MPCW Ch. 82
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10m
Danqing had been flying for over two hours before he brought the gourd down toward the ground.
Sand stretched in every direction beneath a cloudless sky. Alexei squinted as they descended below the clouds and looked for anything that might count as a landmark, but there were no sign that anyone had ever come here on purpose. As far as he could tell, the entire place was sand, with probably more sand buried underneath it.
"This is it?"
"This is it," Danqing said.
Apparently, the old man had found the place during one of his wandering years. It sat deep in mortal territory, far from spiritual energy, cultivators, and anyone likely to complain if someone started digging up large sections of the desert. According to him, the place didn't even have a name.
Alexei stepped off the gourd and onto the sand. His feet sank into the surface, and heat rose from the ground in waves. The temperature would have been miserable for an ordinary person, but his body treated it as background information.
"I'll be here for a while. You don't need to wait."
Danqing nodded, settled back onto the gourd, and closed his eyes.
Alexei looked at him. The old man seemed comfortable sitting in the middle of a nameless desert, ready to sleep as if this were no different from any other roadside stop.
Alexei decided not to think too hard about it and got to work.
The chunk-loading exploit was almost certainly off the table. He had spent enough time thinking through the geometry and timing to be confident of that. Every version of the plan ran into the same problems. The trees grew too slowly, the timing windows were too narrow, and there were too many variables he couldn't control. It had already been a finicky process in the original game. Trying to reproduce it here, in a world where physics only loosely respected Minecraft logic, was asking for trouble.
That meant he would have to rely on sand instead. He needed soul sand for both the End portal and the expansion of his Nether transportation network, and sand was still the easiest way to get it. The calculations were straightforward. What he needed now was volume.
After finding a suitably empty stretch of desert, he began setting up the collection system. The first step was a transmission ender chest linked to its counterpart back at the Aureate Summit survival base. Once the connection was established, he switched both chests to public mode. That kept them separate from the ender chest tied into the Verdantree City toll network. That system ran on a private configuration, and he had no desire to discover what would happen if thousands of blocks of desert sand started flowing through it.
With the chest in place, he started on the transport trigger beneath it.
The arrangement wasn't complicated, but it did need every part to cooperate. He placed the sorting hopper first, then worked the comparators into position and connected them to the bubble column and trapdoor assembly. Once the redstone was linked properly, he took out a Nether Star, renamed it Desert, and placed it into the first slot of the sorting hopper. The remaining four slots were filled with eleven filler items each, enough to lock the filter and keep anything else from slipping through.
After that, he connected the ender pearl to the bubble column and checked the circuit.
The system was simple enough in practice. If someone dropped a Nether Star labeled Desert into the public ender chest at the survival base, the sorter would pull it through and activate the mechanism here. The bubble column would trigger the pearl, and the traveler would arrive at this station. Afterward, one pearl had to be replaced before the system could be used again, but that only took about three seconds.
The return route worked the same way. Any public ender chest could send a user back to base as long as they dropped in a Nether Star labeled Home. If he built enough stations across the continent, the whole setup would become a proper fast-travel network. For now, it only connected two locations, but that was still better than walking.
Alexei stepped back and looked over the finished device. It stood about chest height and looked vaguely like a small tower, mostly because he had added decorative blocks around the functional parts. He hadn't planned to make it look nice, but the bare version looked unfinished, and leaving it that way would have annoyed him every time he used it.
"Now to the boring part..."
He pulled out his netherite shovel and started digging.
Sand broke quickly, and even with the slight resistance this world added to everything, he could still clear roughly three blocks per second at full speed. Once he found a rhythm, the work became almost automatic. It was repetitive and not especially interesting, but he had made peace with that a long time ago. Materials had to come from somewhere, and in this case, that meant digging them out himself.
---
Far from the desert Alexei was turning into a flat expanse of nothing, the city of Bamboo Spire went on with its day.
Bamboo Spire belonged to the Stormveil Dynasty, and among its many restaurants, the most famous had recently been The Gilded Wok. For weeks, people had talked about it in teahouses, praised it in merchant halls, and argued over whether the prices were outrageous or proof of quality. That reputation, however, had always depended on one man, and that man was currently standing in the back kitchen while the shopkeeper tried very not to panic.
"Chef Ge," Liang said, keeping his voice as steady as he could. "There must be something we can..."
Ge Xiantu raised a hand before Liang could continue listing concessions.
"You have been generous. I'm not leaving because the arrangement has been poor."
"Then why?"
"My disciple and I have been away from my sect for six years, and it's time to return."
