"I'm... I'm so pissed!"
Herta stalked down the village street with a dark expression. Whenever she saw so much as a pebble in her path, she would kick it away. The oppressive aura emanating from her made Silver Wolf afraid to even get close.
The two walked one after the other. Before long, they saw Screwllum conversing with a female villager in a white robe. Their exchange seemed to be going very smoothly, not at all like Herta's frustrating experience.
This left Herta feeling a bit baffled and "jealous." Pouting, she quickened her pace and walked over.
"Screwllum!"
Hearing his name, Screwllum turned his head and nodded at Herta. He then turned back to the white-robed female villager before him and explained, "Madam, allow me to introduce you. These two are my companions. They are also travelers."
The white-robed villager turned, greeting Herta and Silver Wolf with great enthusiasm. "Hello, fellow Steves. My name is Vendi, and I am the village librarian."
"Uh? Hello..." Herta replied, but she found Vendi's way of addressing them both strange and somewhat familiar.
She remembered!
Isn't "Steve" what Fu Zhu often calls himself? Could it be that "Steve" is the local term for a traveler?
Herta didn't voice her suspicion immediately. Instead, she stood quietly to the side, listening to the conversation between Screwllum and Vendi.
"Madam Vendi, since you are the village librarian, might I be able to borrow some of your books?"
"Of course, but there is a fee."
Vendi smiled and materialized a virtual screen. It displayed only two lines of text: one offered an enchanted book in exchange for 8 emeralds, and the other, a bookshelf for 4 emeralds.
The moment Screwllum saw the virtual screen Vendi presented, he understood her intentions. She wanted to barter. It was just that the price... was a bit too steep, and he wasn't carrying that many emeralds with him.
Screwllum turned his head in distress, casting a pleading look towards Herta.
Herta spread her hands helplessly. "I don't have any either. Why would I be carrying that kind of thing around? Hey, pipsqueak, do you have any?"
Having been suddenly called "pipsqueak," Silver Wolf's eyebrow twitched. But the one who called her that was Herta, and she was currently in a situation of "living under someone else's roof," so she could only shake her head meekly.
"I already told you I came here based on Elio's prophecy. How could I possibly be carrying so many emeralds..."
After hearing the three of them out, Vendi spoke with some regret, "If you don't have any emeralds, then there's nothing I can do. Come back after you've gathered some, Steves."
With that, she turned and walked away, seemingly losing all interest in further conversation once she learned they had no emeralds.
Watching Vendi leave, Screwllum sighed helplessly and walked back to Herta and Silver Wolf. "So, did you two gather any information?"
At the mention of this, Herta and Silver Wolf's faces instantly darkened.
Herta said through gritted teeth, "Nothing... I just ran into an incredibly annoying guy who wouldn't say a single word to me and just kept humming and hawing!"
Silver Wolf also shook her head. "Me neither. I just watched Fu Zhu occupy a villager's house, and then I ran into Herta when I came out..."
"Hm?"
"...Madam."
Under Herta's drawn-out, warning tone, Silver Wolf was forced to add the honorific.
"Is that so?" Screwllum was a little disappointed. He had thought that Herta and Silver Wolf might have been able to obtain some information.
"What about you, Screwllum? It looks like you were getting along quite well with that villager." Herta's tone was a bit sour. Why was it that Screwllum encountered someone who could be considered relatively normal, while she ran into a completely stubborn fellow?
"Regrettably, my progress wasn't much better. Before you arrived, my conversation with Madam Vendi was merely some daily chatter. The only piece of 'information' that could be considered useful is how these villagers refer to us."
"Oh?" A smile touched Herta's lips as she raised an eyebrow at Screwllum. "You noticed it too?"
Screwllum nodded. "Mmm."
"I introduced myself to the madam earlier, but she insisted on calling me Steve. Therefore, I've become quite curious about this word. Does it refer to a group, or does it have another meaning?"
"You'll have to ask Fu Zhu about that. You might not know, but 'Steve' is another name Fu Zhu has for himself."
After offering this explanation to Screwllum, Herta turned her head and stared at Silver Wolf. "Pipsqueak, where's Fu Zhu?"
---o---
A few veins bulged on Silver Wolf's forehead as she retorted in a low voice, "Can't you use a different name? Are all the members of the Genius Society this impolite?"
Herta, however, just crossed her arms, lifted her chin, and snorted. "What kind of friendly attitude should I have towards a captive? Don't forget, you're our prisoner right now."
Silver Wolf sighed in resignation and pointed towards a part of the village. "When it was still night, Fu Zhu was sleeping in a villager's house over there. You should be able to find him there."
Herta and Screwllum exchanged a glance, and together, they started walking in the direction Silver Wolf had indicated. Silver Wolf could only hurry to keep up.
A moment later, the three of them found Fu Zhu, who was standing at the entrance of a house, "spacing out" as he watched the villagers pass by.
"Fu Zhu!"
Herta's call snapped Fu Zhu out of his daze. He nodded at the group.
"How did it go? Did you find anything?"
"Absolutely nothing, but we've got a belly full of questions." After a small complaint, Herta asked Fu Zhu with some curiosity, "What were you spacing out about just now?"
"Nothing much. I was just a bit surprised by the changes in the village."
"Hm?"
Fu Zhu's words made the three of them pause. Didn't the Simulated Universe simulate Fu Zhu's homeland? Why would he find it surprising?
Screwllum quickly asked, "Could it be that what the Simulated Universe has created is not, in fact, your homeland?"
"That's not it. It's the homeland I know, just not the original version."
Fu Zhu looked at the passing villagers, male and female with all sorts of different appearances, and couldn't help but feel a headache coming on.
