Meanwhile, on the bed...
Alexei sat up with a gasp, his sect robes gone, replaced by the clothes he'd been wearing when he first arrived in this world.
He'd died.
Cause of death? He spotted an opening and took out a second baby zombie that was trying to flank him, only to get instantly surrounded. Two skeletons pinned him down while a swarm of regular zombies closed in. He couldn't move, dodge, or do anything but watch his health bar drain to zero.
Though if he was being honest, there was another reason for his death: once he'd gotten close enough to the mob pile, the smell had been atrocious. It's hard to concentrate on combat when you're trying not to gag.
Still, it had all been avoidable. He should have set up a proper kill-spot before heading out.
Why hadn't he?
There had been a reason at the time, but now he couldn't remember it at all.
Maybe that was part of the problem. He had always been bad at school. Staying focused had never been easy for him, and he got distracted far too quickly.
Sometimes he wondered if he had ADHD or if he was somewhere on the spectrum.
"Shit... wait!"
He jolted fully upright, heart rate spiking.
If he didn't get back there fast, those mobs would pour out of the tunnel into the main building. Maybe even into the courtyard.
He sprinted back, taking the stairs two at a time.
The moment he burst through the door, he saw Qingxue standing in the corridor that led to his mob farm, sword still drawn.
"Uh." He slowed to a stop, trying to look casual. "What are you doing here?"
MC-ified blocks could block smells and sight, sure, but doors with gaps, fences, and trapdoors couldn't stop sound the way they stopped water. The mobs' groaning and clattering must've been audible from outside.
"Alexei?" Qingxue spun around at the sound of his voice.
She closed the distance immediately, eyes scanning him for injuries. "Are you hurt? What happened? Where did you go?"
Her hands moved to check him over, but he stepped back slightly before she could start a full examination.
"I'm fine," he said quickly. "What's going on in there?"
"We heard an explosion. And then those creatures started pouring out. We cleared them, but... You didn't answer my question. Where were you?"
"I was..." Alexei's mind raced for a plausible excuse. "Outside. I heard the explosion too and came running."
Yan emerged from deeper in the tunnel, wiping greenish residue off her hands with a cloth. She was carrying his sect robes, neatly folded.
"These were on the floor near the entrance," she said, holding them out. Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Still warm. Like they'd just been taken off."
Alexei took the robes. Those had dropped when he died. All equipped items scatter on the ground where you fall.
"I changed before going outside," he said, which was technically true. The respawn had changed his clothes. "I didn't want to get these dirty."
It was a weak excuse and he knew it, but what else could he say? "Sorry, I died and respawned" wasn't exactly an option.
Yan was studying him. Her perpetually half-closed eyes had opened slightly, revealing those unusual pink irises.
"Something's different about you."
"What do you mean?"
"Your proportions... and bone structure." She circled him once, observing from different angles. "You look younger than you did a few minutes ago. Slightly shorter, too. As if several weeks of growth had simply reversed."
Qingxue's concerned expression deepened. "Is that possible?"
"There are techniques that can alter appearance, even regress age temporarily. But those require spiritual energy manipulation." Yan's frown deepened. "Alexei doesn't have the cultivation base for that. And even if he did, why would he use such a technique?"
Both women were looking at him now, waiting for an explanation.
This was bad. If dying reset his physical development, he'd be stuck in a perpetual cycle. Every bit of growth undone by a single death.
"Can you explain what happened?" Qingxue asked gently.
Alexei weighed his options. He could keep lying, but they'd clearly already seen enough weirdness that they wouldn't just drop it. On the other hand, telling them he could resurrect sounded insane.
"I don't know," he said finally, which was partially true. "I don't know why my body changes like that."
He could tell from Qingxue's expression that she didn't believe him. Yan looked equally skeptical.
"Alexei..." Qingxue started.
"Can we deal with the tunnel first?" he interrupted, gesturing toward the corridor. "Whatever happened to me, the tunnel is probably wrecked, and I need to see how bad the damage is."
It was a transparent deflection, but it worked. Qingxue exchanged a glance with Yan, then nodded.
"We'll talk about this later," she said.
"Sure. But later." When he'd had time to come up with a better explanation than: I have video game respawn mechanics.