Liang looked as though he wanted to keep arguing, but the answer left him with nowhere to go. His gaze shifted past Xiantu to the woman standing a few steps behind him, perhaps hoping she would be less firm about it.
Yu Hongying only gave him a small nod.
He took the answer for what it was and went to the cabinet behind the counter. When he returned, he was carrying a cloth-wrapped bundle, which he set on the prep table between them.
"I know it's not much but please take it for the journey."
Xiantu accepted the bundle with both hands and bowed. "You have treated us well. The Gilded Wok will do fine without us. Its foundation is solid."
Liang sighed.
A little later, Xiantu and Hongying left through the back entrance.
---
Bamboo Spire's morning market was in full swing when Xiantu and Hongying entered the main street.
Xiantu stretched as he walked, rolling his shoulders and lifting his face toward the spring sun. He looked far too pleased for someone with a long journey ahead of him, but then again, he had never treated travel as something worth hurrying over.
Hongying followed behind him at her usual distance. She was still thinking about the farewell. Liang had treated them decently, and that was worth remembering.
"Your cultivation is nearly stable," Xiantu said as they moved with the flow of the crowd. "When we get back, you should push into the next consolidation phase before doing anything else."
"Mm," she said.
"The others have probably been miserable without me. I expect the whole sect to be suffering from low morale and poor nutrition."
"Mm."
"I wonder if this cycle's intake ceremony will bring in anyone interesting."
"Mm."
"You could at least vary the pitch."
Hongying looked at him. "Mm."
Xiantu sighed.
The truth was that Hongying's sparse replies had never meant she wasn't listening. She followed everything he said. She simply didn't see the need to answer when there was nothing useful to add, and speaking only to fill the silence had always seemed wasteful to her.
As her master, he understood that better than anyone, which was why he kept talking anyway. Over the years, it had become less of a conversation and more of a shared habit. He would speak when something crossed his mind, she would listen, and neither of them felt any need to force more out of it than that.
What worried him about Hongying had nothing to do with her attention. She was capable enough that most elders would have been pleased to claim her as a disciple. Her technique was precise, her judgment was steady, and she trained with a discipline that many senior disciples back at the sect still lacked. The problem was that she had never learned to stop caring.
The cultivation world east of the central territories wasn't gentle with people like that. For six years, she had watched mortals, rogue cultivators, and low-realm disciples grind against one another for scraps of safety and advantage. She had seen enough cruelty to understand the shape of the world, but instead of growing colder, she had become more restrained. That wasn't weakness. He knew that.
It also didn't mean she was ready for what waited ahead.
He let the thought pass and continued walking.
The carriage station sat at the edge of the market district, tucked between a grain merchant and a tack shop. A board outside listed destinations and departure times in handwriting that started neatly at the top, grew hurried through the middle, and became almost unreadable by the last few lines.
The straight-line distance from Bamboo Spire to their sect was around 215,000 kilometers. Under ideal conditions, a spirit vessel pushed at full speed could cover that in about a month. Unfortunately, more than 70% of the route passed through mortal-suppressed territory, where spiritual energy was too thin.
By his estimate, and a conservative one at that, getting home would take over a year.
"If only Quan could come pick us up," Xiantu said wistfully.
"Mm."
He looked down at the board. "Though realistically, if he flew a spirit vessel all the way into a mortal zone, it would run out of spiritual energy halfway there. Then we would have to drag it back by hand."
There was a short silence.
"Mm."
He bought two tickets.
---
Back in the unnamed desert, Alexei straightened up and dropped the shovel into his inventory.
By his estimate, he had collected around 320 stacks of sand. The area he had cleared now sat lower than the surrounding desert, forming a wide rectangular depression with flat ground at the bottom.
He rolled his neck until something popped, then turned toward the tower.
It was already active. The pearl was loaded, the link to the base was stable, and the test run before the dig had worked without any issues. That left the sand itself, which would take time no matter how efficiently he handled it.
One stack of sand cost 64 levels to assimilate, so even a safe pace gave him several stacks a day. If he processed more aggressively and spent the levels as soon as they came in, he could clear over a hundred stacks daily.
That put the whole batch at two or three days.
Once that was done, he needed to deal with the ender dragon.
The dragon was the real bottleneck. Bedrock came from resetting the exit portal with end crystals, and end crystals required the fight. The obsidian was already piling up from the bartering farm, and the sand problem was mostly solved, but the rest of the plan still had to wait until he had a clear window to go back and finish the dragon.
After that, with bedrock available, Nether Stars would stop being a limited resource.
And that brought him back to the portal network.
The portal in Verdantree City was already bringing in steady money. It had paid for itself weeks ago, and since the cost of keeping it running was almost nothing, most of what came in now was profit. That alone proved the idea worked. People were willing to pay for fast travel, and once the portal was built, it could keep earning without much attention from him.
