Basket and Scoti found their way in through a secret underwater tunnel, and now it's "time to go get the stuff." The death counter opens at Scoti 57, Basket 47. A witch spawner and a skeleton spawner wait up top, and a thrown potion goes out to make an invisible mob visible.
Two spawners on pillars
At the base of the hill sit two spawners that were active a minute ago: one on a one-block pillar, one on a three-block pillar. The guess is that the short one matters most, and it is. "You're right, short one was the real bad guy." On the way back up the hill, a frost trap at the bottleneck earns a "nice job." "I figured we have enough of them that I can risk it."
Dropping in from above
To the right is what one of them calls a "huge nasty place," with spawners on both sides and one up high dropping potions. Basket goes over the top of it all from the trees and drops onto the charged creeper spawner. "Charge creeper spawner down." The potions land anyway: hunger, absorption and nausea, and the screen goes wavy for a while.
A TNT trap thrown on the spawner below works well enough that the plan is to "do that more often." The chest there holds diamond leggings and more of the potions they need to see the invisible mobs.
Darkness, invisibility, and the edge
Bridging across the next gap means charged creepers below and arrows from somewhere. "I just got shot, did you shoot me?" "No." More nausea follows, along with silverfish, and then one of them gets the emerald. Then the darkness comes down. "I can't see." Something knocks one of them toward the edge, and "I'm dead" turns out to be wrong. The counter doesn't move. Most of the skeletons here need a splash potion before anything can hurt them, and they aren't standing where it would land.
The warden of the jungle
Up top, past a trapped chest and a couple more spawners, stands what one of them calls a "viney grass block, bush block head guy. Warden of the jungle." They take it to be the big bad. It has thorns, there's an archer somewhere nearby, and one of them nearly loses their pants to the fight. When it goes down, it drops zombie flesh. "So long, and thanks for all the zombie flesh."
Not a crystal
What they find looks like the light gray crystal, but it says Blightroot, a quest item "used to perform an ancient ritual." It belongs to the quest from the intersection, not the monument. One of them carries it and the other keeps the emerald. One of them tries to repair a helmet at the anvil and can't, and the other offers up 18 levels.
A look around the old blast site turns up mostly darkness and spiders. Maybe this area works differently, and they bring the item to someone instead of a crystal. They'll go back and find out. The counter closes where it started, at Scoti 57, Basket 47. The monument isn't shown, so it stays at 8 of 16 crystals and 5 of 12 emerald blocks.