest in one of the fireflies, which contained three Night's Edge swords and one called Mystery Blade, which looked like a bloody Muramasa. When I tried to grab it, “Not yet” flashed at the bottom of the screen. Only one Night's Edge could be got out of the chest, however, and it was enough for me. As it turned out, only the swing of this blade could slightly dispel the darkness of the Maw, and from that moment the "fireflies" ceased to come across on my way down.
At that moment, I was finally able to break away from the game. It was already getting dark outside the window, although I started playing early in the morning, and I suddenly realized that I hadn't eaten or drank anything all day. Returning to the last "firefly" and, just in case, having built a hastily made wooden dome around me, I curtailed the game and stood up. My lips were dry, and my heart was beating treacherously loudly when, frightened by every rustle, I went into the kitchen to take at least a sip of water and have a snack on a hastily prepared sandwich. Mom had not yet returned from work, so the empty, dark apartment looked frightening in the light of recent events. Before I had time to pour myself a glass of water, a terrible cry came from the room, exactly the same one that I heard then, on the embryo. I literally felt my hair on my head stand on end and, dropping the glass, ran back into the room.
The game was expanded to full screen, and the inscription "You were slain ..." was burning in the middle of the monitor. The dome I built was spattered with blood from the inside, which looked like it was real, flowing down the wooden walls and dripping regularly from the low ceiling. The floor was littered with overly detailed limbs and entrails, and something unintelligible flashed in the background, after which the game immediately flew to the main menu. With a trembling hand, I fumbled for the mouse and, without any desire, mechanically clicked on "single player". Nett disappeared.
At that moment, I was close to screaming in horror. Just as one last straw can break a camel's back, this detail seemed to be enough to make me completely crazy. I hit the power button on the system unit, turned off the computer, and, having drunk a double dose of sedative-sleeping pills, tried to lie down and fall asleep in order to understand in the morning that it was all a dream or my imagination being played out. I had nightmares, as if my room had become part of the Womb: the walls pulsed with streaks of cadaverous-blue veins, something disgusting and frightening was swarming in the corner, and the same umbilical cord was reaching out to me from the monitor screen ... Twice a night I woke up in a cold sweat, turned on the lamp and calmed himself for a long time.
Second day:
Needless to say, the next morning I had absolutely no desire to play Terraria? Without even turning on the computer, I got dressed, had breakfast and went out to get some fresh air to unwind a little. This walk had a calming effect on me - against the background of the beautiful immutability of the real world, yesterday's virtual horrors seemed far-fetched and petty, so I decided to call the friend who brought me the game and tell me about everything that happened. He listened to me with excited interest - he himself had not yet played 1.0.5, having spent all yesterday fighting the viruses that had flooded his computer, but he perceived everything that happened to me the same way I wanted to understand it, that is, as just very elaborate quest from the developers. In the end, curiosity overcame my fear and I returned home and turned on the game again.
Natt really went missing, so I had no choice but to create a new character, the black girl Alice. "! Born" loaded and I continued to play. Nothing has changed in the world, NPCs walked aimlessly around the restored village, occasionally wandering into the cemetery, which I never dared to demolish ...
The cemetery ... Something in it caught my attention, something I remembered that could help me ... Tombstones! Likewise, there was a tombstone at the place where Natt died, and it should have written exactly how he died! Not that I doubted that it was some kind of "background" creature, it just became damn interesting to know what would be written there. Plus, in about the same place there was a chest with swords, without which I did not want to continue the descent, and it was not possible, because the devil knows how long it would take to descend lower and lower.
Armed with supplies that I had prudently kept in a chest in case of another unexpected death, I was about to head towards the dungeon, when I suddenly found belatedly that I was completely devoid of health potions. I returned to the merchant, talked to him, went to the trade menu, skimped and, already ending the conversation, realized that something was wrong. He turned again and froze - "Ah, they will tell tales of Natt some day." I didn’t know how to understand this, it seemed that the merchant was aware of Natt’s death and seemed to be hinting at something ... However, from the next appeal, everything fell into place - “Natt, is it? I’ve heard good things, friend! " The merchant apparently mistook my character for Nat because of some glitch. However, not only the merchant, but also all the other NPCs, each of which had "personal" appeals to the player - "Hey, Natt, wanna buy a big freaking gun, huh?" , “My god, Natt, were you bathing in lava ?!”, “Natt? Such a good name ... I'll name my next bomb N.A.T.T.! " and the like.
The glitch was insignificant, but it was quite enough for a bad feeling to reappear in my soul. Fully armed, I went west again and, reaching the entrance to the "dungeon", began a long descent. This time, it seemed to me that the blocks of the Maw started much closer to the palace than before, as if it was growing in size, eating blocks of stone and bricks of the dungeon, and it was scary. In addition to the depth gauge, I also had a watch with me. Immediately after entering the Womb, they went wrong and stopped showing the time, displaying only "wo: mb", "hæ: ll" and "pa: th" depending on where Alice was at the moment.
This time it was clearly darker in the Womb than the previous one, and the ominous music in the background gradually became louder and clearer. Moaning voices began to break through the bone-chilling, gloomy music, which consisted mainly of the measured booming beats of drums and the low notes of a string instrument, which I associated only with sinners from the second circle of Dante's Hell, and whose believability threw me into shiver. They were heard before, but now it has definitely become something more than a simple surround sound. At the same time, as far as I could see in the dim light of the flashlights, something was happening to the background of the Womb. It seemed that some faces or body parts began to appear on it, but no matter how hard I looked, I still could not finally make sure that this was not the fruit of my agitated imagination.
I continued to descend, and the monsters became more realistic and scary. Trying, for the sake of interest, to go into the dark side tunnel, departing from the central path with the umbilical cord, I almost immediately stumbled upon something that caused me a hundred and fifty damage in one blow and, jumping back, chaotically brandished my sword. Immediately, as if mockingly, a firefly flew in from the central tunnel, illuminating my enemy. It turned out to be a giant half-decayed head without a lower jaw and with a sprawled long tongue, which was drawn so realistically that I felt gagging and jerked away from the screen, just not to see it again. When I finally, having mastered myself, turned back to the screen, the head was gone, only a dead end made of the same pulsating flesh and a "firefly" rushing back. I didn’t want to stay in the dark corridor, especially after what had happened, so I returned to the umbilical cord and continued going down.
I soon got to the place where Natt died. Everything remained in its place - a golden chest, an improvised dome that did not save the character from death, his body parts, blood everywhere, a tombstone ... Seeing this sight, despite the fact that everything was drawn, I felt sick. Bodies disappear after death? In Terraria, there is no such realism of murders? There is no blood in it, is there? Damn it, this is all a game ?!
I pulled myself together. Yes, it's a game. Yes, the realism of death is a feature from the developers, as well as the whole place. Yes, I'm already tired of deceiving myself with this stupid excuse, but what else could I say? Everything that happened to me and my characters could well be justified by the logic of the developers, although some intuitive part of my mind resisted this thought. Alice went to the tombstone and I read the cause of Natt's death.
“Natt has been taken by Mother”
What?! The devil knows how many times over the past two days I was seized with panic, I wanted to immediately exit the game, delete it and never remember my failed journey through the Womb again, but I lacked the courage. Stupid, absurd thoughts were spinning in my head, I imagined what would happen if I did not kill that Child, which Father had warned me about, I imagined how I, the real one, would be swallowed up by pulsating walls at night or even worse ...
Stop.
In the midst of all the madness that washed over me, one intelligible thought made its way. Father, Child, Womb and Mother. These names, in spite of their simplicity, were definitely not accidental, they contained some secret meaning that I had not yet discovered. And if I had already seen the Father, the Child and the Womb, then this is who the Mother is, I had not the slightest idea. My rationalistic ego clearly said that it would be some kind of boss at the bottom of the Womb, for whose sake this whole frightening quest is being performed, it has already drawn me a giant worm or something similar, from which the umbilical cord begins, but the only trouble is that this place is not obeyed rational judgment. More precisely, it obeyed, of course, but as if disguised as reality, so as not to betray its essence. These thoughts made me even worse, but I had to continue.