The next step was to build more of them. A second portal in the right city would bring in another stream of spirit stones, and ten portals across ten cities would do the same on a larger scale. He wouldn't need to redesign anything or invent a new system each time. The structure, maintenance, and tolls could all stay the same. As long as he chose cities with enough cultivators passing through, the numbers should hold.
He had been turning the idea over in his head for a while. The teleportation network he had just finished setting up for himself only made it harder to ignore. If fast travel was useful to him, it would be useful to other people too. Most cultivators might be able to travel faster than mortals, but that didn't mean they enjoyed losing weeks or months on the road, dealing with weather, bad inns, spirit beasts, bandits, and whatever other nonsense the continent decided to throw at them.
Charging for that convenience wasn't the same as trying to take over the market. And it wasn't some grand plan to build a portal empire either. He just wanted enough spirit stones coming in that he could stop worrying about resources every time he needed to build, repair, test, or buy something. Considering he had arrived in this world with nothing and spent his first week dying to a spider, that sounded less like greed and more like common sense.
"I'm done."
Danqing opened one eye from his place on the gourd.
"That took less time than I expected."
"Sand is easy." Alexei climbed back up. "I have what I need. We can go."
The gourd lifted, and the desert began to fall away beneath them. From above, little had changed. It was still a flat stretch of empty sand, except now a small tower stood at its center. It didn't look impressive, but he didn't need it to. He only needed it to work.
---
After returning from the desert, Alexei went straight to the survival base and opened his inventory.
[End Portal Frame ×12]
He took one out and turned it over in his hands. It looked almost exactly like the game version, with end stone patterning along the sides, blue-green markings across the top, and a square socket in the center that faced upward. The socket was much larger now, nearly half a meter across.
He was about to set it down when he remembered Withers couldn't destroy end portal frames.
In the game, that was just a useful bit of trivia for Wither cages. Most players knew it, but not many bothered using it unless they wanted a specific farm. Withers were loud, destructive, and annoying to build around, so killing one normally was often easier than trying to keep one contained.
Here, though, the situation was different because monsters couldn't pass through solid blocks, explosions didn't leak through walls because of engine quirks, and there was no clipping or hitbox nonsense waiting to ruin the setup. If he built a sealed cage out of end portal frames, then anything inside would stay inside. A Wither would stay contained, and if one could be contained safely, several could be contained the same way.
Once he had Nether Stars on demand, everything after that became easier to scale. Beacons meant large-scale power, faster conversion systems, better automation, and eventually enough control over bedrock manipulation to stop treating it like a rare trick.
He took a breath.
The portal placement needed some care. Most Minecraft blocks could be mined and replaced if he made a mistake, but these weren't like that.
Alexei spent a few minutes walking through the survival base and checking the distances before choosing a spot about thirty meters from the Nether portal entrance. Anyone entering the base could turn right for the Nether and left for the End, and the two portals were far enough apart that he would still have room for paths, storage, or whatever else he decided to build between them later.
After settling on the spot, he placed the twelve frames in the standard ring pattern and checked the orientation of each one as he worked. Every frame had to face inward, and while getting one wrong wouldn't make the portal unusable forever, it would be a mistake he would notice every time he passed by.
Once the ring was finished, he switched to the ender eye.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
Each one compressed from a sphere into the square recess as soon as it touched the frame, fitting into place.
He placed the eleventh eye, then looked at the last empty frame. There was no reason to delay, so he pressed the final eye into its socket.
The portal activated with a deep boom that rolled through the base, followed by a low hum that settled into the walls and floor.
He stared at the completed portal as the empty air inside the ring folded inward and disappeared. In its place, a view of open space spread across the frame.
He looked at it for a few seconds.
"Here we go."
Then he jumped in.
---
Far from the survival base, in the cultivator territories that covered most of the continent, several extremely powerful people suddenly found their morning ruined.
In the Obsidian Domain, a senior elder of the Cloudpeak Alliance was three years into secluded cultivation, working through a critical meridian consolidation that couldn't afford any interruption. When the resonance passed through her meditation, it dragged her out so sharply that her eyes opened at once.
She sent her spiritual sense sweeping across the surrounding mountains, but there was no obvious source. The space nearby was stable, no formations had activated, and the spiritual energy in the region showed no abnormal spike. Even the divination array she assembled in haste failed to point her toward anything useful.
"What was that strange feeling?" she muttered as her gaze lifted toward the sky.
"Could it be connected to Che?"
She dismissed the thought almost as soon as it appeared.