They walked deeper into the corridor. The damage was immediately visible, sword marks scoring the walls where Qingxue had fought, scorch marks from fire techniques Yan must have used, and near the end, clear signs of the creeper explosion.
When they reached the spawning chamber entrance, Alexei's heart sank.
The floor near the entrance had cratered from the explosion. And inside the chamber itself...
"Fuck," he muttered.
Nearly a third of the constructed spawn floor had collapsed. The walls showed similar damage.
This was going to take time to repair. Assuming he even had enough materials.
Qingxue was still watching him, but she'd shifted her attention to the chamber.
Yan studied the ruined chamber. During the fight, she had already sensed that something was wrong with the corpse puppets. As a medical cultivator, her perception was unusually sensitive, yet she had felt nothing from the puppets at all.
No qi. They were indistinguishable from real corpses.
If she had not seen them move with her own eyes, her senses would not have registered them in the slightest. They felt like empty space, as though they did not exist. Though they were corpses, they carried none of the yin or baleful energy typical of corpse puppets.
In short, these things did not feel like they belonged to the cultivation world at all, nor could they be explained by any common cultivation logic.
Alexei did a circuit of the damaged space, collecting the items scattered across the floor.
The experience orbs from the nearby zombie kills swarmed toward him like moths to a flame. In the span of a few heartbeats, his level shot from zero to eleven.
"Alexei."
Qingxue's voice came from behind him. He turned to find both women watching him with expressions he couldn't quite read.
"Do you know where these... corpse puppets came from?"
Alexei blinked. "You mean the zombies and skeletons?"
Qingxue nodded slowly.
In this world, anything involving the dead was taboo. It was the kind of thing that could get you labeled a demonic cultivator, even if you hadn't actually done anything evil.
Back in Silkspore Basin, she could rationalize the undead as some kind of natural phenomenon. But here, inside sect territory, in a chamber he'd clearly built himself? There was no way to dismiss this as coincidence.
And she was worried he was going down a dark path. He could see it in her eyes.
Well. Shit.
Alexei had known this conversation was coming eventually. He just hadn't expected it to happen while standing in a half-destroyed mob farm.
"About that," he said, brushing dust off his hands.
He wasn't going to hide the truth. Qingxue had stuck her neck out for him multiple times now, and lying to her felt wrong.
So he explained the spawn mechanics. The more he talked, the more confused Qingxue and Yan looked.
Yan was studying him with those half-lidded pink eyes, her senses probably working overtime trying to detect something that would explain what she was seeing.
Qingxue's expression shifted from worry to something more contemplative. "In the cultivation world, powerful innate abilities often come with restrictions. Heavenly balance, some call it. The stronger the gift, the harsher the limitation."
Yan nodded. "There was a prodigy in the Fate's Eye Pavilion who awakened the ability to see the future. The cost was that every second he looked forward in time, he lost a second of his lifespan."
"And the current Sect Master of the Alchemist's Summit has an innate talent that lets him transmute any stone into any metal he's touched before, using only his spiritual energy," Qingxue added. "But the transmuted metal crumbles to dust ten seconds after leaving his hands."
Alexei processed that. "So you're saying my ability to grow plants instantly and spawn monsters is... what, balanced by some cosmic restriction?"
"Perhaps," Qingxue said. "Though I'm not sure what the restriction would be in your case."
Death resets my physical development, Alexei thought but didn't say. That seems like a pretty significant fucking restriction.
Instead, he focused on the more immediate concern. "The point is, this isn't demonic cultivation. I'm not raising the dead or binding souls. These things just appear naturally from the blocks I create. It's not evil. It's just... weird?"
"Weird," Yan echoed. "That's certainly one word for it."
"What exactly is a 'complete MC block'?" Qingxue asked, moving past the philosophical implications to practical questions. Very like her.
Alexei appreciated that.
"A block that's exactly one meter by one meter by one meter. Anything smaller doesn't count. And half-slabs don't work either, even though they're MC-ified."
He pointed at the green experience orb Yan was still absently rolling between her fingers. "An MC block is just a normal block fused with those using my ability."