One of the many photographs of the Womb. Each and every one was unsuccessful, and sometimes the outlines did not coincide with the place that I was trying to shoot. Pictured here is Alice with Night's Edge.

I took out another Night's Edge from the chest, and, lighting it up with waves, I continued to walk down the umbilical cord, fighting off the "organic" monsters. Several times I wanted to stop and, if not quit the game, then at least go to the kitchen and have a snack. At the same time, it seemed to me that I had already sunk a good forty thousand feet below sea level, and I definitely didn’t want to return to the spawn or, even more so, to build a dome around myself and pause the game, therefore, fighting hunger , thirst and fatigue, I continued and continued to descend. The voices in the background became even louder, already overlapping the music. They whispered to each other in a language that I could not even identify approximately. It was more like imitation of a hawk screech than human speech, and the moans eventually developed into sobs, crying and, sometimes, even screams of pain. I muted the speakers to prevent Mom from hearing strange sounds through the two walls, but that didn't really help much.
Suddenly everything changed. The screen twitched, went out for a second, lit up again and, although at first glance nothing changed, I almost immediately noticed that the background was deformed and seemed to flow to where Alice was. I got scared and ran down even faster, not staying in place for a second, but something in the background was faster. The voices ceased whispering and drew out a long, drawn-out note, at first low, like the rumble of a cello, then rising and rising, until finally they turned into a shrill and terrible screech. At the bottom of the screen, “It's wrath has awoken” flashed, and the flesh of the Womb in the background twisted, something large, several times larger than the character, was detached from it, oblong, with sharp steel teeth and, having increased almost the entire background screen, closed its jaws on Alice, and then immediately disappeared again. Simultaneously with the terrible and insanely realistic creak of closed jaws, the voices fell silent, cutting off the high note.
I, frozen, stared at the monitor with glazed eyes, unable to even move before this spectacle. When it was all over, I forcibly unclenched my clenched fists and reached for the keyboard to understand what had happened, but Alice did not move the way I wanted. She, turned to the screen with her left side, slowly swayed, as if she was keeping balance on one left leg, then suddenly, with an animation completely impossible for Terraria, she turned to the screen with the other side and fell. She was missing the entire right half of the body, which was bitten off by this something, and you could see absolutely everything, the insides, bones, the cross section of the skull, everything was damn realistic, as if a real person was cut with a perfectly straight blade, photographed and made a body texture for Alice ... In the middle of the screen the inscription "You were slain ..." flashed melancholy and, after a second, another one - "... again ...", after which the game again flew to the main menu. Alice has disappeared from the character roster.
My heart was beating so that, it seemed, at any moment it would pierce the chest or break at all, unable to keep up with such a pace, but my thoughts were empty. It seemed like a kind of quiet hysteria - I seemed to be watching myself with a distance, without thoughts and worries, while I had to die of fear. Probably, at that moment my nerves could not withstand all this load, and I surrendered to this devilry. Whatever it was, I thought, and whatever it cost me, but I have to reach the end. Still aloof, I went into single player, created a new character, an old man named Erich, loaded! Born and continued the game.
Here my sanity returned to me, instantly enveloped in a sticky web of fear. Now, it seemed, not only did the game not want to let me go, but I also became dependent on the mystery that awaited me at the end. In the world, as far as I saw, nothing outwardly changed, so I, still insanely frightened by what had happened, began to arm Erich. The merchants still mistook the character for Nat, but now they seemed to be more cautious, more distrustful. Until a certain time, I took it for the fruit of my own agitated imagination, which adjusted fantasies to reality, but then ...
Then something unexpected happened. Having crafted the Phoenix Blaster (yes, by this time I had already been to Hell and made sure that it was impossible to get into the Womb through it, as well as simply getting below the usual edge of the map), at first I waited a long time for the meteorite to fall to make cartridges out of it, but then, without waiting, he went to the arms dealer in order to buy it, albeit bad, but still some kind of ammunition. Even then, when, during a conversation with him, the same window opened as in a conversation with Father, I clearly understood that something terrible was about to happen.
- Natt? .. Stop ... You’re not Natt. You’re not! - the words were printed one at a time, as if the merchant pronounced them, - What have you done? I… I know… gods’ pain… blood… womb… They’re all gonna pay… They’re all gonna die, Natt, can you hear me ?! THEY'RE ALL GONNA DIE !!! And you, devil child, you will be the first one!
With an extremely drawn movement, he drew a pistol, apparently from his shoulder holster, twitched the bolt, and shot Erich twice in the head. I shuddered - the sounds were not at all what they usually were. Not the pitiful beeping of a weak toy pistol, but real, loud and echoing shots, accompanied by a clearly audible release from the safety lock and the sound of falling shell cases. The bullets went through Erich without causing him any harm and crashed into the wall, and the arms dealer backed away, lowering his weapon. For a second, I saw real, genuine horror on his face and “Well then ...” was added in the still open window. The window closed, and the merchant, turning around, ran through the open doors of the houses, in each of them thrusting several bullets into their inhabitants. The sounds of shots were heard from the speakers literally like a machine-gun burst, and at the bottom of the screen there appeared the inscriptions "Matha-Naeg'on killed Clayton Brawl", "Emilio Consigliori had tasted Matha-Naeg'on's deal", "Airwing Skyslide has been shooted by Matha-Naeg'on "And the like. I ran after him, on the run with horror examining the results of the real massacre that Matsa committed in just a few seconds. Bullets accurately found their victims, blood already abundantly watered the walls, furnishings, sometimes whole torn pieces of meat lay next to the immovable corpses. After running through all the houses, I realized that the crazy merchant was in the cemetery.