"No. Even if he found that artifact in the Verdant Vine Mystic Realm, he shouldn't be that strong yet."
After a few breaths, she forced herself to calm down. Since she couldn't find the source, worrying would change nothing. She closed her eyes and returned to her cultivation, though the unease in her heart didn't fade.
In the Frostpeak Domain, two sect masters from rival factions were in the middle of a tense negotiation when they both stopped speaking at the same time. They looked at each other across the table, neither willing to be the first to admit confusion, but both of them understood that something had happened somewhere far beyond their reach.
The problem was that neither of them could say what it was.
In the outer reaches of the Demon Wilds, a creature so old that it no longer bothered with humanoid form opened one eye and searched the horizon. It found no enemy, so it closed its eye again and went back to sleep.
Across the continent, powerful cultivators began arriving at similar guesses. Some believed that a major sacred artifact had awakened. Others suspected that a forgotten immortal realm had opened. A few thought that the world itself had crossed some hidden limit.
None of them were entirely wrong.
It was only that calling it that was a little like describing a nuclear reaction as a small fire that had gotten out of hand.
---
Alexei arrived standing on obsidian.
He turned in place and found dark stone surrounding him on every side. He had spawned underground. That was new, though not especially surprising. The End had never been reliable about starting elevation, and this version was much larger than the one from the game, so he hadn't expected it to follow the old rules perfectly.
He took out his pickaxe and dug a staircase upward.
When he broke through into open air, the sky was the first thing that caught his attention.
Dense clusters of stars filled the darkness. The central island extended far in every direction. Beneath it all ran the familiar low hum of the dimension.
Then he noticed the endermen.
Dozens of them stood across the island, scattered at different distances. Some were still. Others shifted slightly or tilted their heads. None of them were staring at him yet, which was about the best news he could hope for.
The obsidian pillars were less reassuring.
They were much farther apart than they should have been. The closest stood around 200 meters away, while the rest curved across the island with kilometers between them. They were also much taller than they were supposed to be.
Each pillar climbed roughly 1,000 meters into the air. From the ground, the end crystals at the top were barely more than tiny glowing specks.
Alexei looked from one pillar to the next, then checked his inventory.
He had his bow, his flying sword, and enough supplies to improvise if things went wrong. It would be irritating, but he could handle irritating.
What he hadn't accounted for was the dragon noticing him before he had time to plan anything.
It was already watching him from the exit portal. He put its length at twenty meters at minimum, probably closer to thirty.
They looked at each other. Then the dragon launched itself into the air.
"Oh, come on."
The distance between them vanished fast. He only caught a glimpse of the claw before it hit him and sent him stumbling backward. He checked his health bar out of instinct and found that it had hardly moved.
That was unexpected, but he was not going to trust it yet.
He pulled out an enchanted golden apple.
The dragon had already climbed away by the time he took the first bite. It banked in a wide arc, putting a good 200 meters between them, and fire began to build in its throat.
Alexei got onto his flying sword before it fired.
The fireball came down and slammed into the ground, sending burning debris scattering in every direction. By then, he was already climbing above the blast radius, still chewing the apple as he rose.
It wasn't dignified, but it was necessary.
From above, the island looked much worse than it had from the ground. The central plateau stretched farther than he had expected, and the obsidian pillars were spaced so widely apart that trying to handle the fight on foot would have been miserable.
With the flying sword, it was at least manageable. Unfortunately, manageable didn't mean fast.
He picked the nearest pillar and flew toward it, already adjusting his route around the gaps between the towers. He expected the dragon to keep circling for a while before making another pass, but it turned with him instead.
That was new, or at least much more aggressive than he remembered. Normally, an ender dragon followed a patrol route. It circled the island, charged when it felt like it, and returned to the exit portal every so often regardless of what the player was doing. This one seemed to have decided that he was worth following around.
That made every pillar a problem. Whenever he tried to get close, the dragon cut him off with a claw swipe, forced him away with a fireball, or moved between him and the crystal. It was hard to line up a shot when thirty meters of dragon kept putting itself in the way.
He shot it whenever he had the chance.
At this range, with the dragon moving so quickly, hitting it was mostly a matter of waiting for it to hold a path long enough for the arrow to reach. He would line up a shot, release, and watch the dragon twist away before the arrow got there.
It missed by only a little each time, but that didn't make it any less irritating.
The method still worked, just slowly. Nearly twenty minutes passed before he found a clear shot at the first crystal. The arrow struck, the crystal exploded, and light flashed across the top of the distant pillar, leaving eleven more scattered across the island.
