Inferna and I clashed in mid-air, her fire meeting my enchanted blade.
"THE XP," she said. "MILLIONS OF LEVELS. YOU SPENT THEM LIKE WATER."
"XP is experience. Experience comes from living. And I've lived more than anyone."
"YOU COUNTED YOUR KILLS."
"Fifty million, give or take. Each one a lesson. Each one a step forward."
"AND WHAT DID IT COST?"
"Everything. But I got what I paid for."
---
Year 200-250.
XP became my currency. Fifty years to accumulate millions of experience points might seem excessive, but remember: I was immortal. I could farm the most dangerous mobs without fear. I could mine in the deepest, most lethal caves. When a creeper killed me, I respawned and went back to work. When I fell into lava, I lost my items but not my progress. This freedom from permanent consequence let me work faster, take more risks, push harder than any normal player ever could.
Every enchantment I wrote manually cost XP. Every experiment, every failure, every attempt to create something new—XP was the fuel.
And XP was hard to get.
In the game, you gained XP by killing mobs, mining certain ores, smelting items, breeding animals. The amounts were small—a few points here, a few there. It added up slowly.
But I needed MILLIONS.
---
Year 210. I built the first mob farm.
A mob farm is a structure designed to spawn, weaken, and kill monsters automatically, collecting their XP for the player to absorb.
The design was simple: a dark room where mobs would spawn, a water system to push them into a chute, and a drop that would leave them one hit from death. I could then kill dozens in seconds with a single swing.
It wasn't enough.
I needed more. Faster. Better.
---
Year 220. I expanded the operation.
Multiple mob farms, each designed for different mob types. A spider farm for string and XP. A zombie farm for rotten flesh and XP. A skeleton farm for bones and XP.
I built them across different biomes, maximizing spawn rates. I optimized water flows, drop heights, kill chambers. I spent years on efficiency improvements.
Still not enough.
---
Year 230. I discovered the guardian farm.
Guardians were mobs that spawned in ocean monuments—aggressive fish-like creatures that attacked with laser beams. They gave more XP than normal mobs and could be farmed more efficiently.
The problem: ocean monuments were underwater, full of guardians, and contained elder guardians that inflicted mining fatigue.
I cleared three monuments in a single year.
The XP was incredible. But the process was tedious.
I needed something even better.
---
Year 240. I went to the End.
The End was a dimension of void and islands, home to the Ender Dragon and endermen. Endermen gave a lot of XP, and they could be farmed even more efficiently than guardians.
The problem: getting to the End required finding a stronghold, activating a portal with eye of enders, and surviving the dimension itself.
I did it. Of course I did—I'd done everything else.
And I found something I hadn't expected.
The End was... wrong.
Not broken—wrong. Like a part of the world that hadn't been finished, filled with void and chorus plants and shambling endermen.
It was also connected to something else.
A rift in reality that I could almost see, almost touch, almost reach.
Almost.
---
Year 250. I made a breakthrough in XP storage.
The problem with XP was that you couldn't save it. Once you absorbed it, it was either spent or lost on death. There was no bank, no storage, no way to accumulate it safely.
Or so I thought.
Manual crafting, once again, provided the solution.
I created a crystal—a manually crafted object that could hold XP. The process involved enchantment writing applied to physical objects rather than books.
The [Store] enchantment.
It was my second completely original enchantment, after the blast protection variant. And it was game-changing.
Literally.
With [Store], I could save XP in crystals, building up reserves over time. Each crystal held 10,000 XP—a significant amount, but not overwhelming. I would need many crystals.
So I made many.
---
Year 260. The grind intensified.
With XP storage solved, I could accumulate XP more systematically. I built more farms, spent more time killing, saved more crystals.
The daily routine became:
Wake up 2. Farm XP for 12 hours 3. Practice enchantment writing for 6 hours 4. Sleep (optional) 5. Repeat
Every day. For decades.
---
Year 300. Statistics.
Mobs killed: approximately 150,000,000 XP earned: approximately 75,000,000 XP spent on failures: approximately 40,000,000 XP stored in crystals: approximately 25,000,000 Enchantments mastered: 47 vanilla enchantments, 12 original creations
I was becoming something the game had never seen.
A player who understood its fundamental mechanics and could manipulate them directly.
But I wasn't done yet.
I still couldn't leave.
And that remained the goal.
That remained the obsession.
That remained the only thing that mattered.