Last Successful Snapshot, Erich and Matsa-Nig'on

In the morning twilight, when the moon had already disappeared behind the horizon, and the sun had not yet come out, Matsa-Nig'on was kneeling at the farthest grave, whispering something under his breath, and his indistinct whispering was already coming from the speakers. Instantly, I realized that I had already heard this whisper in the depths of the Maw, among dozens of other frightening monologues. Matsa-Nig'on took the clip out of the pistol, examined it, pronounced "The last one" clearly and, finally looking over his shoulder at Erich, put the muzzle into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Blood, mixed with brains, meat and fragments of a skull, flew out of the back of his head in a stream, and Matsa himself, turning with a gaping wound to the screen, fell on his side and froze.
"Now all of them are dead, Natt" belatedly appeared at the bottom of the screen.
The sun did not rise, and the dusky sky took on a bloody hue. Time stood still, and now even the newly crafted watch showed only "pa: th". However, I didn't care. A separate section of time simply fell out of my memory, and I came to my senses only when Erich stood at the entrance to the dungeon, which had already ceased to be such. Now each block, which was once a brick, has become part of the very organic matter of which the womb consisted, and the clock at the entrance immediately switched to "wo: mb". Obviously, the dungeon simply ceased to exist, becoming part of the Womb.
Having descended to the place where the palace used to begin, I ventured to move away from the umbilical cord and go west, in order to see the Father again. All those randomly generated characters that attacked me here before have changed significantly. Now they looked as if they had been hastily sewn from the torn pieces of their own bodies, and the weapons I was familiar with were replaced by bloody hooks, similar to medieval instruments of torture. Each of these walking dead were whispering something that I already heard in the round dance of voices that followed me in the womb. When, finally, I made my way to the throne room, everything looked radically different there - the portraits of aristocrats on the walls changed to sprites of those organic monsters that I met in the womb, all furnishings were half rotted, and in the place where they used to be the throne of the Father, the same head with a severed jaw towered. Unable to withstand this sight any longer, and barely restraining myself before not screaming at the whole apartment, I, without stopping, rushed to the umbilical cord, continuing my descent, without imagining my own goal. Already blindly orienting myself in the darkness that surrounded me almost immediately, I got to the very golden chest where Natt died and opened it. Inside lay one "Night's Edge" and the same "Mystery Blade". The latter still could not be picked up, so, armed with the remaining Night's Edge, Erich continued to advance deeper into the Maw, illuminating his path with brief flashes of weapons.
After, as far as I understood, fifty thousand blocks of depth, the cursor disappeared from the screen, and soon all other interface elements, leaving only a blank screen with the character and the Womb. Escape no longer opened the inventory, and picked up items were no longer highlighted in the pop-up caption. Monsters from the background, like the one that killed Alice, continued to appear at great depths, but against them I literally immediately worked out tactics - first I went down as far as possible, then abruptly changed direction and went up. Deadly bites passed by, even if such maneuvers and greatly slowed my progress down. Some of the side tunnels previously encountered in the Womb were partially overgrown with flesh, although it was quite possible to get into them, if desired, but I did not want to.
From about seventy thousand blocks deep, the monsters from the background stopped appearing. It seemed that the game realized that it wouldn’t take me now, and now it was hastily working out a different tactic. At a certain moment, the voices died down, and they were replaced by rustling and chomping, which clearly sounded to me like the sound of rotting meat being thrown into the mouths of starving dogs, and the surface of the blocks organizing the tunnel began to change. Almost immediately, I noticed that the organics began to move, as if they were covered with thousands of small tentacles, and some kind of synchronicity and regularity appeared in the previously disordered pulsating movement of the walls. Now this place looked like a living organism, striving to absorb the invading enemy.
Soon, prickly growths began to appear on the walls of the Maw, the tentacles lengthened, and the previously simply pulsating flesh began to shudder rhythmically like muscles. From somewhere there was a quiet squelching sound, growing louder and louder with each repetition, until it finally turned into a distinct inhuman scream. Something seemed to be approaching from the depths of the tunnel, and the walls of the Maw responded to every cry of this unknown creature. The screen began to blink, and it was absolutely impossible to determine whether the Womb or the monitor itself was darkening, and in the intervals between screams, "white noise" passed along the edges of the screen. Due to too loud noises, I tried to turn off the speakers, but the switch itself seemed to be stuck, and I simply could not force myself to tear myself away from the screen for a second and remove the cord from the outlet. However, he did not want to.
And again, at the peak of the heart-rending scream, an indefinable shadow swept behind Erich. More precisely, she seemed to merge into him from the background, and I lost control of the character. Erich jerked convulsively and somehow unnaturally slowly turned to the screen. His mouth moved silently, as if Erich was trying to say something, but I could not read anything on my lips, no matter how hard I tried. Suddenly, the old man arched his whole body and, with terrifying ease, thrusting his hands into his chest, tore it open with the disgustingly realistic sound of tearing skin and breaking bones. But instead of entrails, a skeleton or anything else, there was only a pulsating darkness inside, blacker than the blackest color, which, as if reluctantly, released thin tentacles from the chest of the still standing old man and launched them into the rest of his body. Erich looked up from the place where he was caught by this something, slowly rose into the air and began to change. The legs lengthened and became covered with spiny growths, an additional pair of limbs grew out of the shoulders, like either praying mantis sickles, or folded wings, the head was pulled into the denser torso, and in the middle of the former chest an eye opened with three pupils, each of which, moving independently of the others, slid across the screen, focusing almost immediately on ... Me? What had just been my character turned on its hips, gathered into a ball and jerked right onto the screen, instantly expanding in size. The last thing I saw this time was a paw outstretched to the screen, in the palm of which its mouth bared with thousands of small and insanely sharp teeth. "Finally, you were slain ..." - flashed on a black screen, and the game flew back to the main menu. The luminaries in it did not move, the sky acquired the same red hue, the music disappeared, being replaced by the general hum of the voices of the Womb, and the only item was “See the end”.
Probably, I was still in a state of extreme stress - only this can explain the fact that my hand did not reach out to the button to turn off the computer or monitor, not to the cord going from the outlet to the power supply, not to the phone, but to the mouse in order to click on the only possible option. I simply didn’t have the strength to scream, and, without noticing myself, I bit my tongue to pain and was now convulsively swallowing salty blood. It seemed that every cell of my body was shaking, fear completely occupied my consciousness and took possession of my thoughts. Not fear of something obvious, of the realism of what is happening to my characters, no, but an animal fear of the unknown, of what awaits me at the bottom of the Womb.