From there, the fight settled into a rough pattern. He pushed toward a pillar, the dragon came after him, and he either dodged or took the hit before continuing forward. Once he found an angle, he fired until the crystal broke, then shifted away before the dragon finished turning back toward him.
The caged crystals were worse. He couldn't break them from a distance, so he had to get close enough to deal with the iron bars first. That meant slowing down near the top of a pillar, which gave the dragon the target it wanted.
One of those attempts went badly.
Alexei landed on a pillar to get a better angle on the cage, only for the dragon to turn back sooner than expected. Its shadow swept over him before he could finish breaking the bars. He threw himself sideways and avoided the main impact, but something still clipped him and sent him tumbling off the pillar. He flew thirty meters through open air before the flying sword caught him.
He steadied himself on the blade and looked back at the dragon.
"It has a reach attack?"
The dragon hadn't hit him directly. When it turned at speed, some kind of pressure burst spread from its body. It only reached a few meters, but that still put him in danger whenever he dodged too close.
He changed his approach after that and stopped trying to land on the pillars.
An hour and twenty minutes after Alexei entered the dimension, the last of the ten crystals broke, and the dragon changed its behavior.
It stopped chasing him across the island and circled back toward the exit portal, moving in the familiar pattern that came before it settled onto the bedrock perch. Once it landed, it wouldn't be able to fly, and that made this the best opening in the fight.
He came in low and fast, meeting the dragon as it descended. His netherite sword bit into the base of its neck, and he stayed with it through the landing, striking again and again while its health dropped faster than its regeneration could recover.
Twice, the dragon tried to pull away and take off. Both times, he cut across its path with the flying sword before it could build altitude, forcing it back into range until his final strike caught its tail as it swept past him.
But instead collapsing, some invisible force seized the dragon and pulled it upward, dragging its body into the air above the island. Cracks spread across its surface, and purple light leaked through the gaps, growing brighter until the creature looked less like a dragon and more like a broken shell filled with light. Then it detonated about 100 meters above the ground, tearing a crease through the air before the distortion smoothed itself away.
Experience orbs rained across the island.
Alexei stayed on the flying sword and swept through them, circling until the last orb vanished into him.
At the center of the portal sat an egg. It was about a meter tall, dead black, and covered in faint purple veins. He walked up to it, tapped the shell with one finger, then drew his bow and shot it.
The arrow hit, and the egg vanished in a scatter of purple particles before reappearing about eight meters to the left.
He followed it and knocked on the shell. There was no sound from inside. He crouched and pressed his ear against it anyway, mostly out of curiosity, but the egg remained silent. Whether that meant it was inert or very patient, he had no way to tell.
"You're getting boxed up."
After digging two blocks straight down into the end stone beneath the egg, he placed an ordinary torch in the empty space below it and mined away the last block holding the egg up. The egg dropped onto the torch, broke into item form, and slipped into his inventory before it could bounce somewhere inconvenient.
He took it back out to check it.
During tha process, it had shrunk to roughly the size of his head. After turning it over once, he put it back into his inventory.
That left the end gateway.
It should have appeared somewhere within about a hundred blocks of the exit portal, so he searched in a widening spiral around the area. After more than ten minutes without finding anything, he had to accept that the island was too large for that rule to be useful. A hundred blocks was easy to check in the game because the central island was compact. Here, the same distance covered enough ground that he could keep walking for a long time and still not be sure he had searched properly.
Continuing like this would waste the rest of the day.
He stopped and looked toward the edge of the island, which was still nowhere in sight.
"The egg goes back first. Then I figure out the rest."
He stepped into the exit portal without thinking much of it, already expecting the usual transition back to his survival base. Usually, he would open his eyes in the familiar room a second later. This time, the world around him dissolved before any of that could happen.
The ground disappeared beneath him, the sky vanished above him, and his body seemed to fade along with everything else.
When his vision steadied again, he found himself surrounded by dirt. He could look around without any trouble, but that was where his control ended. He had no hands to raise, no feet to move, and no sense of weight to tell him which way was down.
The sensation was unpleasantly familiar, because it felt far too close to dying. There hadn't been pain then either, at least not in the way he understood pain now. What he remembered most was the strange separation from anything physical, as if his mind had been pulled out of his body and left without anything to anchor it.
Then quiet music began playing from somewhere he couldn't identify.
He would've sighed if he still had lungs.
"No way... Is this the End Poem?"
Text appeared in the center of his vision, hanging in the air in front of him as it began to scroll upward. He tried to ignore it, but it sat in his line of sight, so he eventually gave in and read the opening lines.
---
I see the player you mean.
A#*#$ V!%!v?
Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read our thoughts.
That doesn't matter. It thinks we are part of the game.
