While Marcus was lying there, a soft rustling sound came from the other bed in the room.
Someone else was quietly waking up.
It was Nami.
She sat up slowly, still groggy from whatever illness had knocked her out, and noticed Marcus staring at the ceiling with his eyes wide open.
"You're awake?"
Marcus turned his head and saw Nami looking mostly normal, except for her face being unusually flushed red.
So the story had developed as expected after all. Even though there hadn't been any major battle that destroyed her clothes, she had still gotten bitten by those disease-carrying bugs somehow.
"What the hell happened?" he asked, curious about how they'd ended up here.
Nami thought for a moment, then gave him a quick rundown of the past few days.
According to her, Kira had found Marcus unconscious on the ship. In the middle of all the chaos and panic, Nami had stepped up and immediately started treating him using the methods she'd seen Marcus use before.
First, she'd tried feeding him milk, then started giving him food. But no matter what she did, he showed no signs of waking up.
During this time, Nami herself had suddenly fallen ill for reasons she couldn't understand.
At that point, the only two people on the ship who had medical knowledge and the ability to treat others were both unconscious. Fortunately, Vivi was still with them. At least she had some sailing experience and could judge their environment to determine if there were islands nearby.
In the end, the whole crew had made an emergency voyage and arrived at Drum Island.
What happened after that, she didn't really know. After all, her consciousness had completely cut out right after Luffy shouted that he'd spotted land. Clearly, her condition had also been pretty serious by that point.
As for keeping people alive with milk and food? Well, all the milk had been fed to Marcus by Luffy, who seemed to think that if a little was good, a lot was better.
Food, however, wasn't too much of a problem. Although food made from the furnace wasn't as filling or nutritious as the original Minecraft food, it was still enough to keep someone alive.
After piecing all this together, Marcus could only shake his head and laugh.
"That really was a close call."
"Yeah," Nami replied, her voice still a bit weak. "According to the doctors here, you were in a state of continuous physical exhaustion. If it had gone on any longer, you might not have survived."
"Me?" Marcus was surprised. He'd been thinking Nami was the one who'd been at death's door. From what she'd just told him, it hadn't just been a few days, it had already been more than ten. If not for his Minecraft food keeping her alive, she probably would've died from whatever disease had hit her.
But after thinking it over for a moment, he began to understand what had happened to him.
It had to be related to the Nether Portal.
In Minecraft, the Nether was as large as the Overworld itself. In a sense, that meant he had literally tried to create an entire new dimension. But since his Devil Fruit abilities weren't nearly that powerful, his physical strength had started draining rapidly to compensate, like he was massively overusing his powers.
And the drain hadn't stopped there.
At first, there hadn't been any noticeable effects. Probably, once his stamina was completely depleted, the portal had started consuming his EMC reserves instead.
When those six million EMC points were drained dry, it had gone back to drawing from his physical strength again.
That would explain why his body was now so thin and frail again, like he'd been starving for weeks. All the muscle he had been painstakingly building up was gone...
"It really is the guidance of fate," Marcus murmured as he spotted Chopper, who was still half-hidden outside the doorway.
If he had been conscious, he probably could've solved Nami's problem himself without any drama.
After all, her issue wasn't really an illness, it was poison that had eventually developed into a disease. If there had still been milk around at the start of her symptoms, she might not have gotten sick at all. Which meant Chopper might never have joined the crew.
Marcus wasn't even sure if the island after Little Garden was supposed to be Drum Island in the first place.
In the original story, Luffy's crew had just happened to pass by Drum Island on their way to Arabasta, stopping to look for a doctor for Nami.
Now, through the twist of fate that he'd collapsed from portal creation, this meeting had been brought about anyway.
You could only say that Luffy and his crew must have some kind of supernatural luck binding them together, no matter how much the timeline got changed, certain events seemed destined to happen.
He stopped dwelling on it. He lay quietly on the bed, thinking about his financial ruin.
"What a series of disasters," he muttered.
Nami, who had been holding back her curiosity, finally asked the question she'd been keeping inside: "By the way, what exactly were you doing on the ship before you collapsed?"
"Hm? What do you mean?"
"That... that pitch-black stone frame with the swirling light inside it."
"Oh, that. The Nether Portal."
"Nether?" Nami tilted her head, clearly not understanding.
"Yeah, you could say it's another word for hell."
"Hell?!" Her eyes went wide, then her expression turned strange. "You... you're not actually a demon from hell, are you?"
Marcus couldn't help but burst out laughing. "Didn't expect your imagination to be so wild."
Nami didn't respond, though her expression remained odd.
Marcus didn't think much of it, assuming it was just her overactive imagination running wild.