But that was the end. Even if nothing had changed in the main menu of the game, and the last blade, "Mystery Blade", would not have been waiting for me on the way to the Womb, I would have understood with crystal clarity that this would be my last descent into the Womb, I just felt would. And now I just had to find out how it would end. Don't get me wrong: if I saw myself from the outside, then in the morning I would force myself to delete the game and forget about it, but it's one thing to watch from the outside, and quite another to participate in it myself.
The world loaded immediately, even without creating a new character and loading. The character turned out to be Nett, as he was from the very beginning, without any kind of armor. The interface never appeared, and it was simply impossible to open inventory or chests. The world is still "stuck" at the stage of bloody twilight, absolutely nothing has changed in the village, the bodies of NPCs, without disappearing anywhere, lay in their places in constant, extremely realistic poses, and their blood still covered the walls and floor. Nett was equipped in a very strange way - he had an instrument in his hands when I needed it. If I, who was sitting behind the screen, wanted to use the grappling hook, then Nett did so; if I wanted to shoot, he shot, if he hit with a sword, he beat, dig - he dug. He literally guessed all my thoughts, even when I tried to misuse a tool or weapon.
However, the amendment. It was simply impossible to use tools or weapons for their intended purpose. Three changes took place all over the world: absolutely all monsters, both ordinary and organic, disappeared from it, and in places under the ground, pieces of pulsating flesh began to appear, exactly the same as the Womb was made of. It became impossible to rebuild the world - even ordinary blocks of earth were not broken from nowhere with a red-hot pickaxe taken from nowhere. The only thing that remained working and unchanged was the hook, which I had to resort to several times on the way to the former dungeon. In addition, a watch, now showing wo: mb everywhere, and a depth gauge were permanently equipped on Nett.
I made my way to the Maw while simultaneously examining what this world had become. He was corroded by an infection that had come from the Womb - where it touched the surface, instead of grass, the very moving shoots grew, and the trees turned into twisted limbs of the color of raw meat. The contaminated ponds were turning crimson, as if they were filled with ... blood? I didn't even want to think about it, so as not to go crazy. Instead of one of the hills on the way to the west, I found a huge pile of stirring meat, which I did not even dare to touch, enclosing it with a wooden dome. And, as already mentioned, monsters have disappeared all over the world.
It was even more frightening than those incredible horrors lurking in the darkness of the Maw. If any monster could be tried to be explained as AI, then behind the emptiness, gloom and decisiveness of this world, it seemed, someone's cold-blooded and cruel mind was hiding, who put on a play in which I was assigned the role of a victim. Then I could not even roughly imagine how right I was in these terrible and hectic thoughts.
When I got to the entrance to the former dungeon, I suddenly wanted to see the Child. The umbilical cord was still growing through the roof of the organic tower and, grabbing onto it with a hook, Natt climbed up. It was no longer an embryo. When I saw it for the first time, it occupied a total of four screens, like a flying island, but now ... Now it took up much more space and looked like a fully formed human baby. He was ready to be born, but what did his birth just mean for this world and, which is much more important, for me? ..
I couldn't stay on it. It was just ... disgusting, or what? Nett jumped down, I didn't even think about the fact that he could break. However, this did not happen - the infected blocks next to the tower seemed to bend, stopping the fall of Nat, and after a second they pushed him out. The womb does not want me to perish, I thought then; it had prepared a completely different death for me. I caught myself on the fact that I was already identifying myself with Nat, and I felt creepy. In any case, the only way was the way down, and now I had to go through it. Natt started downhill.
The womb had changed only in one thing - all the side passages and branches, including the former palace, were overgrown, and now the path along which I walked did not leave an iota from the umbilical cord. I never met a single monster, but at times it seemed that somewhere on the verge of darkness and shadow, silhouettes appear .... Characters? NPC? Sometimes it seemed to me that I saw in the shadow of a grinning Mats-Nig'on with a hole in his skull, I noticed the shadow of a changed Erich slipping in the background, I saw Natt turned gray and the others who had met me in the last two days and for whom I had played. The disgusting odor of the Womb, which had come from nowhere, was hammered into my nostrils, but the voices disappeared. Absolute silence, only the sounds of the character himself, the measured, hoarse breath of the Womb and my frantically beating heart. It was scary even to open my mouth and say at least something, it seemed that the Maw would hear me.
Meanwhile, Natt made it to the golden chest. There was still no cursor, and the entire interface had not appeared, so I wondered how I would get the last sword out of there. However, this was not needed - as soon as I brought Natt to the chest, he himself, again, with an animation that did not exist in Terraria, opened it and pulled out a blade. It looked intimidating - it oozed blood, insanely realistic blood that dripped from the blade with every movement, echoing in the speakers. In addition, it could not be used more often than once every five seconds, but the light from the impact illuminated the entire screen at once, although it quickly faded away. Armed with the last sword, Nett continued his descent, and meanwhile I was recollecting the events that had occurred in the Womb with the previous characters.
Here Natt died, the dome under which I had hoped to hide him, and so it disappeared, and the blood was still flowing down its walls. Here I turned to see that very severed head, but now the passage is overgrown with the flesh of the Maw. Here, something brutally killed Alice, blood still flowed from the very place, as if the corpse had not disappeared anywhere. Here the Maw first began to change, tiny tentacles still stirring on the pulsing walls. And here something got into Erich and tried to attack me. With each new swing of this slow sword, not only a picture appeared on the screen, but also an image of the same place when the Maw was more normal, or something, appeared in my memory ... In any case, when I saw the monsters, it was much easier for me. I knew who I needed to hit, I had a rough guess of what I needed to be afraid of, I saw the target. And now ... Sheer uncertainty. And it was depressing.
Suddenly the Womb was over. The passage widened and led me into a huge cavity, similar to an enlarged Hell, in which instead of blocks of dust and hellish stone there was flesh and bone, and instead of lava - blood. The depth gauge, as if waiting until I see what is displayed on it ?????? feet below, disappeared along with the clock, leaving me alone with the darkness. I have overcome a hundred thousand blocks of depth, and now is the time to find out why all this happened at all.
The cave led me west, but not for long. After some time ... a palace appeared. The one that was in the dungeon, but changed. Each cell in it consisted of carefully mixed parts of the bodies of people and monsters. The floor, walls, furnishings - absolutely everything was in its place, as in the former luxurious palace, but that beauty was replaced by filth. It was disgusting: hands, legs, heads, wings, bones, slugs, bats, whole parts of bosses lay like bricks in the walls - everything mixed in order to create this eerie place.
