Inferna and I traded blows across the End's shattered landscape, each strike carrying decades of history.
"THE ANGER," she observed. "IT CAME AFTER THE AWAKENING. I FELT IT LIKE A FIRE IN THE VOID."
"Anger was easier than grief," I admitted. "Grief required accepting what I'd lost. Anger just required a target."
"AND YOU CHOSE THE WORLD."
"I chose the world's rules. The system that trapped me. The code that wouldn't let me leave."
"AND DID YOU BREAK IT?"
"Not yet. But I was going to try."
---
Year 72-100.
The anger came first. But with the anger came something unexpected: speed. I had seventy-two years of depression behind me, seventy-two years of nothing. Now that I cared again, I moved with desperate intensity. And I could move fast because death meant nothing. I could die a hundred times in a day and lose nothing but my equipment. My knowledge, my skills, my understanding—those respawned with me. This was the hidden gift of immortality: the freedom to fail without consequence, to learn without limit.
After the awakening, after Mira's hug, after I started caring again—the anger came. Not immediately, but inevitably.
Seventy-two years. Seventy-two years of sitting in gray silence, watching generations live and die, existing without living. Two hundred years stolen from me by a world I hadn't chosen, a game I hadn't asked to play.
I was furious.
Not at the villagers—they'd done nothing wrong. Not at the mobs—they were following their programming. Not at myself—my depression had been a response to an impossible situation.
I was angry at the world itself. At the system that had trapped me. At the code that refused to let me die or leave.
So I decided to break it.
---
Year 75. I began testing the world's limits. And I moved fast—faster than any normal human could. Because death was no longer a setback. When I died, I lost my items, but I kept my knowledge. Every experiment that killed me taught me something. Every failure was just a respawn away from trying again. I could take risks that would terrify any mortal. I could learn in days what would take others years.
If I couldn't leave through normal means, maybe I could find another way. Maybe there were cracks in the system, boundaries I could push, rules I could exploit.
I started with physics.
I could already manipulate gravity through manual crafting—manual blocks fell while vanilla blocks floated. But were there other physics differences?
Testing revealed several:
Water flowed differently in manual systems—more realistically, with actual pressure and volume calculations.
Fire spread along manual materials in complex patterns, obeying real-world combustion rules rather than game logic.
Light behaved strangely—manual torches cast realistic shadows and faded over distance, while vanilla torches lit areas evenly within a radius.
The world had two physics systems running simultaneously—the game's code and something else. Something real.
That something was my way in.
---
Year 80. I tested the world's boundaries.
Minecraft worlds were theoretically infinite—they generated infinitely in all directions, creating new terrain as players explored. But were they really infinite?
I walked.
For five years, I walked in one direction. Through forests, deserts, oceans, mountains. The terrain changed, repeated, changed again. New biomes appeared—some I'd never seen before, strange and beautiful.
But I never found an edge. Never hit an invisible wall. Never reached a point where the world stopped generating.
The world was infinite. Or close enough that the difference didn't matter.
But that didn't mean there weren't boundaries.
---
Year 85. I tested the world's depth.
The Overworld had a bottom—bedrock, an unbreakable layer that separated the world from the void below. But what if I could break it?
I spent years trying.
Diamond pickaxes: Nothing. Netherite pickaxes: Nothing. Explosions: Nothing. Wither attacks: Nothing.
Then I tried manual crafting.
A manually forged drill, created from netherite and powered by redstone. It took me six months to design and build. When I activated it, the sound was like screaming metal.
The bedrock cracked.
Not broke—cracked. A hairline fracture that shouldn't have been possible.
The game's code said bedrock was unbreakable. But manual items bypassed the game's code.
It took me another year to create a drill powerful enough to break through completely. When I finally did, I found... the void. Just void, stretching down into infinity.
But the breach hadn't gone unnoticed.
---
Year 90. I tested the world's sky.
The Overworld had a ceiling too—height limit 320 blocks. Above that, there was nothing.
I built a tower.
It took three years, using a combination of vanilla floating blocks and manual support structures. By the time I reached the height limit, my tower stretched higher than anything I'd ever built.
At the top, I found... nothing.
A barrier. Invisible, impenetrable, absolute. The game's code manifesting as a physical boundary.
I tested it. Manual blocks couldn't pass through. Manual tools couldn't break it. Even the void, which dissolved everything else, stopped at this barrier.
The world was a box. A very large box, but a box nonetheless.
And I was trapped inside it.
---
Year 95. I made my first real breakthrough.
If I couldn't break the world from the outside—couldn't reach its edges or punch through its boundaries—maybe I could break it from the inside.
The corruption experiments began.
I'd discovered earlier that enchantment symbols could be combined in new ways to create custom effects. But what if those effects could corrupt the game's code itself?
I started small: a block that I teleported back and forth until it rendered incorrectly; an item that occasionally duplicated because of the space and chunks I messed with; a mob that glitched through solid walls.
The world tried to heal itself—correcting errors, removing corrupted entities, maintaining its integrity. But I was persistent.
And I was learning.
Each corruption, each glitch, each error taught me something about how the world worked. About where its code was vulnerable. About what might finally break it.
I didn't know it yet, but I was on the path to my greatest creation.
And my greatest sin.