The Struggle of a Mortal

After the initial despair, Fang Zheng tried hard to gradually calm his restless, anxious heart.

A bit of trivia he had learned from an educational channel made Fang Zheng realize the danger.

Humans were animals incapable of enduring loneliness. If shut inside a dark little room, most would begin developing mental problems after more than three days.

And Fang Zheng's situation was no different from being locked in such a room.

"I have to find something to do, or I'll definitely go insane!"

Driven by fear, and to keep himself from losing his mind, he began trying his hand at construction. Using the various functional blocks in Minecraft as building materials, he created novel, beautiful structures, hoping to ease the despair buried deep within him as much as possible.

The Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Imperial Palace, the Pyramid, the Paris Grand Theater...

Every building that had left a vague impression on him from television, Fang Zheng painstakingly recreated in blocks while trying to calm himself.

He worked hard to cast aside all distracting thoughts, desperately suppressing the despair and agitation within him as he threw himself wholly into building with blocks.

That was how he struggled through the first three-odd months.

At first, this activity did have a somewhat healing effect on Fang Zheng's mind.

Fortunately, whether he had transmigrated into Steve, the protagonist of Minecraft, or had been turned into a Brain in a Vat by some mad scientist, Fang Zheng could not feel any physical exhaustion at all. Nor could he feel the theoretical grogginess that should have come from his brain operating continuously for so long.

That was what allowed him to endure for so long.

Yet as time passed, and all manner of bizarre buildings and wonders—reaching the maximum block placement height—rose across Minecraft's three dimensions: the Overworld, the Nether, and the End, the suppressed agitation and despair in Fang Zheng's heart became increasingly difficult to contain.

After his mind repeatedly broke down to its limit, he began screaming and wailing continuously. Then, like a madman, he used TNT, lava, Flint and Steel, Withers, and countless other methods to destroy the structures he had spent so much time and effort building.

After destroying them, he built them again. The cycle repeated endlessly: destroy, rebuild, destroy, rebuild...

Through such frenzied release, his agitation and despair eased, and several more months slowly passed.

More than half a year had passed on Earth, while over 15,000 days had gone by in the Minecraft world.

At some point, Fang Zheng realized that although he was merely an ordinary middle school student with a poor memory, he could now remember with absolute clarity every block he had seen over those 15,000-plus days, every action he had taken, even the texture of every pixel on every block, every action precise down to the timing of each frame...

Only then did Fang Zheng finally confirm one thing: he really had transmigrated.

He had truly become Steve, the immortal and indestructible protagonist of the world of Minecraft, capable of creating almost anything.

But that immortal, indestructible body—the so-called "Creator God" body dreamed of by countless Minecraft players—had become a prison for Fang Zheng's mind.

Although Fang Zheng discovered that he could clearly remember every memory from this period, he also realized in despair that—

The human being named "Fang Zheng," his personality, was slowly being ground away by this torment.

The minds of intelligent life such as humans had enormous flaws. People could not endure such monotonous, tedious immortality.

Watching the Block Sun set, Fang Zheng, who had not spoken to himself for over a month, murmured, "That was the 16,867th sunrise and sunset..."

Beginning with the sunrise of the next day, Fang Zheng stopped building and destroying those bizarre, grotesque structures meant to stimulate a sense of novelty.

Fang Zheng began trying to save himself—to save his own soul.

He began attempting to construct a Redstone Circuitry computer.

In Minecraft, this sandbox survival-building game, Redstone Circuitry was a skill only veteran players could master proficiently.

For those extremely rare hardcore veterans, Redstone Circuitry was something they could manipulate in endlessly inventive ways.

By making use of the properties of various blocks, and even all kinds of special bugs, they could design and create mob farms and automated Production Lines for farming resources, achieving virtually unlimited supplies in Survival Mode.

For the tiny number of master-level players, Redstone Circuitry could even serve as a programming tool.

Within Minecraft, they could use Redstone Circuitry to create Redstone Computers based on the same binary computer principles as those of the real world!

Inside a Redstone Computer, master-level players could edit all kinds of programs just as programmers wrote code on computers, allowing them to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; play videos; play music; and even play games!

However, something like a Redstone Computer, which only hardcore master-level players could handle, was far too difficult for an ordinary player like Fang Zheng, who only played games to pass the time.

He only knew that such a thing existed. He had no idea about the specific details of how to build one.

Again and again, he could only struggle to calm his suppressed, despairing mind, which was on the verge of collapse. He constantly recalled and pondered the principles of binary logic gates he had seen in videos, trying to figure out how to recreate them with Redstone Circuitry.

Time slowly passed. Another 3,000 Block Sun cycles came and went. Fang Zheng succeeded, yet he also failed...

Within just the first few days of thinking, Fang Zheng had already figured out how to construct a Redstone Computer. The remaining time was spent endlessly building and adding more logic gates.

But just how complicated was it to make a computer run? It was difficult for anyone who had not specifically studied the subject to imagine.

On Earth, the crudest early computers had been massive machines made from vacuum tubes, relays, punch cards, and countless other components, requiring rooms hundreds of square meters in size.