I like this player. It played well. It did not give up.
It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a screen.
That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a game.
Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the reality behind the screen.
They used to hear voices. Before players could read. Back in the days when those who did not play called the players witches, and warlocks. And players dreamed they flew through the air, on sticks powered by demons.
What did this player dream?
This player dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created. And it dreamed it destroyed. It dreamed it hunted, and was hunted. It dreamed of shelter...
---
The words were stranger than he'd expected.
Two voices were speaking about a player in a game, someone who had reached the end and was now reading their words. It was self-referential and a little annoying, but it wasn't empty. He could tell there was something behind it, even if the whole thing sounded like it was trying too hard.
It wasn't something he would've chosen to read on his own. He'd finished Minecraft more than a dozen times, but he'd never sat through the End Poem from start to finish. Every playthrough had ended the same way. He stepped through the portal, pressed escape, and closed the credits before the game could start getting philosophical at him.
Here, that option didn't exist.
He looked for a skip button, but no interface appeared. He tried thinking the command as clearly as he could, in case the system was feeling generous, but nothing happened.
Since he couldn't skip it, he kept reading.
---
...Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works.
But what true structure did this player create, in the reality behind the screen?
It worked, with a million others, to sculpt a true world in a fold of
the **§§§???, and created a ??§§ for ??§§, in the *??§§.
It cannot read that thought.
No. It has not yet achieved the highest level. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a game.
Does it know that we love it? That the universe is kind?
Sometimes, through the noise of its thoughts, it hears the universe, yes.
But there are times it is sad, in the long dream. It creates worlds that have no summer, and it shivers under a black sun, and it takes its sad creation for reality.
To cure it of sorrow would destroy it. The sorrow is part of its own private task. We cannot interfere.
Sometimes when they are deep in dreams, I want to tell them, they are building true worlds in reality. Sometimes I want to tell them of their importance to the universe. Sometimes, when they have not made a true connection in a while, I want to help them to speak the word they fear.
It reads our thoughts.
Sometimes I do not care. Sometimes I wish to tell them, this world you take for truth is merely *??§§ and ??§§, I wish to tell them that they are ??§§ in the *??§§. They see so little of reality, in their long dream.
And yet they play the game.
But it would be so easy to tell them...
Too strong for this dream. To tell them how to live is to prevent them living.
I will not tell the player how to live.
The player is growing restless.
I will tell the player a story.
But not the truth.
No. A story that contains the truth safely, in a cage of words. Not the naked truth that can burn over any distance.
Give it a body, again.
Yes. Player…
Use its name.
A#*#$ V!%!v. Player of games.
Good.
Take a breath, now. Take another. Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return. Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity, in air. Respawn in the long dream. There you are. Your body touching the universe again at every point, as though you were separate things. As though we were separate things.
Who are we? Once we were called the spirit of the mountain. Father sun, mother moon. Ancestral spirits, animal spirits. Jinn. Ghosts. The green man. Then gods, demons. Angels. Poltergeists. Aliens, extraterrestrials. Leptons, quarks. The words change. We do not change.
We are the universe. We are everything you think isn't you. You are looking at us now, through your skin and your eyes. And why does the universe touch your skin, and throw light on you? To see you, player. To know you. And to be known. I shall tell you a story.
Once upon a time, there was a player.
The player was you, A#*#$ V!%!v.
Sometimes it thought itself human, on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock. The ball of molten rock circled a ball of blazing gas that was three hundred and thirty thousand times more massive than it. They were so far apart that light took eight minutes to cross the gap. The light was information from a star, and it could burn your skin from a hundred and fifty million kilometres away.
Sometimes the player dreamed it was a miner, on the surface of a world that was flat, and infinite. The sun was a square of white. The days were short; there was much to do; and death was a temporary inconvenience.
Sometimes the player dreamed it was lost in a story.
Sometimes the player dreamed it was other things, in other places. Sometimes these dreams were disturbing. Sometimes very beautiful indeed. Sometimes the player woke from one dream into another, then woke from that into a third.
Sometimes the player dreamed it watched words on a screen.
Let's go back.
The atoms of the player were scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground. A woman gathered the atoms; she drank and ate and inhaled; and the woman assembled the player, in her body.
And the player awoke, from the warm, dark world of its mother's body, into the long dream.
And the player was a new story, never told before, written in letters of DNA. And the player was a new program, never run before, generated by a sourcecode a billion years old. And the player was a new human, never alive before, made from nothing but milk and love.
You are the player. The story. The program. The human. Made from nothing but milk and love.
Let's go further back.
