The Twilight Forest had changed since Mario first arrived.
The once-dense woods had completely vanished. He stood at its center, construction wand in hand, carefully placing the last few stone half-slabs.
When the final block clicked into place, he stepped back and surveyed his work. The platform stretched out before him like a massive cement pad, though instead of concrete, it was composed of one-meter stone half-slabs.
"Finally. Foundation's done."
He pulled a carrot from his inventory and bit into it. The crispy texture and sweet flavor hit his taste buds as he chewed quickly.
A soft chime echoed in his mind. His maximum health, originally sitting at 20 points, ticked up to 21.
Nice.
The Spice of Life: Carrot Edition mod was paying dividends. By eating different foods, he could permanently increase his max health, one point for every five unique foods consumed. Combined with Pam's HarvestCraft and its hundreds of different recipes, the potential was enormous.
"I actually feel stronger. So my power is tied to my health cap... Once I've got access to all the modded foods, I'll be unstoppable."
The sound of jet thrusters broke his train of thought. Ivan descended from the sky in his battle armor, landing on the stone platform. The suit opened, and he stepped out carrying an armload of oak logs, which he dumped into a nearby hopper.
The guy couldn't access Mario's inventory system, so he had to carry materials the old-fashioned way. Bags and containers didn't work either.
Mario glanced around at the cleared area. Every tree within a hundred meters had been harvested by Ivan, leaving nothing but stumps and bare ground.
"That's plenty. Good work. Next up: clay, gravel, and sand. We need those materials for the smeltery."
He wanted to get the Tinker's Construct setup running as soon as possible. The sooner he built tools in that system, the sooner they'd start leveling up through the Tool Leveling mod. Time was XP, and XP was power.
Ivan walked over. Unlike Tony, who would've spent weeks trying to explain the impossible, Ivan had simply filed away all the inexplicable phenomena as "weird shit to investigate later."
It was probably healthier that way.
"Where do we get these materials? Head back and buy them?" he asked the question seriously, but Mario couldn't shake the feeling the guy was being just slightly sarcastic.
"We save where we can, spend where we must. All these materials exist naturally in this world, I'll show you where to find them. Plus, we need to hit a Hollow Hill to mine some ores and craft proper tools."
As he spoke, Mario walked over to one of the spare suits of battle armor he'd brought along specifically for these expeditions. He climbed inside, and the suit powered up around him.
"Let's go."
Thrusters ignited with twin gouts of flame, and he shot into the air. The HUD lit up with altitude readings, velocity vectors, and threat detection as he oriented himself toward the Hollow Hill he'd marked on his mental map.
Flying through the Twilight Forest was incredible. With the AI assistance managing thrust vectoring and stability, he found himself pulling barrel rolls and executing complex aerial maneuvers just because he could.
"Flying is fucking amazing!"
He rocketed past a lich tower, close enough that he could see the dark stone bricks as they blurred by. The undead mage inside probably had no idea what kind of technology had just violated his airspace.
"This beats walking by a mile. Once we get the new materials, I'm building myself a dedicated flight suit. Even if I never fight in it, being able to travel like this is worth the resources."
Within minutes, they touched down in front of what looked like a massive burial mound jutting from the forest floor. Monster sounds echoed from within the dark opening.
Mario popped his armor and hopped out. A quick glance at his mini-map confirmed what his ears were telling him: the place was crawling with hostile mobs. Red dots packed the interior like sardines in a can.
But this time, he'd come prepared.
"Hang back and follow my lead."
He pulled out his diamond pickaxe and started attacking the hill's outer wall. In just a minute or two, he had opened up a tunnel.
Whoosh-whoosh.
Arrows and slime balls immediately filled the passage. Two arrows embedded themselves in his forehead. Behind him, Ivan asked, "You okay?"
Mario reached up and plucked the arrows out. "I'm fine. Light 'em up."
The shoulder plating of his armor opened, revealing a compact missile launcher. A small projectile shot from the housing and streaked into the dark tunnel.
BOOM.
The explosion not only obliterated the monsters clustered at the entrance but also widened the tunnel significantly, blowing chunks of stone outward.
Monsters came boiling out of the darkness.
Ivan didn't need instructions this time. His armor's palm repulsor fired, sending a continuous white beam into the mob.
Mario grinned behind his helmet. "Keep blasting! Clear us a path!"
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Under such overwhelming firepower, the monsters didn't stand a chance. They died in waves.
"This is what I'm talking about! All fear comes from insufficient firepower!"
Mario pulled out his sniper rifle and started picking off stragglers. They fought their way deeper into the mine.
It was still extremely dark inside, with only a few glowstones on the ceiling providing faint light
He pulled out his moonworm queen, aimed its rear end at the wall, and gave it a gentle squeeze.
A glowing worm shot out and stuck to the stone surface, immediately illuminating the area with soft bioluminescence.
He placed worms every meters as they advanced. Soon, the entire cavern was bathed in green light.
"Watch for spawners and take out any stragglers. I'll seal up their spawn points."
"Got it."
Ivan had no idea what a "spawner" was until he saw one. Then the concept became clear.
The moonworm queen was useful, but it couldn't block spawners. For that, Mario needed torches. He pulled a stack from his inventory and sprinted toward the nearest cage, jamming torches on all four sides to max out the light level and suppress its spawn rate.
As he worked his way through the cavern, sealing spawner after spawner, his hunger bar dropped again. He grabbed a piece of rotten flesh from his inventory and popped it in his mouth without hesitation.