Almost immediately I went out to the main hall. The portraits in the hall were replaced with images of all my dead characters and NPCs. Nett, Alice, Erich, Matsa-Nig'on, all the other merchants - they were all depicted in the portraits as they were at the time of their death. At the farthest edge of the hall, instead of a throne, there was again the same head, from the forehead of which the umbilical cord began, and on its fallen tongue, like on a throne, Father was sitting, boredly leaning on his hand and looking at Nat and the remains lying in front of him ...
The remains of all those who were depicted in the portraits.
Father slowly got up from his "throne", keeping as arrogant as before, went down the steps to Natt and spoke. I shuddered - Father's voice sounded not in the speakers, but right in my head.
“So you came, Natt. We can finally end this. Do you have something to say before you die?
“I… I…” I didn’t even notice that I didn’t have a microphone. And it was so clear that in order to communicate with the Father, he was not needed. I barely squeezed out the only question that tormented me the most at that time - Who are you ?!
- And ... - he stretched a little disappointedly, - If you haven't guessed yet ... In your world, I am an error in the generation of virtual data. Let's put it this way: because of a hole in the code of my world, someone was created who was supposed to be responsible for the troubles of the whole world. I am the answer of the card to a question that never crossed your mind simply because it is beyond your boundaries of thought. Who cursed the old man guarding the dungeons? Who created the dungeon itself? Where do monsters all over the world come from? Where did the zones of infection and the eyes of Cthulhu come from? For you, this is all the invention of the developers. For them, too. But this is not enough for my world. I am the consistency of all evil that has infected the innumerable worlds that you create for your amusement. And that gives me the right to some ... privileges ...
His father walked past Natt and, being behind, turned to the screen with the left side of his body, which he had never turned before. There ... It wasn't even dark or lack of texture. There was an absolute, sucking void, to which it was scary to touch through the glass of the monitor, which seemed to absorb absolutely everything that was nearby.
- That's better? - a bit of cold mockery of a sadist tormenting his victim flashed in Father's voice, - What do you want to know now? Who is the Mother, what is the Child, why did I lure you into the Womb?
I nodded convulsively, unable to utter a sound, but Father, it seemed, was enough.
“Well, there’s nowhere to rush, you’re not going anywhere anyway,” to my relief (if this word is generally applicable to the state in which I was), Father again turned to the screen with the “normal” side and returned to the “throne” ", - Mother ... I must admit, I am surprised that you did not guess. The Mother is this whole world, and the Child is my kind of successor, whom she raises through the Womb I have created. But there is one small difference - I am limited by the framework of these fictional worlds, but the Child is not. As soon as it is born, it will be in both worlds at once, Natt, and in yours and in mine. It will create a new Womb in your world and infect it just like it infected this one. But it’s impossible to create anything outside of one world by the forces of one world, which is why we needed sacrifices, Nat. Yes, sacrifices. Each of those you choose to call your characters is an invader to this world. You lowered him into the Womb and literally fed him to the Mother, who, with the help of the received energy, raised the child. Then the inhabitants of your village became separate individuals, the result is known to you. And now, Natt, you are here, and you are the last living soul in this world. All the rest have already gone into the expense of supporting Mother until the time you get here. You are the last link in my plan, Nat, and I thank you for coming on time. Now, be so kind, die.
- DIE YOURSELF! - I shouted it in a full voice, already not at all aware of what I was doing, and Nett ran at Father, brandishing his sword. With horror, I realized that I could see a smug smile on his lips, but it was too late. At that moment, when the sword was supposed to cut him in half, Father went into the background, with an ostentatious movement, he pulled the blade out of Natt's hands and chopped off his head with one blow. A bloody fountain burst out of the neck, and the body sagged heavily, but this was not the main thing either ...
The screen shook and started blinking. Several bodies fell from the ceiling, and Father, throwing his sword over his shoulder, stood and with a smile looked directly at me through the monitor. The last thing I saw then was the inscription “The Child was born” at the bottom and immediately hit the power button of the system unit with my hand. The computer immediately and readily shut down, but this seemed to me not enough. Obsessed with the only thought to immediately delete the game and everything associated with it, or better simply format the disk, I turned on the computer again. He turned on without any loading and immediately showed me a shaking screen with Father walking through the remains of all my characters. He looked at me and calmly said, "It's too late."
I looked down at my hands. To my indescribable horror, the keyboard turned into the same organic matter from the Womb, and the keys on it were replaced by a whole forest of slimy tentacles clinging to my fingers. The mouse became covered with bones, becoming like a chest, from which, instead of a cord, the same umbilical cord came. The screen blurred, and the walls of the system unit turned into the walls of the Womb. I screamed and dashed backwards and fell with the chair. At the same time, there was a stomp in the next room and my mother burst into the room.
- What's happened?! - I could not answer anything, just pointed my finger at the computer that had become quite ordinary. Crazy, as my mother told me later, looking at him with a glance, I jumped to my feet and, as if possessed by something, tore off the side cover from the system unit. Inside I saw this time an absolutely real piece of flesh from the Womb, formed in place of the hard disk, which pulled its thin slimy tentacles towards me. Then, grabbing the entire system unit at once, pulling out the cords and dropping the monitor on the floor, I ran to the window and threw the system unit right into it, knocking out the glass. The sistemnik flew twelve floors and crashed into a car parked below, and I lost consciousness on the spot.
I think you yourself understand what happened next. They tested me for a long time for drug use, for mental state, and as a result, they found nothing but severe overwork and stress, aggravated by a temporary clouding of mind. I was prescribed some pills, and for the third week I have been sitting without a computer, but that was all. We paid compensation to the owner of the car, but in the system, which was searched at the time when I was passed out, we did not find a hard drive, which I was constantly raving about. The only evidence that all this was not delirious is the pictures I took throughout the game. I dictate this text to my friend, because now I am afraid to approach the computer ...
And you know what? I will not tell you "do not play Terraria." This is stupid, I myself understand, even from the point of view of the story told by the Father, not in every world the quintessence of evil is generated. I just want to say ... There are times when you shouldn't give a damn about this damn curiosity. Don't repeat my mistakes.
PS: Since then, I have been dreaming of the Womb every night.

