"Well... you're certainly decisive, aren't you?"
Li Ke was at a loss for words. Even counting his time in the 7 Days to Die world, this girl was setting a record for the fastest response to such a proposal.
He looked down at the petite, barefoot girl standing before him, and his inner monologue couldn't help but stir. To be fair, this "Toph" was genuinely cute—her features were clean and natural, carrying a unique, spirited charm. But... how should he put it?
She was as flat as a board.
Despite looking significantly older than Hermione, she somehow looked even more underdeveloped.
"Can't be helped. I'm starving," Toph spat out, her tone laced with irritation.
"I literally just stepped out of the arena and was heading home to grab a bite when I got sucked into this mess. If I don't get back soon, my parents are going to lose their minds. Not to mention, I'll miss my meal. I've already run away once to travel with the Avatar for years, and they've been hovering over me ever since, terrified I'll disappear again."
She looked genuinely annoyed. It was clear she loved her parents, but their suffocating control was a constant thorn in her side.
"Listen, I think you might have misunderstood me," Li Ke said, trying to be the voice of reason. "I need to be clear: doing this once isn't a magic ticket home. This ability needs to charge. I honestly can't even tell you how much energy it'll take to bridge the gap between worlds yet."
Looking at her stubborn expression, Li Ke had a sinking feeling. If she did this once and didn't immediately teleport home, she'd probably take her frustration out on his "little brother." This wasn't the 7 Days to Die world anymore; he couldn't afford to be reckless. In a world with these kinds of stakes, "reckless" could lead to a literal break in his physical health!
"I get it," Toph replied, her face the picture of matter-of-fact logic. "But I spent plenty of time hanging around the guys at the arena. I've heard them bragging constantly about how 'powerful' they are down there—boasting they could go all night without breaking a sweat. An outsider from another world shouldn't be any less 'capable' than a bunch of common thugs, right?"
She said it with such total, blunt confidence that Li Ke felt a massive headache forming. She wasn't being poetic; she had simply been misled by a bunch of ruffians talking big about their sexual prowess, and now she was applying those "locker room standards" to him.
"You actually believe that locker room bragging?!"
Li Ke was dying to snap back. Even in his original world, he didn't believe a man could naturally pull that off unless he saw it with his own eyes. And besides, Toph wasn't even trying to hide that mischievous, "gotcha" smirk on her face.
"Don't you think you should be at least a little skeptical?" he asked.
"Your heartbeat hasn't skipped a beat," Toph replied with a shrug. "That means you probably aren't lying. Plus, you're way stronger than me right now, yet you keep hinting that I shouldn't be impulsive. If you were actually a bad guy, you wouldn't be this polite."
Toph puffed out her chest with pride and gave Li Ke a mock-challenging wave of her hand.
"So come on! Let 'The Blind Bandit' see what you've got!"
"..."
Li Ke felt like her logic was annoyingly sound. Ironically, he was the one feeling hesitant now. It wasn't that he was uninterested; he just didn't want the girl to do something she'd immediately regret.
"Forget it. Let's wait until you've cooled your head a bit," he muttered.
He reached into his backpack. He hesitated to pull out the high-tier dishes from Food Wars—those were too 'explosive' to give to strangers without warning. Instead, he grabbed some standard supplies he'd scavenged from 7 Days to Die and handed the pack to Toph.
"Anyway, you two can try some food from another world. I don't know if it'll sit right with you, but it's better than nothing. And seriously, calm down—you're scaring Elsa."
Li Ke glanced over at Elsa. The moment his eyes met hers, she let out a visible shiver. He didn't dwell on it, simply turning around and heading toward the plateau he had scouted earlier.
"What a wet blanket!" Toph grumbled loudly, then turned to Elsa. "Hey! Food's here. Eat up!"
Elsa: "..."
She truly couldn't fathom how Miss Toph could be so completely devoid of suspicion. To Elsa, the girl seemed to have no guard up at all, treating a man who had just suggested something so intimate as if he were just a slightly boring travel companion.
Li Ke left the two girls to their own devices and made his way to the plateau he'd picked out earlier. The area was thick with cubic trees, and he began felling them one by one with his sword. As the logs popped into his inventory, he naturally combined them, and a Crafting Table manifested before him.
Once the table was set, things started getting interesting.