To demonstrate, he pulled out a piece of cobblestone and held it in one hand. With a thought, several experience orbs appeared in his palm, sank into the shrunken block, and then the stone returned to normal size.
He pulled out another regular cobblestone with his other hand and tossed both to the ground.
The MC-ified one hovered slightly above the floor, rotating slowly. The regular one just landed normally and lay still.
"That's the easiest way to tell which is which," he said.
Yan was staring at the demonstration. Her eyes opened wider than he'd ever seen them, studying the floating block.
"Fascinating," she murmured. "The spiritual signature is completely different. It's as if the block exists in two states simultaneously... material and immaterial."
"Sure," Alexei said, having no idea what that meant. "If you say so."
Qingxue was still processing the information.
"So if we understand correctly," she said slowly, "as long as you place these MC blocks in a dark area, zombies and skeletons will appear indefinitely?"
"Pretty much. And creepers and spiders, yeah."
"And in sunlight, livestock appears instead?"
"Right."
"That seems..." She paused, clearly trying to find the right words. "If zombies and skeletons are the 'restriction' on your power, then what are the animals? Compensation?"
Alexei had to laugh at that. "I honestly have no idea."
Whether they understood his explanation or just accepted it because they had no better alternative, he couldn't tell. But they seemed satisfied enough for now.
He placed torches around the spawn chamber to stop more mobs from appearing, then ushered both women out of the chamber before they could ask more questions he didn't have answers for.
Once he was alone, he finally opened his inventory to properly assess today's haul.
The loot was actually pretty decent:
[Enchanted Gold Helmet ×1]
[Leather Tunic ×1]
[Iron Shovel ×1]
[Gunpowder ×5]
[String ×5]
[Rotten Flesh ×32]
[Bones ×9]
[Arrows ×11]
[Spider Eyes ×4]
[Potato ×1]
The iron sword the baby zombie had been wielding hadn't dropped, which was unfortunate. Those had decent durability.
But the enchanted gold helmet was a pleasant surprise.
He pulled it out to examine it properly, then immediately felt his enthusiasm deflate.
[Gold Helmet:
Durability: 11/77
Protection III
Unbreaking II]
Each level of Protection reduced incoming damage by four percent. Protection III meant twelve percent damage reduction, not bad at all.
Unbreaking II gave a twenty-seven percent chance not to consume durability on hit, effectively extending the item's lifespan by about a third.
Both enchantments were solid and useful.
But with only eleven durability remaining, the helmet was nearly worthless as armor. One good hit and it'd shatter. The only sensible option was to break it down using Deconstruction. Five gold ingots and an enchanted book with Protection III and Unbreaking II.
The book he could save for later, apply it to better armor when he had iron or diamond gear. The leather tunic and iron shovel met the same fate, yielding eight pieces of leather and one iron ingot. But the real prizes from this run were the bones and the potato.
Nine bones meant twenty-seven bone meal.
That was enough to grow three Brightglow trees from sapling to full maturity. He could finally have a reliable food source that didn't involve eating mystery berries from the forest and hoping they weren't poisonous.
Though he probably wouldn't grow new trees just yet. If his hunch was correct, the Brightglow trees worked like berry bushes in Minecraft, after harvesting the fruit, you could just wait for them to regrow through their natural cycle. Bud, flower, fruit, ripen, harvest, repeat.
Much more efficient than constantly planting new saplings.
As for the potato, that opened up interesting possibilities. Plant it in tilled soil, let it grow, harvest more potatoes. Eventually, once he found a witch and a zombie villager, he could set up fully automated farms.
Mass potato production for trading with villagers for emeralds. Assuming this world had villagers. And assuming they'd accept potatoes as payment.
He sorted everything into the appropriate storage chests in his workshop, then stood in the doorway of his half-destroyed mob farm and groaned.
The repair work was going to take forever...
---
The next two days passed in a blur of construction and renovation.
Alexei didn't farm a single mob during that time. He just worked on rebuilding and improving the farm's infrastructure, replacing damaged blocks, reinforcing weak points, and implementing a better design he'd been mentally workshopping.
His brief three-day vacation of sleeping in until noon also came to an abrupt end.