From 4-10-2014, 18:00

Almost everyone who played Minecraft knows this funny story with Herobrine. Ha ha ha, well, yes, about an alternative character who runs around the world, builds all kinds of things and scares the player with his appearance. "Notch's dead brother" ... what nonsense, I thought. In general, I am skeptical about such things and do not wander in the clouds. I do not believe in any ghosts, demons and other garbage there - I need iron facts and proofs. And despite this, I cannot explain what happened to me when I played Terraria. I hope someone was just making fun of me ...

I played single player as usual. It was one of the first worlds I created, but after a while I abandoned it. I didn't delete the character, but just created a new one, in a new world. I wanted to start from scratch and do everything right. I played, everything was fine. Having obtained Molten Armor and the same equipment, I decided to return to the old world and build a normal base there. How to repay him a debt, to make him the way he could come out, if I had more experience and knowledge.

When I loaded this world, it was late evening (game time). I started to demolish the old house (it was pathetic - small rooms, there were only the Instructor and the Trader) and then I saw the inscription on the screen "You feel how everything is getting cold inside" ... It's strange. Does such an inscription appear not only after the destruction of the Shadow Orb? No matter. A few minutes later the night fell - "The bloody moon is rising" ... So that's the point, I thought. I continued to demolish the building, brushing off annoying zombies and demonic eyes. I had excellent equipment, they could not harm me, and it was too lazy to wait locked up until dawn.

And then ... something strange began.

My first character had dark purple hair tied in pigtails, and she was dressed in black and white. And while I was demolishing the walls of the house, I noticed right on the border of the light falling from the torches of some kind of zombie. It was too dark, I could only make out his legs and thought that he was just stuck behind a hillock - he didn't have enough brains to jump up and come up to me. Well, that’s less of a problem for me, right?

It seemed to me that the bloody moon had been in the sky longer than usual, but at last it was morning. I took apart almost the entire building before realizing that I didn't have enough wood even for the side walls, let alone the back. I had to go cut down some trees. I walked forward without a specific goal. This world was not well explored, so the trees had to be nearby. Soon I saw a narrow tunnel going straight down. Probably one of my first mines. I don’t remember exactly why I was digging here, well, and still wait from a complete noob? I jumped down, thinking that it couldn't be too deep here. I fell and I fell ... and I kept falling. While I was flying down, the message "Echo is spreading screams of horror around you ..." appeared on the screen and immediately after that I found myself in a "hellish" layer, falling into a pool of lava. The screen flashed: "You were killed" ... When did I dig this mine? I don't remember getting to that depth in this world. It seemed to me that I had not even reached the stone layer. Weird. Well, then this hole was here before me. What other options are there? Yes, it did. It's just that with a very small chance a world was generated, where there was already a tunnel straight to hell. Why not, with my luck. But while I was waiting for the character to revive, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. At the very edge of the screen, on the left ... was it a zombie? I didn't pay attention. Maybe just an imp? It should be. Well, sure, some imp came to laugh at my stupid death. Or maybe he also dug a tunnel for fun! I had no idea how close I was to the truth.

I repaired the hole. I've had enough of falling into pits. Found some trees and went back to work. The merchant was not there. Weird. He must have disappeared due to the fact that he did not have a home. The instructor was still there. I went to the workbench to make some wooden walls. I guess I accidentally clicked on the Instructor, because a window appeared on the screen: "It's ... it's so cold" ... What is it? I clicked on the Help option. "I can't help you ... Nobody can ..." Goose bumps ran down my spine. I pressed Help a few times, but the Instructor kept repeating "It's ... it's so cold here" ... Okay ... Must be a joke from the developers. Very funny. It just doesn't happen. Either a prank, or someone broke into my computer, or ... something else. So I decided to continue building the house. And I ran out of tree again.

I was a little nervous, so I no longer walked to the side of the map where there was a hole in the ground.
God takes care of the cherished, right?
Wrong.

On my way to the other side of the map, I noticed that the screen had become ... strange. As if I were in the lands of Corruption, only ... there was nothing like that around. The sky darkened, the clouds changed color, but there were only ordinary trees around. I continued to mine wood, trying not to pay attention, when I suddenly noticed another shaft ahead. A hole that goes straight down. Just like the first one. I jumped over it and went on. Another hole. And further. Too many for coincidences. Goose bumps covered my hands. This is a prank, someone is playing a prank on me.

An inscription appeared on the screen: "The instructor was killed" ... But how? Can mobs kill him? (up to version 1.0.3 it was almost immortal).

I ran back to the base, thinking that a goblin invasion had begun, the message of which I had overlooked. Along the way, I kept getting messages "You feel like everything is growing cold inside you" ... They just kept flashing on the screen like some kind of spam. "You feel how everything is growing cold inside you ... You feel how everything is growing cold inside you ...", over and over again. "Turn back." I froze.

It was already kind of creepy ... but I could not stop. I needed to go there, I had to find out what killed the Instructor!