He quickly slapped together a wooden axe; his sword was his most precious tool, and he needed to preserve its edge for real threats. However, when he tried to pull the axe out—expecting it to materialize into a realistic, heavy tool like in the 7 Days to Die world—he paused.
The axe remained a jagged, pixelated object. Even as he held it or slotted it into his hotbar, it stayed stubbornly low-res, looking like something pulled straight out of a retro game.
"Great... I hope the food in this world isn't pixelated too. If I eat a stack of squares, am I even going to feel full?"
Li Ke felt completely out of place—a high-definition character trapped in a lo-fi world. But he quickly brushed the thought aside. 7 Days to Die had been a broken, "leaky" world full of loopholes to exploit. This world, by contrast, seemed much more "stable" and consistent with its own rules. It made sense that he wouldn't get the same realistic shortcuts here.
"Whatever. First priority is getting a fortress up. I'll worry about the rest later."
The mere thought of a Blood Moon from the 7 Days to Die world sent a chill down Li Ke's spine. He felt a compulsive need to build a proper base here—something sturdy and functional. If this world shared that same glitchy habit of spawning endless waves of monsters to hunt him down, he at least wanted to buy himself some reaction time.
Besides, if his memory of Minecraft served him right, the monsters would start spawning the second the sun went down.
Li Ke moved with practiced efficiency, crafting a wooden pickaxe and shovel. He set to work on the cliffside, clearing dirt and stone until he struck solid rock. The moment he gathered enough cobble, he discarded the wooden tools for stone ones and dug deeper.
Because the mining mechanics mirrored the game almost perfectly, Li Ke made rapid progress. Within a short while, he had hollowed out the beginnings of a room and unearthed a decent vein of coal. He slapped together a furnace, tossed in some coal to start smelting stone, and went right back to his excavation.
Unbeknownst to him, Toph and Elsa had wandered over and were watching his tireless work from a distance.
"We're all outsiders here... so why is he the only one who can actually pick things up?" Elsa asked, her brow furrowed in confusion as she watched the floating blocks drift toward Li Ke like iron filings to a magnet.
She could accept that this world was made of cubes. She could even use her magic to rationalize why broken objects turned into tiny floating squares. What she couldn't wrap her head around was why they couldn't touch any of it. Every time she tried to pick up a block she'd broken, it just sat there on the ground, mocking her.
She'd even tried singing to the elements. It didn't help.
"Who knows? Didn't he say he's a traveler? I guess 'travelers' just have a different set of rules," Toph replied nonchalantly. She was currently busy devouring a hot dog Li Ke had pulled from his shop interface. Even if its main draw was healing, Li Ke had mostly bought it for the flavor, and Toph wasn't complaining.
"I just... I think you're being far too trusting," Elsa whispered, her voice laced with worry. "Yes, he saved us, but the conditions he asked for are just..."
Elsa trailed off, unable to even say the words. If he had asked for gold, jewels, or land, she wouldn't have hesitated for a second. But that?
She was deeply grateful he'd stepped in—her failure to thank him earlier was purely due to the sheer shock of his proposition—but as a Queen, her default instinct was to remain skeptical of everyone's motives.
Toph, however, didn't seem to have a care in the world.
"What other choice do we have? When you're stuck and a path finally opens up, you take it, no matter how rocky it looks. Or what, do you plan on wandering around looking for an exit without any food?" Toph paused to take another massive bite. "Count me out. Look, the absolute worst-case scenario is that I end up married to the guy. If we really can't go home, that's probably the best option anyway."
Finishing the hot dog, Toph started picking her teeth, completely unconcerned with royal decorum. Her situation was actually the most dire of the three. Without her Earthbending, she was just an ordinary blind girl, forced to rely on heartbeats and echoes to find her way. She and Elsa had already experimented: even if they managed to hunt one of the local animals, they gained absolutely nothing from it. No meat, no hide—nothing.
Without food and without sight, the situation was already bordering on despair.
Whether or not Li Ke was telling the truth about the energy exchange, it was still a path forward. Toph had her doubts, but in times like this, she relied on her gut—and her gut told her that Li Ke wasn't lying about the necessity of their cooperation.
And besides, she reasoned with herself, as long as it gets us out of here, it doesn't matter how strange his methods are. As long as I don't tell anyone I had to work for a guy like this, my reputation is safe. Her logic was, in her mind at least, bulletproof. She stood there for a moment, the strange, blocky wind tugging at her hair, her decision already solidifying like the stone she could no longer bend.