As computer technology advanced and silicon transistor chips were invented, computers made leaps in both size and computing power.

But if chips—objects of incredible precision among human creations, manufactured using the world's most advanced Production Lines—were to be replaced by the astonishingly large blocks of Redstone Circuitry, how much space would that take?

How enormous would the workload be?

The answer was that even for the chip in the most basic old-fashioned phone, even ignoring the complexity of Redstone Circuitry itself, merely scaling the phone chip up proportionally and reproducing it one-to-one with Redstone Circuitry, with each basic logic gate at least one meter wide—one block in size—

It would still become a colossal thing occupying dozens of kilometers when placed on the ground!

Fang Zheng could calculate how long it would take to create something of that scale, but he simply could not keep going.

After the 3,000th day-night cycle since he began this work, Fang Zheng temporarily stopped placing blocks.

Looking at the immense Redstone Computer before him, so vast that its end could not be seen at a glance, its height reaching the Overworld's block placement limit, Fang Zheng clumsily began debugging it again and again, checking for errors in the Redstone Circuitry.

Starting from scratch, he tried to use the programming principles he remembered from videos to write binary programs.

It was a painful, difficult process.

When the programming was complete, he began testing it. After entering a simple multiplication and division problem, the Redstone Computer slowly began operating amid a series of clacking sounds. After a long time, it finally calculated a simple addition and subtraction problem that even a kindergarten child could solve instantly.

Fang Zheng cried.

The mortal within the expressionless, immortal Block Person let out a wail of collapse.

In theory, if Fang Zheng were given enough time, he could indeed use the Overworld, whose area seemed infinite, to construct a Redstone Computer so unimaginably enormous that its computing power would far surpass the combined total of every computer on Earth.

However, Fang Zheng had already tried that from the beginning.

In this blocky pixel world, aside from simple commands that could directly teleport coordinates or change the weather and time, there were no complex commands like those in the PC version of Minecraft. It was simply impossible to use commands to lay down a Redstone Computer.

He could only build it manually, block by block.

But Fang Zheng was human!

He was a human being!

Just an ordinary middle school student with average grades!

He was not a machine that could keep working forever as long as it was fed instructions and had sufficient power.

His mind was constantly wearing down under this unceasing labor.

Fang Zheng could estimate the speed at which he placed blocks, and thus calculate how long it would take him to build a Redstone Circuitry system with computing power equal to even a mere single-core 1 Hz CPU in reality.

Even excluding every possible error during construction and excluding the time required to write the code, it would still take at least several months of uninterrupted building—several months of Earth time...

If he wanted computing power comparable to a slightly more advanced chip, then it would require hundreds of years without sleep or rest...

And Redstone Circuitry had enormous flaws.

A Redstone signal required 0.1 seconds to travel each standard unit of distance. Even if he truly constructed the ideal massive Redstone Computer, its operating speed would still be agonizingly slow.

Fang Zheng, who did not even know how he had endured this long, finally gave up. He finally fell into complete despair.

Although his memories remained crystal clear—clear enough for him to remember every pixel on every block from this period of work—Fang Zheng could distinctly feel that his personality, his human mind, his mind as a mortal being, was finally about to face its final collapse.

"What will I become after I completely break down?"

"Will I become a corpse frozen inside this immortal, indestructible block-pixel body?"

Fang Zheng did not know.

He wailed, wailed without end...

He called out for his family, called out for his friends, called out for everyone he knew...

Gradually, he stopped. With his mind collapsing, he could no longer even cry.

Before he sensed the final collapse of his personality approaching, Fang Zheng left the Redstone Computer that had come to disgust him.

He found a stretch of coastline that, aside from the blocky visual style, was rather scenic.

He watched the pixelated blocks of seawater flow and wash over the dirt blocks in stuttering motion, quietly watching the Block Sun rise from the ocean at the edge of his vision.

Sunrise followed by moonset. After watching another 3,000 day-night cycles, Fang Zheng's mind had nearly come to a complete standstill within that immortal, indestructible block body.

He simply remained there quietly, as though he would continue until the end of time.

However...

The weather refreshed into a rainstorm once more. Not far from Fang Zheng, one of the countless Hell Gates he had once built in an attempt to crash the server was struck by lightning from the sky.

As the activation sound effect that made Fang Zheng want to vomit rang out, a pure white curtain of light appeared inside the obsidian frame. Milky-white particle effects, like drifting snow, flowed endlessly in and out of the light.

And so, as he watched that milky-white radiance, the block body that had stood frozen by the sea for 3,000 day-night cycles moved.

That stagnant soul was awakened by this sudden change!

"I... this..."

Fang Zheng's voice sounded hesitant.

"A White Hell Gate?!"

Unlike an ordinary purple Hell Gate leading to the Minecraft Nether, the curtain of light within this Hell Gate, suddenly struck by lightning, was white.

That meant that what lay beyond might not be the Nether Fang Zheng knew, but an entirely new world!

Without hesitation, Fang Zheng broke into a sprint and charged inside at the fastest speed his block body could manage!