The seven billion billion billion atoms of the player's body were created, long before this game, in the heart of a star. So the player, too, is information from a star. And the player moves through a story, which is a forest of information planted by a man called Julian, on a flat, infinite world created by a man called Markus, that exists inside a small, private world created by the player, who inhabits a universe created by…
Shush. Sometimes the player created a small, private world that was soft and warm and simple. Sometimes hard, and cold, and complicated. Sometimes it built a model of the universe in its head; flecks of energy, moving through vast empty spaces. Sometimes it called those flecks "electrons" and "protons".
Sometimes it called them "planets" and "stars".
Sometimes it believed it was in a universe that was made of energy that was made of offs and ons; zeros and ones; lines of code. Sometimes it believed it was playing a game. Sometimes it believed it was reading words on a screen.
You are the player, reading words…
Shush… Sometimes the player read lines of code on a screen. Decoded them into words; decoded words into meaning; decoded meaning into feelings, emotions, theories, ideas, and the player started to breath faster and deeper and realised it was alive, it was alive, those thousand deaths had not been real, the player was alive
You. You. You are alive.
and sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the sunlight that came through the shuffling leaves of the summer trees
and sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the light that fell from the crisp night sky of winter, where a fleck of light in the corner of the player's eye might be a star a million times as massive as the sun, boiling its planets to plasma in order to be visible for a moment to the player, walking home at the far side of the universe, suddenly smelling food, almost at the familiar door, about to dream again
and sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the zeros and ones, through the electricity of the world, through the scrolling words on a screen at the end of a dream
and the universe said I love you
and the universe said you have played the game well
and the universe said everything you need is within you
and the universe said you are stronger than you know
and the universe said you are the daylight
and the universe said you are the night
and the universe said the darkness you fight is within you
and the universe said the light you seek is within you
and the universe said you are not alone
and the universe said you are not separate from every other thing
and the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own code
and the universe said I love you because you are love.
And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.
You are the player.
Wake up.
---
Annoyingly, it was better than Alexei had expected.
He hadn't planned to get invested in a blocky afterlife conversation between two strange voices, but one of the later passages hit closer than he liked. He read it again, then sat there in the quiet, staring at the words as they faded from his vision.
He wasn't telling anyone about that.
Then the credits began.
At first, he assumed it would be a short list of names. But the black void filled with white text, and the names kept coming.
Developers, artists, sound designers, community contributors, and people whose roles he didn't even recognize all scrolled past.
He had never seen this before, obviously. In his defense, he hadn't made a habit of killing the ender dragon and sitting through the ending like a responsible player.
Still, why were there credits?
He started searching for a skip option again. He looked around the void, focused on the text, ignored the text, and tried picturing his survival base to make the world take the hint. When that didn't work, he tried mentally ordering the scene to end.
But the credits kept scrolling.
---
About twenty minutes later, the familiar pulling sensation returned. The dirt-void dissolved around him, the music faded out, and the next thing he knew, Alexei was standing beside the bed in his room.
He sat down on the edge of the mattress and stared at the far wall for several seconds.
The Wither cage was getting a skip option. That was going near the top of the list.
Once he'd finished making that decision, a large amount of information surfaced in his mind. The newly acquired knowledge didn't give him any new abilities.
It was more like a system manual.
It contained detailed explanations of every function: assimilation, fusion, mining, biological transformation, items, status panels, and more.
Most of it covered things he already knew, or at least things he'd guessed correctly after enough experiments, so he skimmed through those sections quickly and only slowed when the familiar topics gave way to the Nether Star section.
"Huh."
The manual was surprisingly thorough. Nether Stars had more than twenty listed uses, and while some were the sort of thing he would've expected from a high-tier crafting material, others went in directions he hadn't considered at all. He started with the first entry that seemed immediately useful: fusing a Nether Star with a creature or monster spawn egg.
According to the manual, doing that wouldn't change the species' basic behavior. Passive animals would stay passive, and hostile monsters would stay hostile. What changed was their intelligence and strength, and not just for a single individual. The effect applied to the entire species. The improvement scaled with him, using his total accumulated experience and his progress as the world's only player, while stronger upgraded species spawned less often to keep the system from flooding the world with enhanced mobs.
He could see the farming use right away. Better mobs meant better drops, but it also meant stronger enemies, more difficult containment, and a higher chance that any mistake would become expensive. Whether that tradeoff was worth it depended on the species, so he mentally pushed it into the category of useful but not urgent.
The next useful entry involved creatures from this world. If he killed one, assimilated its corpse, spent 1,000 levels, and fused a Nether Star with the result, the creature could be added to the natural spawn pool of either the Overworld or the Nether. The default setting was hostile, which was inconvenient but not surprising.