Once Qingxue discovered that his inability to absorb spiritual energy from the Brightglow Fruits was because he'd never successfully sensed qi in the first place, she'd immediately reinstated mandatory morning training sessions.
Every dawn, she dragged him out of bed to attempt qi sensing exercises.
Every dawn, he failed to sense anything except mild annoyance at being awake before sunrise.
Progress was... not happening.
But at least the mob farm renovations were going well.
---
Inside the spawn chamber, Alexei poured the final bucket of water into the reserved channel and stepped back, wiping his hands on his pants.
"Done."
The improved design was finally complete.
The mechanics were simple:
Upper half-slabs allowed mob spawning while the AI's pathfinding made monsters seek out complete blocks to stand on. By placing those complete blocks on the other side of open trapdoors, he could trick the mobs into walking straight off the edge.
They'd fall three meters down into a sixteen-meter-long collection channel, which he almost called a "kill chute" but decided that sounded too edgy, where they'd land in water.
The water was two blocks deep, which meant zombies would sink to the bottom and eventually convert into drowned.
His designated attack position was separated from the water channel by half-slabs that blocked the flow but left a twenty-five-centimeter gap at floor level. Just enough space to see the mobs' lower legs and feet.
The gap couldn't leak water because MC water didn't work like real water. It looked like water, flowed in square patterns like water, but behaved according to game logic.
Fences, doors, trapdoors, half-slabs, anything with partial gaps could block it completely. Physics took a backseat to Minecraft rules, and honestly, he was fine with that.
This iteration also included alternating lower half-slabs to prevent spider spawns. In Bedrock Edition mechanics, spiders needed a full 2×1×2 unobstructed space to spawn. Placing half-slabs in a checkerboard pattern blocked them completely while still allowing other mobs to spawn.
Of course, the design had obvious flaws.
Creepers floated on the water's surface instead of sinking, which meant he'd have to manually clear them out after dealing with the drowned below. And when killing drowned, any equipment they dropped would float to the surface thanks to water physics, requiring him to wade in and collect it by hand.
But you couldn't optimize for everything. If he wanted the equipment drops, he had to accept the inconveniences.
Could he expand this into a multi-floor farm for better efficiency?
Eventually, sure. But not yet.
First, he needed to save up enough iron to craft an anvil. Repairing and combining enchanted gear was going to be essential once he started getting better drops.
He stared at his stone pickaxe, currently sitting at about half durability.
"How long is it going to take to mine enough iron with this?" he muttered to himself.
He sighed. Time to start the grind.
---
Over the following days, Yan became a fixture in Qingxue's courtyard.
She'd arrive shortly after dawn each morning, carrying a different selection of medicinal herbs, and proceed to conduct what she called "agricultural experiments" with Alexei's ability.
The results, in her opinion as an alchemist, were nothing short of revolutionary.
Herbs that normally took decades to mature could be grown to harness-ready state in minutes. Rare specimens that required specific environmental conditions and years of cultivation could be fast-tracked through their entire growth cycle with a handful of bone meal.
For someone whose entire profession revolved around transforming plants into pills, this was the equivalent of discovering an infinite resource exploit.
"Oh..." she'd muttered on the third day, watching a thirty-year Snow Lotus sprout, bloom, and reach maturity in the span of a conversation. "The entire alchemical economy is based on scarcity of ingredients. But with this..."
She trailed off, staring at the fully-grown herb.
Alexei, who'd been leaning against the doorframe watching her work, had shrugged. "Supply and demand. Tale as old as time."
"You don't understand. This could destabilize..." She stopped herself, reconsidering whatever she'd been about to say. "Never mind. I need to run more tests."
The Brightglow Fruit tree that had previously stood beside the building was gone now, which had caused Yan some distress.
According to the Profound Mirror Spirit Fruit Codex, every part of a Brightglow tree was valuable. The bark, the leaves, even the root system could be processed into various medicinal compounds.
But when Alexei had broken the tree using his Minecraft mechanics, it had simply disappeared. No fallen branches or scattered leaves, not even a hole in the ground where the roots should've been. The tree had compressed into his inventory, and that was that.
Yan had mourned the loss for a while, calculating the theoretical value of all those wasted materials in her head. But she'd also felt a strange sense of relief.