In vain, in vain I did not stop. True, it would be better if I just left this world, deleted it along with the first character and never remembered it again. But I came to the place where my house stood, an almost finished base. But he wasn't there. Instead, I saw a flat earthen area and two small pits filled with lava. One contained what had once been the Instructor. From above it was covered with earth. There were signs near both pits.

A sign near the pit with the Instructor read: "Here the Instructor lies. He helped the traitor and was killed."

The inscription on the second tablet, standing near an open pit of lava, made me pale. "Here YOU are lying. Was my friend, but broke my dreams." Was that a joke from Blue? What a stupid joke? And then my old character appeared on the screen. My very first character that was created with this world. She walked across the screen ... and her eyes were completely black. Just black dots ... as if she had no eyes at all. She kept walking towards me and the screen began to shake. As if the game started to "slow down" ... it was going, but suddenly it was far from me. A moment - and she is next, comes to me from the edge of the screen and then - again behind. The screen is obscured by the inscriptions "You feel how everything is growing cold inside you ...", then - "The echo carries screams of horror around you" ... I felt uneasy. The music changed to a boss fight, then the Corruption melody, sped up incredibly, started playing backwards and very slowly. I panicked. I don't know what happened, but it was too much for me and I decided to quit the game. Pressed ESC and tried to click on "Save and Exit". I pressed the exit option over and over again and the music got louder. The screen began to blink, day quickly changed to night and back; just before the screen was Corruption and immediately - the Blood Moon. Something incredible was happening to my old character, she was floating at the top of the screen. "The merchant was killed ...", "The dryad was killed ...", "The echo spreads screams of horror around you ...", "The nurse was killed ...", "The demolition was killed ...", "They begging for death to take them ... "," The arms dealer was killed "... By this time, the change of day and night was happening so quickly that the image on the screen turned into a flickering of flowers, and my character's sprite appeared under my eyes red stripes ... he was crying blood? "You pray for death" ... On the screen was my old character in close-up. The image continued to enlarge, the music playing backwards became so loud that I got scared for the speakers. Suddenly, the screen showed the words "You were killed ..." and the speakers made a sound like thousands of zombies died at the same time.

Then the game closed by itself.
The program just ended. I started it again and tried to log into my old character ... failed to load the save. World 1 ... failed to load save. Both files are corrupted ... The main character could not be loaded either. Heck!

I have created a new character. Returned to the mastered world, just to get it all out of my head. I didn't want to think about what happened, it was probably someone's stupid joke or some kind of debug game mode ... or something else. With a new character, I built myself a castle. "You feel how everything is growing cold inside you" ...

I rebooted my computer. Since then I have not played Terraria. And he couldn't even if he wanted to. The game no longer started. I just refused to boot. I uninstalled it, reinstalled it, but it didn't help. There are no save files left on the computer, no traces that I ever played it at all. I don’t know why I’m writing about this here ... maybe for the developers to see it, if it was their joke. Or to warn people if not.

Sometimes I regret that my friends are as down to earth realists as I am. One would guess that a statement like "my computer is possessed by an evil character in the game who no longer allows me to play Terraria" would only cause a friend to be surprised and want to prove to me that I was crazy. Although, in his place, I would have done the same, just out of principle. We don’t take our word for anything until we see the evidence with our own eyes - even if it’s the words of our best friend. It has always been this way and until now it has only been better. But I wish I had kept my mouth shut this time and pretended nothing had happened. But I could not resist - and here is my story. Hope readers learn from my mistakes. I used to think that someone was joking with me, but ... I don't think so anymore. Over the past few weeks, so much has happened that I no longer believe that a person could do it.

So after that horrific incident with the game, I called Jerry. We have been friends since school, two nerds - we had to stay close to survive. Then we went to one college and so on. In a word, I called him. He told me what happened, shared his thoughts that one of the developers had a very strange sense of humor or that something had happened to my game. "Come on, don't tell me that now you also believe in this garbage. Probably it's time to call the polite guys in white coats!" - he just laughed into the phone. He did not believe me and I understand him. I just wanted to tell someone about what happened. Someone to tell me that I'm not crazy. Maybe then everything would fall into place. "Well, since you can't play Terraria anymore, I'll come and take a look at your computer. What if my copy starts up on it?" Why not, I thought. That is, it could just be a virus or something like that, and it would help launch the game. It won't get any worse, will it? It would be better if I refused his help ...

He came the next day. I brought a USB flash drive and connected it to my computer. Launched Terraria. It worked, but ... something seemed strange to me. For a moment, I thought there was a Blood Moon instead of a normal night on the main menu screen. But Jerry quickly launched the game and I didn't have time to see exactly. Probably just it seemed. His world has loaded successfully. Everything looked completely normal. He looked around, checked his buildings, entered the dungeon, then even generated a new world. Everything was normal. No oddities. He left the game and looked at me. "A possessed computer, then?" And we both doubled over with laughter. Of course, it was complete nonsense. I was just playing for too long ... or the files got messed up on load or the modified server file did something with them. There is a simple explanation for everything.

For a while, I even forgot about this case. My character already had all the necessary things and I decided to wait for the next version, which will not have this strange bug. On the forum, I did not find anything similar ... maybe some kind of virus. They are not capable of that, right? About a week later, Jerry called me. Probably wanted to mock my "obsessed computer" again. His voice was somehow hoarse ... as if he had caught a cold. “Dude, are you sick there?” I asked. "I sent you a video ..." he whispered back. Then I added something else, but I couldn't make it out because of his hoarse voice. Like, "look at him." Well, okay, probably a trailer for a game wants to persuade me to play it together. I sat down at my computer and checked my mail. I put the file up for download, returned to it: "What kind of video, Jerry?" Silence in response. "Jerry?" Silence. Hmm, maybe he hung up or went to the toilet. Who knows.

I started the video. My breath caught in my throat. It was Terraria. The cursor has selected a single game. Then the character Jman. World 1. It was dark, the player was standing on some kind of platforms ... he was lit by several torches. Probably wants to show me how cool he wets the bosses. "woke up!" - an inscription appeared at the bottom of the screen. Who has awakened? Suddenly the screen darkened and there was a very loud death rattle of a dying zombie, followed by the inscription "You were killed" ... I got angry and jumped up from the computer. "Jerry, what the fuck are you doing? You want to bring me to a heart attack ?!" Here is a goat! I knew he didn't believe me, but to joke like that? Everything is clear - he hung up the phone so as not to give himself away with laughter.