At that moment, the noisy voices of Luffy and the others echoed from outside in the hallway.
"Nami! Marcus! You're both awake! That's great!" Luffy burst through the door, seeing the two of them talking.
He immediately let out a huge sigh, like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
Sanji was right behind him, of course, and his first glance naturally went straight to Nami.
"Ah, even a sick Nami is absolutely adorable."
When he passed by Marcus' bedside, he stopped and pulled out a bento box from inside his coat.
"The doctor said you desperately need nutrition. This is some food I whipped up, it's even got dinosaur meat in it. The taste should be excellent."
After saying this, he spun over to Nami's bedside, dropped to one knee, and gazed at her with deep, romantic affection.
"Ah, my beautiful Nami, whatever you need, your devoted knight will prepare it immediately."
"Then just some simple soup will be fine. My stomach isn't as indestructible as certain people's," Nami replied, clearly referring to Luffy.
Said "certain people" were already happily demolishing the dinosaur meat like it was a regular Friday.
"This is amazing! Can I get five more servings?"
Meanwhile, Luffy had spotted Chopper trying to hide in the corner of the room.
"Whoa! A snow monster!"
"Ahhhhh!" Chopper immediately bolted away.
In an instant, the lively sickroom turned quiet again, both in terms of mood and temperature. Cold snow blew in through the door that he had left wide open in his escape.
Marcus sighed helplessly, got up on shaky legs, and shut the door. But the moment he turned around, the door opened again behind him.
"Hm? Is this door broken or something?" He turned his head, only to see Dr. Kureha standing there, somehow wearing a midriff-baring outfit in the middle of a snowstorm.
"Uh... hello?"
Without saying a word, Kureha reached out, pinched Marcus' cheek, and tugged it from side to side like she was testing the elasticity of rubber.
"You've recovered this quickly? Just what the hell is your body made of?" She effortlessly lifted Marcus up with one hand and tossed him back onto the bed like he weighed nothing. "Don't move around. Let me run some proper checks on you."
Being handled like a rag doll left Marcus momentarily stunned, but he obediently lay still. He'd heard enough about Kureha to know that arguing with her was pointless.
She pulled out what looked like a blood pressure cuff from seemingly nowhere and wrapped it around his arm. Then she produced a stethoscope and started her examination.
After poking, prodding, and measuring for quite a while, she finally spoke, "Going from complete organ failure and no body fat to being back to normal parameters, and without leaving any permanent damage... kid, you're surprisingly resilient."
When the crew had first arrived, Nami had appeared to be the one in immediate danger. But in reality, it had been Marcus who was closest to death.
Nami's case had still had available treatments. But with Marcus, even though he'd looked relatively stable on the surface, that had been the real problem, because they couldn't identify what was wrong with him.
If there was no identifiable cause, that meant there was no targeted cure. And no cure meant waiting for death.
Kureha had even begun doubting her own medical expertise. In the end, she'd discovered the truth, his stamina and life force had been draining endlessly without any natural limit.
Though she'd found the root cause, there still hadn't been any way to solve it. All she could do was give him nutritional injections and hope his body could somehow recover on its own.
Marcus smiled sheepishly and said, "It's all thanks to my Devil Fruit ability, really. Sorry for the trouble."
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As a reminder: Marcus doesn't have a Minecraft system. He ate a Mythical Zoan-type Devil Fruit, let's call it Human-Human Fruit, Model: Steve or Herobrine. Like Luffy, the closer he gets to awakening, the closer he becomes to his fruit's true form, in Luffy's case, Nika; in Marcus' case, Steve or Herobrine. Zoan fruits, especially Mythical ones, grant massive stamina and physical energy.
In Minecraft, when you start a new game and create a save file, the game generates a unique seed. That seed contains its own Overworld, Nether, and End. The Nether portal doesn't create a new world, it just gives access to the Nether that already exists within the seed.
But Marcus' case is different. When he ate the Devil Fruit, no "world" or seed was generated. Only when he built the Nether portal did the fruit trigger the creation of a seed, meaning an entire new dimension (the Nether) was born.
And what fuels Devil Fruit abilities? Stamina and physical energy. As a Mythical Zoan user, he had plenty of both. Remember: when he eats beyond his saturation level, the extra energy gets stored. All of that stored energy went into creating the Nether too. But even that wasn't enough, without the massive pool of EMC points he had built up, the effort would have killed him.
So, logically, it makes sense: he burned through all his points and barely survived. From a reader's perspective, it may feel like a nerf. But in reality, his strength hasn't changed, he just can't buy things for now. Plus, he unlocked the Nether. In game terms, it's like he purchased access to a whole new dimension.