A spirit plant of that caliber growing openly in a courtyard wasn't sustainable long-term. The tree absorbed ambient spiritual energy to grow, and the more it absorbed, the more noticeable the local energy depletion would become.
Short-term? Fine. Nobody would notice a temporary drain.
But weeks or months of a high-grade spirit plant siphoning energy from the surrounding area? Eventually, some passing cultivator would sense the anomaly and come investigating. And that kind of attention was the last thing Qingxue's courtyard needed.
Now, though, Alexei had grown another Brightglow tree inside the building's main room, protected by MC-ified blocks. As long as no one entered the building itself, the tree was effectively invisible to spiritual senses.
There was, however, one complication. A minor one, but worth noting.
Spirit plants relied on absorbing spiritual energy from their environment. They processed that energy and converted it into purer, more potent forms, which the plants themselves couldn't reabsorb. Under normal circumstances, that purified energy would accumulate around the plant until ambient energy could no longer flow in, essentially suffocating the plant in its own waste products.
The solution nature had evolved was symbiotic guardian beasts. Spirit beasts would protect valuable plants while simultaneously absorbing the excess purified energy, maintaining a healthy balance. But the Brightglow tree in Alexei's building was completely cut off from all external spiritual energy. No flow in, and no flow out.
By conventional wisdom, it should've died immediately.
Except... it hadn't.
For reasons Yan couldn't explain, the tree showed no signs of withering. It looked healthy, vibrant even. It just wasn't growing anymore. She'd examined it multiple times, trying to understand the mechanism at play, but came up empty.
"It's as if the MC blocks create a closed system," she'd theorized. "The tree isn't receiving new energy, but it's not expending any either."
"Or the tree just doesn't care about plant biology," Alexei had offered. "That's also an option."
Yan had given him a look that suggested she didn't appreciate his flippant approach to botanical mysteries.
Not that it mattered much to Alexei. He wasn't waiting 140 years for the tree to naturally flower and fruit anyway.
140 years was the maturation time in high-density spiritual environments. In a place like Aureate Summit Sect, with its mediocre energy levels, it'd probably take closer to 1,400 years. And that was assuming the tree survived that long without a guardian beast.
With bone meal, though? Instant results.
Yan had briefly entertained the fantasy of having Alexei plant a Brightglow tree in her personal quarters so she could sleep next to it every night.
The mental image was appealing. Falling asleep surrounded by the faint luminescence of the fruit, breathing in that subtle, calming fragrance...
She'd dismissed the idea quickly. Her cave dwelling couldn't block spiritual energy the way Alexei's MC blocks could. A tree in her room would be detected within days, and then she'd have to explain to the sect why she had a priceless spirit plant growing in her bedroom.
Best to let Alexei keep his indoor tree and just visit regularly. Which she did. Every day. Sometimes multiple times.
Qingxue had started giving her knowing looks, but Yan pretended not to notice.
---
Meanwhile, Alexei's cultivation journey continued to produce zero results. His daily routine had settled into a mind-numbing pattern:
He woke up, washed his face, and pretended to sense qi for Qingxue. Then he ground mobs, went fishing, ate, ground more mobs, practiced calligraphy because apparently that was important for cultivators, then went back to grinding mobs before finally going to sleep. And then he did it all again, ad nauseam.
Time passed in this fashion until the day before the recruitment ceremony in Verdantree City.
That morning, Qingxue had corrected his meditation posture, reminded him to try sensing qi this time, and then flown off on her sword toward the Sect Master's hall at the mountain peak.
Alexei watched her go, waited approximately thirty seconds to make sure she wasn't coming back, and then spoke aloud to the empty courtyard.
"Let's set a small goal for today. I'm going to successfully sense qi."
He nodded to himself.
"Today's the day. I can feel it. This is when everything changes."
He sat in perfect meditation posture, back straight, breathing controlled, eyes closed.
Ten minutes passed.
His breathing deepened, became rhythmic and slow. His head tilted slightly to one side.
Twenty minutes.
A small trail of drool appeared at the corner of his mouth.
The faint sweet fragrance from the Brightglow tree filled the room, and Alexei, seated on the meditation mat in the building's main room, slept like someone who'd discovered the true path to enlightenment was just taking really good naps.
