The battle with Inferna raged across the End's fractured landscape.
She dove and I rolled. She breathed fire and I raised my shield. Her claws found my armor and my sword found her scales. We'd done this so many times that it was almost routine—almost a dance.
"YOU DIED SO MANY TIMES," she observed, circling for another pass. "I REMEMBER. EVEN FROM THE END, I FELT EACH DEATH."
"Forty-seven times in the first month alone," I replied. "I kept count."
"WHY COUNT?"
"Because I had nothing else to do but survive. And survival meant learning. Every death taught me something."
"AND WHAT DID YOU LEARN?"
"How not to die. Eventually."
---
Year 0, Day 2-30.
I died constantly.
Skeleton arrows found me. Zombie swarms overwhelmed me. Creepers exploded before I could run. I fell into caves, drowned in rivers, burned in lava.
Each death was different. Each death was agonizing. And each death ended the same way—with me waking up at my spawn point, whole and alive and terrified.
I started keeping track. I carved tally marks into stone, recording every death.
Day 3:Skeleton. Arrow through the throat.
Day 4: Zombie swarm. Torn apart.
Day 5:Fall damage. Broken everything.
Day 6: Creeper. Explosion.
Day 7: Drowned in a river. Couldn't swim fast enough. Day 8: Spider. Poisoned and eaten.
By day 30, I had forty-seven marks on my stone.
Forty-seven deaths in thirty days.
I should have been traumatized. I should have been broken. But somewhere around death number twenty, something shifted. The fear became familiar. The pain became expected.
I stopped panicking when I died. I started learning.
Skeletons strafe. Zombies are slow but relentless. Creepers need three seconds to explode. Spiders can climb walls. Endermen hate water.
Each death was a lesson. Each respawn was a chance to apply what I'd learned.
By day 31, I survived my first night without dying.
It felt like victory.
---
I learned to build.
First, a makeshift shelter—stone walls, a door, torches to keep monsters away. Then a I farm—wheat. Then tools—stone, then iron, then (eventually) diamond.
but I can't craft without a crafting table. I had to rig up a furnace and smelt the iron myself just to get a clumsy pickaxe for mining.
The world opened up as I got stronger. I explored caves, finding precious ores. I mapped the land, marking interesting locations. I even found villages—collections of simple buildings populated by people with large noses and limited vocabulary.
"Hmm," they said when I approached. "Hrmm."
They were NPCs, clearly. Non-player characters with programmed responses and simple behaviors. But they were also... people? They had homes, jobs, lives. They farmed and traded and slept.
The first village I found, I stayed for a week. They let me use their crafting table—my first real one—their furnace, their beds. Before this, I'd been making planks by hand, laboriously splitting logs with sharp stones, manually smelting iron for tools. The crafting table was a revelation: instant transformation, game logic at work. They didn't seem to understand where I came from or what I was, but they accepted my presence.
One night, a raid came.
Pillagers—illagers—hostile humans with crossbows and axes. They poured out of the forest, attacking the village with terrifying coordination.
I fought. with my newly made iron armor, and iron sword, and a week's worth of experience.
It wasn't enough.
The village burned. The villagers died. I watched them fall—men, women, children—all cut down by the raiders.
I killed as many as I could, but there were too many. They overwhelmed me, and I died with a crossbow bolt through my chest.
I respawned at my spawn point, miles away.
By the time I got back to the village, it was ruins. Bodies. Ash.
I buried them. All of them. It took three days.
Then I built a wall around the ruins and moved on.
---
Month six. After finding my first village and using their crafting table for weeks, I finally discovered the difference between vanilla crafting and manual crafting.
I was building a house—a real house, not a hole in the ground—using cobblestone and oak planks. The vanilla crafting system let me create doors, stairs, slabs, all the standard items.
But I needed something the game didn't have a recipe for. A bolt lock. A real, functional bolt lock that would let me build a gate that could be lock open and closed.
The game didn't have locks. There was no recipe. No menu option.
So I improvised.
I took iron ingots—real iron, heavy and cold—and I heated them in front of lava. I used a stone I'd shaped into a rough hammer. I pounded and bent and shaped until I had something that looked like a bolt lock.
It was ugly and crude. It barely worked. But when I attached it to my gate made of wood, it lock.
The gate close. and lock. That I'd made myself.
I stared at it for a long time.
In Minecraft, you couldn't create new items. You could only craft what the game allowed. But I'd just made something that wasn't in the game's code.
What else could I make?
---
I started experimenting.
Most of my experiments failed. I tried to make a gun, but no gunpowder recipe worked; it just exploded. I tried to generate electricity, but Redstone didn't behave like real copper. Copper itself can conduct, but I am not an electrician. I even tried to build a ship, but it collapsed under its own weight after I put it together. I don't have an engineering degree, so I don't understand why.
But some things worked.
I made better tools—manually forged iron that was stronger than vanilla iron. I made reinforced armor—plates that covered gaps in the standard design. I made a proper backpack, with pockets and straps and compartments.
And I noticed something else. The items I made manually were different from vanilla items.
They had weight. Real weight. They obeyed physics. If I place a vanilla block on a wall, it floated in the air. If I place a manually crafted item, it fell.
Manual crafting bypassed the game's rules.
That discovery would change everything.
Eventually.
But first, I had more important things to figure out—like why I couldn't seem to die permanently, no matter how hard I tried.