Surprisingly, it tasted like beef jerky. Spicy beef jerky, specifically. Nothing about it resembled actual rotting meat.
"Huh. Not bad, actually."
After thoroughly looting the Hollow Hill, they returned to the portal area. Mario pulled some wood from a nearby chest and got to work.
Time to build the Tinker's Construct infrastructure.
"God, I love modded crafting tables. Auto-sorting, item splitting, proper inventory management... Vanilla Minecraft could learn a thing or two from Tinker's Construct."
The basic tables were simple to craft, the Crafting Station, Stencil Table, and Part Builder all required nothing but wood. Even the upgraded Tool Station was relatively cheap.
Following the mod's linking mechanics, he placed several tables on the ground and connected them together. Now he could access all their functions from a single interface.
As he finished organizing everything, he glanced toward a small river about fifty meters away. Ivan was over there, digging up sand and clay from the riverbank. Both materials were common in and around water sources.
Mario walked to his furnace, which had been slowly smelting gravel into seared bricks. He pulled out the dark, charred bricks and combined them into seared stone bricks.
"Too slow. If only I had some acceleration torches to speed this up."
The normal furnace's smelting speed was sluggish for someone used to instant crafting. Bored, he sat down on a nearby stone block and watched Ivan work by the river.
That's when he remembered the Teleport Cakes mod.
"I can make cakes that teleport you directly to the End or the Overworld!"
He jumped up and started rummaging through his storage chests. Everything here had been brought over from the Marvel world in a hurry, which meant it was all mixed together in no particular order.
After several minutes of searching, he found wheat and eggs. Milk he had plenty of in his inventory already.
With materials in hand, Mario froze. "Okay... how do you craft a cake again?"
He opened the crafting menu and checked the recipe. "Oh, right. Sugar too. Almost forgot."
Rather than waste more time searching chests, he jogged over to the river where Ivan was working. He found some sugarcane growing along the bank and harvested the middle sections.
"That's enough. You can stop digging now."
Ivan was waist-deep in the water. Hearing Mario's voice, he waded to shore, his clothes instantly drying the moment he emerged. Similar to how Mario didn't get wet from water blocks, though the underlying mechanics were completely different.
They returned to the platform together. Mario stood at his crafting table and began assembling cake ingredients.
"Wheat, sugar, milk, egg... wait, something's off."
He arranged everything but nothing appeared in the output slot. He checked the recipe book again. "Oh, the wheat goes on the bottom row!"
Before long, he'd crafted three cakes. He didn't have much sugar left, most of it had been used for potion-making earlier. The main reason he hadn't planted sugarcane was simple: sugar and paper were incredibly common in the modern world. If he needed more, he could just buy it.
"Actually... I could just buy pre-made cakes and save time."
But then he reconsidered. What if store-bought cakes couldn't be converted properly? That would cause unnecessary complications. Plus, cake ingredients were easy enough to gather. Worst case, he'd call Allen back from Washington to help farm materials.
The recipe for an Overworld Cake was straightforward: place a regular cake and surround it with oak saplings. The End Cake required ender eyes, while the Nether Cake needed obsidian blocks.
He placed the completed Overworld Cake on the ground. It looked almost identical to a grass block, with green "frosting" on top. He stared at it, debating whether to use it.
Part of him wanted to jump through immediately and explore. But a bigger, more rational part warned him about the risk. Going to the Overworld wasn't the problem, the question was whether he could return afterward. If he got stranded in vanilla Minecraft's Overworld...
"No, better hold off on that. I'll make the End Cake first. Besides, most Overworld materials can be found in the Twilight Forest anyway. Except for Totems of Undying."
Those were incredibly valuable, they gave players a second chance at life. Once he got his hands on the Infinity Gauntlet, he could give everyone a totem and have them snap their fingers one by one, testing whether reality manipulation could send him home.
Ring-ring-ring.
"How do I have signal here?"
He pulled out his phone. Tony's name appeared on the caller ID, and the signal indicator showed one precious bar.
"Are the dimensions merging on a spatial level? That's the only explanation."
There wasn't time to puzzle it out. Tony rarely called him directly, he usually went through Ivan for business matters. A personal call meant something urgent had come up.
He glanced over at Ivan, who was absorbed in studying the smeltery structure. For some reason, Mario felt like he was watching his best scientist get poached by a rival company.
He answered the call. "Tony, what's up?"
"Mario... where are you? I'm at your company facility. There's something I need to discuss with you."
Tony's voice broke up intermittently, clearly affected by the weak signal.
"Alright, give me a minute."
Without checking whether Tony had heard him clearly, Mario hung up. He turned to Ivan.
"That's enough for now. This stuff isn't something you can study yet. Take it step by step. Once I have time to visit Asgard and collect what Thor promised me, then you can dive deeper into this."
He had several scientists on payroll, but Ivan was the only one who was both young and exceptionally gifted. He couldn't afford to let the guy burn himself out chasing impossible questions.
Hearing Mario's words, Ivan reluctantly pulled his attention away from the smeltery. Coming to the Twilight Forest had been a revelation. Where the laws of physics seemed like polite suggestions rather than hard rules. Constant temperature, floating blocks, monsters spawning from nothing, water flowing without source or end.
If Mario hadn't occasionally snapped him out of it, he might have lost himself entirely to the mysteries of this place.
"Next time we come here... can I bring some equipment? I need to document this place."
Mario rubbed his forehead. Ivan's expression told him the man was already halfway down the rabbit hole of obsession.
"We'll see. But right now, we can't keep Tony waiting."