Silence.
Not the usual late-night quiet of his room. This was hollow, digital silence — the kind that sat on your chest and waited.
A faint, looping Minecraft melody drifted through the air, eerie and wrong in a place that wasn't supposed to have music at all.
Vicky opened his mouth to scream.Nothing.Not a rasp. Not a whisper.
His existence was muted.
He looked down.
Blocky hands.Pixel skin.He wasn't looking at his own fingers — he was looking at a Minecraft avatar's.
His bed was a wool block.His desk was a crafting table.The window: a rectangle cut into dirt, framing a sky with square clouds drifting smoothly across.
A cold, sharp panic settled in his gut.
He tried walking. His legs moved, but not like human legs — stiff, jerky, each step landing with that dull thump the game used for footsteps.
He reached for his door.
It didn't exist.Just an unbroken wall of oak planks sealing him in.
He punched it.
Thump. Thump. The same hollow sound effect from the game. He might as well have been hitting rubber.
His silent shout died in his throat. This wasn't a dream. He was trapped inside a broken version of the game — inside the glitch he'd created.
The only way out was the only logic Minecraft knew:Break the block.
He raised a fist and hammered at the wall.
Thump. Thump.A crack.Thump.CRUNCH.
The block shattered into pixel fragments and vanished.
A hole appeared — not into his hallway, but into a narrow, dark corridor made of more planks. Wrong. All of it was wrong. His house wasn't a block maze.
He stepped out, heart pounding.
His parents' door? Gone.His sister's room? Gone.Every familiar part of his home overwritten by wood and darkness.
A worse fear hit him:What if the glitch had swallowed them too?
He shoved the thought away and forced himself forward.
The front door should've been ahead — instead, another wall. He attacked it again, ignoring the mechanical stiffness of his punches.
CRUNCH.
Light poured in, but not sunlight — the flat, artificial glow of a rendered sky.
He stepped outside.
And froze.
There was no Jaipur.No buildings.No road.No people.
Just an infinite Minecraft landscape, stretching in every direction. Forests. Hills. Dirt. Grass.
And nothing else.
No villagers.No mobs.No animals.No sound except wind and the background melody.
An empty world.
And he was the only thing in it.
The diamond still sat in his hand — cold, heavy, perfect. The trigger of this entire collapse.
He hurled it away. It arced cleanly and vanished into the grass.
The anger didn't help.
He dropped to the ground, shoulders shaking. The blocky model of his body made even his grief feel artificial. He wasn't the Family Guardian. He wasn't an overlord. He wasn't anything.
He was a prisoner in a dead simulation.
Then—
A sound cut through the world.
Real. Sharp. Jarring.
RIIIIINGRIIIIINGRIIIIING
His phone alarm.
Arambh Hai Prachand.
The world flickered.
The green blocks under him stuttered. For an instant, he saw grey cement. The square clouds ripped like paper, revealing a patch of smoggy Jaipur sky.
The alarm kept ringing — louder, closer — a rope thrown into the void.
Vicky seized it.
Not with his hands.With everything he had left.
He thought of his mother yelling at him about chores.Of Ankit stealing snacks.Of hot chai.Of the smell of aloo paratha.Of home.
The block world fractured.
A crack.A rupture.And then—
SHATTER.
He fell through.
—
He hit the ground on his real knees, not pixel ones — cold cement, gritty and familiar under his palms. Air rushed into his lungs like they'd been starved for hours. He sucked in breath after breath, shaking violently.
The sun warmed his back.A scooter horn blared nearby.Someone argued over milk packets.
All of it was beautiful.
He looked at his hands.Human.Normal.No hum.No static.No glitch.
The diamond was gone.
He wiped his face and sat there on the floor, heart hammering.
Now he understood.
The price of his power wasn't exhaustion.It wasn't headaches.It wasn't a temporary glitch.
The price was obliteration.
One mistake, one overreach —and reality would erase him without hesitation.
He got away once.
He might not get away again.