He hadn't paid much attention to the villagers last night, just thinking they looked normal based on their clothes. But when he saw them out and about this morning, Fu Zhu realized he had been mistaken.
These villagers... were clearly villagers modified by the [Millénaire] mod!
They weren't the vanilla villagers at all!
But he had never unlocked the [Millénaire] mod in his system, and the Ender Dragon had also been modified by it.
"Come inside and have a seat," Fu Zhu said, gesturing for the group to follow him into the house behind him. He then sat down at a simple table made of wooden stairs and pressure plates.
Standing next to Fu Zhu was the male villager in the brown robe he had pulled out of bed last night, who was still staring at him intently.
The three of them entered the house and saw its owner staring fixedly at Fu Zhu. They stood awkwardly at the entrance, not knowing what to do.
Fu Zhu waved them over, pointing to the empty seats across from him. "Don't mind him. Just sit."
The three had no choice but to brave the villager's gaze and sit down in the empty seats across from Fu Zhu.
"Let's start with your questions."
Screwllum took the lead, repeating the question he had discussed with Herta earlier. "Why do the villagers ignore our self-introductions and call us Steve? What does the word 'Steve' represent?"
Hearing this, Fu Zhu recalled the game prompt that had popped up when Herta and Screwllum entered the Simulated Universe.
"Well, because of me, these villagers see you as the same kind of person I am. As for what 'Steve' means... it means the one who created this world."
"Created... the world?"
This word made Herta's and Silver Wolf's pupils shrink. Across the entire cosmos, only a tiny handful of beings could achieve such a feat, and even then, the worlds they created weren't truly real.
Take Herta, for example. The machine she built to simulate a universe could be considered a form of world creation, but it wasn't real.
After hearing Fu Zhu's answer, Screwllum, though shocked, was compelled by his curiosity to press on.
"In that case, Fu Zhu, have you created a world before?"
Fu Zhu shook his head, which brought a slight sense of relief to Herta and Silver Wolf.
That's more like it! There must have been some misunderstanding. It would be too astonishing if this seemingly ordinary person suddenly told them he was a creator god!
"Not one. I've lost count of the exact number, but that's not the point."
Herta shot up, slamming her hand on the table, a bit frantic. "How is that not the point! We're talking about creating worlds! Fu Zhu, can you show some respect for the term!"
"Herta, calm down first. You have to let me explain it bit by bit, right?"
Fu Zhu repeatedly soothed Herta, and with Screwllum also persuading her, the agitated Herta finally sat back down.
Fu Zhu organized his thoughts for a moment before explaining the truth of this world in a way the three of them could understand.
"First off, in my homeland, everyone has the ability to create their own small world. Everyone stays in their own little world, doing whatever they like—building, fighting, adventuring, farming, and so on.
Each of these small worlds is independent. To enter a different world, you need an invitation from its creator. You all are essentially here in my world because I invited you. That's why these villagers call you Steve. You can understand the word 'Steve' as the title used by the creatures within these created worlds to refer to us, the creators.
The reason I told you earlier that I found this world a bit strange is because every created world is more or less the same at the beginning. But they can be changed later according to the creator's ideas. The world we're in now has been modified, which is why I found it strange."
Although Fu Zhu's words were somewhat difficult to believe, Herta and Screwllum were able to grasp the general meaning.
Silver Wolf, however, raised her right hand directly and asked, "Why does that sound like a game?"
Fu Zhu snapped his fingers and looked at Silver Wolf with appreciation. "You can think of it that way."
---o---
Herta, however, let out a soft laugh at their exchange, muttering to herself, "If it's a game, then this is getting very interesting..."
Although her expertise wasn't in biology like Ruan Mei's, she could still tell that these villagers were true lifeforms, not data constructs like the NPCs in a game.
Screwllum processed Fu Zhu's words, a wild guess forming in his mind. But it was just a sprout of an idea; he had no evidence to support it, only a hypothesis born from a scholar's curiosity about the unknown.
"In that case, Fu Zhu, why did you appear at the Herta Space Station?" Herta suddenly asked.
Screwllum and Silver Wolf might not know, but she remembered it crystal clear. Fu Zhu had suddenly appeared right outside the Curio Collection Room after the Trailblazer had fainted.
She had deleted that surveillance footage right after watching it, and to this day, only she knew about it.
To this question, Fu Zhu simply threw up his hands. "I don't know either. I have no memory of that. I just know that I suddenly found myself in a very strange place.
And at that time, I also realized I had lost the ability to create new small worlds, right up until you built the Simulated Universe."
"You don't know either..."
This answer was quite unexpected for Herta. She had thought Fu Zhu had come to her space station intentionally, but it turned out to be an accident.
Screwllum, having now processed the vast amount of information, looked up at Fu Zhu and asked, "Fu Zhu, you mentioned earlier that this world is strange, that it has been modified. Could I interpret that to mean this world was actually created by another Steve?"
"Impossible."
Fu Zhu immediately refuted Screwllum's guess. "Right now, I am the only Steve here. If it were another Steve, I wouldn't have any control over this world at all. That's what I'm curious about as well."
Regarding this issue, Fu Zhu had previously checked his system's MOD library and confirmed that the [Millénaire] mod was not among his activated mods.
He asked the system for the reason behind the world's changes, but the system's answer surprised him. The system only told him two words: Ender Dragon.
Apparently, the appearance of these mods was due to the Ender Dragon.
To figure this out, he would have to find the Ender Dragon first.
Fu Zhu had a hunch. This time, the Ender Dragon wasn't just stronger than the original version. It was possible that, due to the fusion with reality, the Ender Dragon had undergone other changes as well.