After cleaning up the claw marks and wood chips scattered around the back of his treehouse, Alexei finally went inside to tally his gains from the all-night fishing marathon.
One night. 113 experience points total.
Going from level 0 to level 1 only required 7 XP. With some quick math and conversions, he now had sixteen extra blocks of MC-ified silkspore wood in his inventory.
Broken down into planks, that was enough to assimilate four complete walls of his treehouse. Not that he needed to rush that project. The walls were holding fine for now.
Today's priority remained unchanged: find cobblestone.
With a fishing rod and infinite water source, food scarcity was basically solved. Though he couldn't exactly eat raw fish like a game character, could he? The thought of biting into uncooked cod made his stomach turn.
What he needed, what he desperately needed, was a furnace.
The plan for today: dig straight down again, but in a new location. The old mineshaft was probably completely flooded by now, and he wasn't in the mood to deal with that mess.
For the new mining location, he picked a spot on the opposite side of his treehouse.
This time, his inventory held not just ladders but also an MC-converted door.
Testing had confirmed something useful: MC doors counted as water-containing blocks, but they only contained MC water. Which meant the classic wooden-door oxygen trick still worked in this world.
The downside? Regular water didn't just disappear when you placed a door in it. Instead, it got displaced to the sides, squeezing outward with enough force to drench you if you weren't careful.
Don't ask him how he knew that.
His treehouse floor was still damp.
The first four hundred meters went smoothly. The soil gradually started seeping water as he descended, but nothing he couldn't handle.
At five hundred meters, the water reached his waist.
Still no cobblestone. Not even a pebble.
At five hundred fifty meters, he triggered the underwater-digging debuff, that annoying slowdown that happened when your head went under.
Time to break out the door.
The upside was he could save his ladders and just swim back up when he was done. The door kept his digging speed normal by creating an air pocket, so his efficiency didn't drop at all.
The downside was the constant maintenance. Every time he mined the block beneath the door, he had to instantly place a new door or the water above would come crashing down.
Six hundred meters. No stone.
Six hundred fifty. No stone.
Seven hundred meters. Still nothing but endless dirt.
Eight hundred meters. Not even a single goddamn rock.
Alexei was about ready to lose his mind.
If he hadn't brought his crafting table down with him, he would've run out of tools hours ago. As it was, he'd been crafting replacement shovels and pickaxes on the fly, burning through his wood supply.
Somewhere around nine hundred meters, he stopped thinking entirely. Just fell into a rhythm. Mine block. Place door. Mine block. Place door. Repeat until dead or successful.
He'd become a mindless digging machine.
Clang!
The sound of wood striking something hard snapped him out of his fugue state.
He froze, his numb expression cracking into something between disbelief and desperate hope.
He dropped to his knees, well, crouched awkwardly in the tiny one-block space, and ran his hands over the surface beneath him.
Slightly damp, uneven, but solid.
"This is..."
That feeling almost brought tears to his eyes.
Six days.
Six fucking days he'd been searching for this.
Did anyone understand what he'd been through? The deaths, the digging, the disappointment?
His hands were shaking as he switched his tool to a wooden pickaxe.
He wouldn't celebrate until cobblestone was safely in his inventory. Premature celebration was asking for disaster. For all he knew, this could be some other useless stone variant, diorite or andesite or some exotic formation that looked like stone but was completely worthless.
Thunk-thunk-thunk...
Thirty seconds of mining.
The familiar sound of a block breaking echoed in the tiny space. Muscle memory kicked in, as soon as the door got sucked back into his inventory, he placed a new one.
He opened his inventory with trembling hands.
[Cobblestone ×1]
In the darkness of the mineshaft, Alexei's face split into a grin so wide it hurt.
He didn't stop there. He couldn't stop. His hands moved in a blur, mining down another five blocks, checking all sides to confirm he'd actually hit the stone layer and this wasn't just a random boulder in the dirt.
Solid stone. Dry stone. An entire layer of it, stretching out in all directions.
Based on the materials in his inventory, he'd been digging for less than five hours. It was probably still midday above ground. And since coming back down here was going to be a massive pain in the ass once the shaft flooded completely, he needed to make this trip count.
He was getting enough cobblestone to last him a long time. He placed his crafting table and upgraded to a stone pickaxe.
Mining speed immediately jumped from the wooden pickaxe's thirty seconds per block to a solid twenty, roughly equal to digging dirt with a wooden shovel.
This time, he didn't slack off. He didn't take breaks, just mined until his inventory was bulging.
By the time he finally surfaced, the sun was setting and his inventory held ten full stacks of cobblestone.