Qi sensing? Never going to happen.
The only thing that could soothe his restless soul was the noble art of doing nothing.
When he finally woke up, groggy and disoriented, sunlight was streaming through the open door at an angle that suggested it was almost noon. He wiped the drool from his face, plucked one of the glowing fruits hanging from the tree to wake himself up properly, and stumbled into the hidden passage leading to his mob farm.
He didn't even bother putting on armor.
What was the point? The mobs couldn't escape the collection chamber anyway.
---
Several days of grinding had produced some excellent results.
The mob farm's efficiency was higher than he'd initially projected. The spawn rate was surprisingly consistent, roughly ten mobs per hour, give or take.
The 24-block activation distance worked perfectly. The moment he stepped out of the tunnel connecting his building to the farm, mobs started spawning. And since the tunnel was exactly 24 blocks long, he didn't even have to think about it.
Leave building, farm activates. Return to building, farm deactivates.
The concern about mobs clogging the spawn platform and reducing efficiency hadn't materialized either. The pathfinding AI worked beautifully, most mobs walked off the trapdoor before the next wave spawned. At the end of the tunnel, he'd built a cobblestone wall to block line-of-sight with any creepers that spawned, preventing premature detonation.
Dealing with creepers was simple: stand behind the wall, shoot arrows through the gap. The enchanted bows he'd fished up made the process almost trivial.
But creepers were honestly just a side activity.
The real prize was the mass of zombies, drowned, and skeletons packed together on the platform. He descended to the collection level, iron sword in hand, and started jabbing through the gap at ankle height.
The mobs couldn't fight back effectively, they could see him but couldn't reach him, and the half-slab barrier prevented them from pushing through.
It was, to put it bluntly, a slaughter.
Ten minutes of stabbing later, the platform was clear. His experience level, which he'd been saving for assimilating plant seeds at the Verdantree recruitment ceremony, had climbed to 23.
Still no zombie villagers, though. That was disappointing. He really wanted to start setting up villager trading halls.
He mentally tallied today's haul:
[Gold Helmet ×1]
[Leather Pants ×1]
[Leather Boots ×1]
[Iron Sword ×1]
[Iron Shovel ×1]
[Rotten Flesh ×17]
[Bones ×11]
[Carrot ×1]
[Iron Ingot ×1]
[Gunpowder ×13]
[Arrows ×16]
Not bad at all. An iron sword and an iron shovel in one session? That was lucky.
He ran everything through Deconstruction as usual:
Gold helmet → 5 gold ingots
Leather armor pieces → 11 leather total
Iron equipment → 3 iron ingots
Combined with the direct iron drop, that was 4 iron ingots from a single farming session. More than the previous two days combined.
His mood immediately improved. This had to be a good omen. With his current equipment and today's haul, he now had 23 iron ingots saved up.
An anvil required 31 ingots total.
Only 8 more to go.
Since building the farm, his resource income had stabilized beautifully. Iron, gold, and arrows were basically renewable now, as long as he kept the farm running.
Gold especially, he'd been getting ridiculous amounts. His storage chest currently held 49 gold ingots.
Converted to real-world weight, that was roughly 105 metric tons of gold. Which sounded impressive until you remembered that a single enchanted golden apple required 8 gold blocks to craft.
Eight blocks = 72 ingots = 155 tons of gold.
A regular golden apple required 8 ingots, which came out to about 19 tons. His 49 ingots were barely enough for six regular golden apples.
"Long road ahead," he muttered, shaking his head.
But progress was progress.
He double-checked the collection area to make sure he hadn't missed any drops, then broke the torch at the tunnel entrance to reactivate the spawners and headed back to his building.
After organizing everything into the appropriate storage chests, iron with iron, gold with gold, arrows in their designated chest, useless rotten flesh in the "maybe useful someday" box, he finally relaxed.
The sun was still high outside. Plenty of daylight left. Which meant it was time for his favorite activity.
Fishing.
He grabbed his enchanted rod, settled onto his stool next to the infinite water source, and cast the line. The bobber landed, floating peacefully on the surface.
He leaned back, closed his eyes, and let his mind drift.
This was the life.