But the video is not over yet.
The player has been revived. It was still night. The character was standing in the house ... but it didn't look like the house Jerry had built. Two floors, very small. It looked very realistic, as if it was being built following the example of someone's real house. Jerry had as much building ability as he did ballet ... Maybe he downloaded someone's map?

Jman: who are you
Jman: why are you doing this to me
You feel how everything is growing cold inside you ...
You feel an unkind look on you ...

He went up to the second floor. There was a picture on the wall ... very strange, I never noticed in the play of pictures. He went into a small bedroom and closed the door behind him. There was something like a closet behind him. Suddenly, the cabinet doors flew open and the screen went black again. Then ... silence. There was no text, black screen. But the closet was empty, so nothing strange could happen ... right? I looked at the screen and waited. Several minutes have passed and I decided to check how long this video is.

The player had numbers 0:01.

I watched this video for twenty minutes, and it was ... only one second long. It's not funny anymore. I wanted to close the player, but then a voice came from the speakers: "Please wait." I shuddered. There was still no picture on the screen, only Jerry's voice. He kept asking: "Who are you? Why are you doing this to me?"

Suddenly he appeared on the screen. It was him, Jerry. It was dark all around, his figure being pulled out of the darkness by the illuminated webcam. He looked beaten, his clothes were torn, and there were bruises on his face and neck. Suddenly, the image disappeared again and again there was the rattle of a dying zombie, followed by the inscription "You were killed" ...

The video seems to be over. "Jerry ... what happened to you, dude? Are you okay? Should I call the police? Jerry?" I looked at my phone. Did he hang up again? I felt uneasy, as if something bad was about to happen. I have checked the incoming calls. Jerry didn't call. I dialed his number, but he was busy. Suddenly I got another letter from Jerry in the mail. Another video.

Trying not to think about the consequences, I downloaded this video too. It was another video from Terraria, but it was filmed a little earlier, in the daytime. The sun was shining in the sky and the main character seems to have just found that house. He opened the door and looked inside ... but inside for some reason it was very dark, as if it were an underground cave. He took out a candle and began to explore the house. I reached the opposite wall and went up to the second floor. The house looked normal and I think it felt the same to him ... except that ... I can't say for sure, but somehow it seems to me that this house just appeared in this world out of nowhere. He checked all the rooms and stopped in a small bedroom with a wardrobe. The character stopped moving. I didn't know what was going on until the closet opened and the light of a candle filled the small room.

It was an exact copy of his character. Only ... his eyes were completely black. The echo spreads screams of horror around you ... You feel how everything grows cold inside you ... The inscriptions began to fill the screen. The music changed, distorted, then slowed down and went backwards. He ran out of the room, all the doors closing by themselves behind him. He ran outside and kept running until he stopped at the edge of a lake of lava. Right on the surface ... from somewhere there was a whole lake of lava, all the way to the edge of the screen. He started digging down. He probably thought that if he dug deep enough, he could bypass the lava.

He continued to dig until he fell into a long tunnel - it seemed that he was stretching from the house itself. He couldn't dig deeper, because the floor was ebony, and the character looked newly created and his tools were silver. He decided to walk through the tunnel, I think, hoping to get as far away from that awful place as possible. A light appeared at the far end of the tunnel. Could it be sunlight? He seemed to be thinking the same thing. Soon he entered the candlelit room.

I ... don't know how to describe what happened next. Parts of the bodies of other characters were lying on the floor. The longer he stood in the room, the louder the music played and the more its sound became distorted. You feel how everything is growing cold inside you ... The inscriptions continued to appear on the screen. He didn't move. You feel an unkind look on you ... His character stood still, but ... I thought I heard someone crying. Was he crying? Did he record his voice on video?

The screen went dark.

You feel how everything is growing cold inside you ... Echo carries screams of horror around you ... Inscriptions appeared on the screen in a stream, and the death screams of zombies were heard one after another. The screen began to blink, and body parts fell from the ceiling of the room. He ran away. The light continued to pulsate around him. Something appeared in the far corner of the screen ... it was his character sprite.

He got out of the tunnel. I tried to jump over the house. Day and night changed, the sun and the moon ran across the sky. The music got too loud and I turned off the speakers. He finally managed to get over the house and he found himself at a small pit, reminiscent of a grave. He walked over to her and read the tablet.

"Here you lie. The roses are RED, the violets are BLUE. Your flesh will SATURATE me." He ran past the grave. The screen went dark. He was inside the house again. You feel how everything is growing cold inside you ... The inscription came out on the screen again. He ran to the exit of the house as quickly as possible, but there was no front door. Suddenly it became dark in the house. It was day outside, and inside the house there was darkness. The zombie howl rang out, over and over. Loud scream ... I think it was Jerry's voice. He accurately recorded his voice on video. Suddenly the house lit up, parts of his character's body were lying on the floor. The "character" that looked eyeless appeared on the screen, the image on the screen grew, the music played faster. There was laughter, and there was a wardrobe on the screen. An inscription appeared "You were killed ..."

The video is over. Heart jumped out of my chest. I closed the file and wrote a response letter. "Jerry, are you okay? Please Jerry call me, let me know!"

In response, I received a video. I do not believe in God, but after seeing him, I prayed that it all turned out to be some kind of terrible hallucination.

This time, Jerry was on the video, sitting in a chair at his computer. The room was dark, the light fell only on his face and figure. It seems he was busy with something. The focus of the camera moved a little and I saw the door of the cabinet. It opened. The camera zoomed in on the closet, zooming in on the image. She showed the darkness inside the closet and when the familiar howl of a zombie was heard, inside was ...

It was ... Jerry. Jerry was sitting inside the closet. He seemed to have no eyes, and his mouth was so wide open that his lips were almost invisible. The camera circled around him, and the light began to flicker. Then ... I heard a voice in the background. It sounded like Jerry's voice, but ... different. "I sent you a video ..." Everything went cold inside me. "Please ... don't watch it." The screen went dark.

I wanted to delete the videos, but ... you guessed it, they weren't there. No one. Even the one I just watched ... as if it had evaporated. A few days later the cops rang at my door. Turns out Jerry hasn't been home since he came to see me that day. No one saw him on his way home, so they decided to question me. Of course, I didn’t tell them about the video or anything else - I don’t believe myself, and why should I believe them?

But, you ask, why am I still awake at night, but only during the day and with the lights on?
Jerry just never had a webcam.