That opened up several possibilities. He could take local wildlife, convert it into something the system recognized, and potentially feed it into Minecraft-style spawning and farming setups. He couldn't know yet whether this world's creatures would interact cleanly with Minecraft mechanics, but even the possibility was worth keeping.
Then he reached the item section, and that one made him read more carefully.
Fusing a Nether Star with a tool, block, or piece of armor would let other people use it. They wouldn't gain his full level of interaction, so someone else couldn't take an MC pickaxe and mine the world the way he could, but they could still equip armor, open chests, use workstation blocks, and interact with those things.
That was useful, but it also needed limits. Workstation blocks were fine as long as he controlled where they went. Chests and crafting tables with game properties could be managed. Armor was powerful, but at least armor only did what armor was supposed to do.
MC mining tools were the bigger concern.
He thought through what would happen if someone showed up at the Aureate Summit with a netherite pickaxe and realized it could break through the things he had built as easily as stone. The price alone would be absurd, but the danger came after that. Once an item like that left his inventory, he couldn't control who bought it, who stole it, who copied it, or how quickly it spread through people who had every reason to fight over it.
That wasn't happening.
He continued reading through the remaining entries. Most of them dealt with edge cases, including Nether Star interactions with certain block types, several portal-related uses, and a few effects on spawner blocks that sounded useful but couldn't be trusted until he tested them himself. By the time he finished reviewing the section, about fifteen minutes had passed.
Alexei stood up and stretched, then turned back to the items he still needed to organize. It was early enough that stopping now would only annoy him, and he had enough loose materials sitting around that staying productive wasn't difficult.
The ender pearls from the dragon fight were the first thing he dealt with. He'd collected a decent number during the battle, but they'd been sitting in a miscellaneous stack instead of being sorted properly. He moved them into their designated chest, cleaned up the overflow from the bartering farm's recent output, and only then turned his attention to the dragon egg he'd left on the crafting table while working.
The egg was about the size of his head now. It was probably a unique item, unless this world spawned ender dragons more often than the game did, and while that was possible, he couldn't confirm it either way. The manual didn't make it sound impressive. According to the entry, the egg emitted light at level one, which made it slightly brighter than total darkness and almost useless for anything practical.
He picked it up, turned it over in his hands, tapped the shell, and listened for any sign of movement inside.
"Decorative, then."
He found a place where the room's ambient lighting brought out the Nether Star's glow, carved a small shelf into the wall, and set it there before stepping back to check the result.
Satisfied enough to leave it there, he opened the door and walked into the living area, where Qingxue was already standing near the window. She turned when she heard him come in.
"You came out early," he said as he crossed the room. "Your seclusion was supposed to last another week."
"There was a strange sound earlier," Qingxue said, leaving the window to sit at the low table in the center of the room. "It was like thunder, or something close to it. I sensed it through the formation layers and came out to investigate. There were voices mixed into it as well."
Alexei sat down across from her. "Could you make out what they were saying?"
"No. It was more like background noise."
That meant the credits had been audible outside the portal after all, though not clearly enough to sound like words. Alexei ran through the likely range in his head and guessed the sound could've carried somewhere between twenty and forty kilometers from the survival base before fading into ordinary distance. Past that, it shouldn't have drawn attention from anyone who wasn't already listening for strange phenomena.
"Oh, right," he said, setting that concern aside for later. "Do you still need to go back into seclusion after this?"
Qingxue shook her head. "I won't need to. My sacred physique is stable enough now that I only need to consolidate for a while. The main work is done."
That was good news. The sect had been quieter while she was in seclusion, and in the Aureate Summit, quiet usually meant that all the things needing decisions had simply been piling up.
They talked through the items that had built up over the past few weeks, including minor sect logistics, a few questions about the planting schedule, and an update from Yan about a delivery that had arrived while Qingxue was in seclusion. None of it took long. The conversation covered what it needed to cover, and wound down once they ran out of things that needed answers.
When the silence settled between them, Alexei looked at her and asked, "How does your body feel?"
Qingxue glanced at him, and from the slight shift in her expression, it wasn't a question she'd expected in that form.
"The suppression isn't as constant."
She seemed to consider saying more before asking, "Would you like to see?"
"If you're offering, then sure."
Qingxue activated the physique, and the change moved through her at once. Her hair began losing its color at the roots, the white spreading down the strands until it reached the ends, while three thick white tails formed behind her and shifted with subtle movements she didn't seem to control. Her eyes changed with the rest of it, turning a clear ice-blue.
Alexei's gaze moved over the white hair, the tails, and the unfamiliar color of her eyes before returning to her face.
"Huh."