The Deepsand Desert was a very remarkable place. Not only because it was the biggest known desert on the server, no, there were two other things that made it stand out.
The first one was a huge mountain in the middle of the desert, a sandstone volcano, it consisted of a mixture of sandstone and basalt, unsurprisingly and uncreatively dubbed sandbasalt. Sandbasalt was extremely easy to mine but useless for making tools, comparable to netherrack.
The other thing that made the desert so remarkable also involved the volcano, it was the Rockbane quarry, a place of slavery. Hundreds of slaves, only equipped with stone and rarely iron pickaxes, were mining the dark yellow stone. They were not allowed to branch mine because if they struck lava it could flood a good portion of the quarry, even though the volcano was mostly inactive.
There was always a slave with an iron pickaxe leading a group of slaves with stone pickaxes. The slaves systematically mined the volcano by taking out sections of sandbasalt, forming a large staircase in the rock. They hadn't progressed far into the mountain yet, a good part of it was still untouched.
The reason why they were mining here was because the volcano brought up valuable materials like diamonds or gold from the depths. Those materials were then sold to other players on the server.
As said, all slaves worked in groups, with long-term slaves as leaders. There was one exception. The one I am talking about was the strangest of them: Three meters tall, black scaled skin, red glowing eyes, short white hair, wearing white clothes and a long coat of the same color. This solitary slave's name was Fire. The admins had granted Fire special abilities like his size or enormous physical strength for reasons unknown to many.
He had played on this server before the quarry got introduced. New players would automatically join the quarry, but he had been captured and brought there.
"Why?" you ask? He was a close friend of the former admins. The server had been hijacked by hackers who denied the original admins all access to it. The hackers had no admin powers, so they couldn't ban him, they brought him to the quarry to keep an eye on him.
This wasn't any regular server either, it used technology that was far ahead of its time. When you joined the server, you would black out and wake up inside the server. This was possible because the server established a connection to the player's brain.
If you died, you would just respawn. You were able to leave the server whenever you wanted with very little time having passed in the real world. The slaves however were denied of the possibility of logging out and were effectively trapped inside the server with no chance of logging out.
Before the hackers attacked there had been no text chat but the hackers had introduced it along with some other changes in order to gain some manner of control over the server. The slaves were naturally unable to use the chat and most players were completely unaware that it even existed at all, hardly anyone had noticed that the hackers took over.
But now, back to this one solitary slave. Fire was mining out an area alone which normally would be assigned to a group of four people. He didn't have any problems keeping up with the other groups, courtesy of the admins' gifts. He just was mining away the stone and packing it into his inventory like nothing, only limited by the durability and brittleness of his stone pickaxe. He also did so today.
It was a hot evening, Fire was in the center of a desert after all. He raised the pickaxe over his head and struck it down, breaking several blocks at once. The blocky structure of the world and some of the mechanics and mobs were the only thing that reminded you that you were in fact playing Minecraft. The world, its creatures and also the players looked real and terrain wasn't restricted to blocky shapes either.
Mining in the quarry was a boring and not very rewarding job, what else would you expect from slavery? Sometimes old friends came by and tried to convince the hackers to let Fire go, without success. Other players were allowed to mine here too but they weren't allowed to help the slaves by for example giving them tools, armor or potions.
Fire's pickaxe was about to break, he felt it. He closed his eyes and looked into his inventory, there were four full stone picks left, seven, now eight almost broken ones and an iron pickaxe with about half durability. He moved them into his crafting grid and repaired them into one with full durability. He had one and a half rows filled with full stacks of sandbasalt and his hotbar was quite empty, there were only the four pickaxes, some bread and also some iron ore.
Fire decided to take a break behind a stray rock. He sat down, put down his pickaxe and stretched his fingers. He had no finger nails but he didn't need them, he had very hard and scaled skin after all. He also had claws hidden inside of his fingers, he could use them for climbing and also for battle, they were dangerous weapons, one more reason most other slaves avoided him.
He waited behind the rock for a bit and relaxed. He knew that he shouldn't wait any longer or the hackers would notice that he wasn't working. He rose up, took his pickaxe and continued working, smashing his path through the volcanic rock. He was already halfway through his stone pickaxe as he felt something. One of his abilities was to detect energy flowing through the environment, and for some odd reason the ores in the quarry emitted a fair amount of energy, a lot more than those outside of it. If he interpreted the flow correctly it was redstone, a pretty good find. Now he only had to locate it.
He turned his head left and right very quickly, stepped aside and did it again. This was his method of determining where the ore vein was. The ore was about five blocks in the wall at about eye level. He stored the pickaxe in his inventory and extended his sharp claws on his hands and his shoeless feet. He climbed the ten block high wall in a matter of seconds.
Once up, he started to flatten the area out, using careful swings to create a flat surface to make further mining easier. Then once it was flat, he used fully loaded swings again. His style of mining was fast, but also depleted the pickaxe very quickly. Only wooden or stone picks took more damage from this kind of abuse, but not for iron or diamond ones, which were more durable. His powerful swings made the rock shatter, sometimes ripping larger, irregular holes into the rock.
It didn't take him long to quarry-mine his way down to the ore, he mined the last block in front of it and a pulse of energy went through him. He took the iron pickaxe out of his inventory and started carefully mining the vein, he didn't want to destroy the valuable redstone. With short swings of his iron pickaxe he carefully removed the stone around the redstone gemstones, making sure not to destroy them. Redstone dust was actually the product of careless swings shattering the gemstones. The dust could be later ground from the gemstones for higher quality redstone.
After he had removed all the stone, the glowing crystals were lying in front of him. He looked at their beauty for a few seconds, then he packed them into his inventory and dragged them onto his hotbar. He continued mining.