Six hundred forty blocks of stone. Unless he planned to build a castle, this would last him basically forever.
Other ores? Still zero. Iron, coal, anything useful? Nope.
But honestly, he wasn't even disappointed. He had cobblestone. That was the important part.
Now what he needed was more fishing, more experience grinding, and enough materials to craft and assimilate a furnace.
If he pushed hard tonight, he could have cooked food by tomorrow.
One interesting discovery: despite a full day of intense mining, his hunger bar was only half empty.
Apparently, sprinting drained hunger the fastest, followed by jumping and swimming. Mining, despite looking like the most strenuous activity, barely consumed anything.
Every meter of sprinting equaled two jumps, ten meters of swimming, or mining twenty blocks.
Newton would be proud. Or deeply confused.
He briefly considered eating one of the unknown fruits to top off his hunger bar, then immediately dismissed the idea.
He was about to have a furnace. Cooked fish. Why would he risk another poisoning when he was so close to having real meals?
Though... he couldn't quite bring himself to throw the fruits away either. Maybe someday he'd want to eat fruit for variety's sake. In an emergency.... if all other options were exhausted.
He was totally keeping them for practical reasons. Not because he was getting weirdly attached to his collection of potentially lethal produce.
---
Meanwhile, somewhere considerably less muddy and significantly more pretentious...
The Aureate Summit Sect occupied a mountain peak that looked like someone had taken a normal mountain and decided it wasn't extra enough. Golden-leafed trees lined winding paths. Ornate buildings with sweeping roofs perched on cliff edges. Everything was very aesthetic, dramatic, and much screaming "we have cultivation resources to spare."
In the sect master's hall, because of course there was a sect master's hall, a thin man sat in the main seat with the kind of studied grace that came from decades of looking wise and mysterious.
He was middle-aged, his hair half-white in that distinguished way that suggested either great age or great stress. A faint mist seemed to drift around him, though that might've just been theatrical lighting courtesy of whatever formation arrays powered this place.
His voice, when he spoke, carried concern that didn't quite match his mystical-sage aesthetic.
"Why not break through here, within the sect? With the elders and myself maintaining protective formations, it would be considerably safer."
Below the dais stood a woman who looked like she'd walked out of a painting titled "Beautiful but Unapproachable." Her black hair fell past her waist. Her expression was neutral, the kind of neutral that required significant effort to maintain.
She shook her head.
"My mind is made up, Sect Master. There's no need to dissuade me."
The sect master, whose name was apparently Feng something-or-other, though he preferred being called Sect Master, sighed.
He knew Ning Qingxue's temperament well enough by now. Once she decided on something, argument was pointless. She'd just do it anyway, and trying to stop her would only make things awkward.
Still, he couldn't just let her leave without some attempt at protection.
Looking pained, genuinely pained, not the mystical sage kind, he reached into his wide sleeve and pulled out a talisman.
The paper was yellow, covered in intricate patterns that glowed faintly. He pushed it forward with a gesture that made it drift slowly through the air toward Qingxue.
"Things have been chaotic in the lowlands lately. Take this Radiant Lightning Talisman."
Qingxue caught it with both hands, her eyes widening slightly in surprise.
A Radiant Lightning Talisman. Top-tier Earth-grade. The kind of one-use item that cost somewhere between "extremely expensive" and "are you insane?"
Thirty or forty thousand low-grade spirit stones minimum. And that was if you could even find someone willing to sell one.
In this entire region, these things were basically priceless. People hoarded them for life-or-death emergencies.
Even a Nascent Soul cultivator caught off-guard by one of these would be either dead or seriously injured. They were that powerful.
She looked up from the talisman, about to thank him properly, when she noticed the sect master's expression.
He looked... conflicted. Like he wanted to say something but couldn't quite figure out how.
"Sect Master? Is there something else?"
"Ah... well..." He coughed awkwardly. "The talisman is perfectly functional, and will definitely save your life if needed."
Qingxue waited.
"But... if you could possibly avoid using it..." He trailed off, looking deeply uncomfortable. "That would be preferred."
"Why?" She frowned. "Is there a flaw?"
That would make sense, actually. Their sect had exactly eleven members and precisely zero servants or support staff. They were, to put it bluntly, broke as hell.
Honestly, even if they sold the entire sect, they probably couldn't match the value of this single talisman.
The sect master's expression grew even more awkward. He coughed twice.
"No, no, the talisman is fine. Perfect, even. It's just..." He struggled visibly with the words. "If you manage not to use it could you please return it to me afterward?"
Qingxue stared at him.