Chapter Two: The Struggles of Mortals

After the initial despair, Fang Zheng struggled to calm his restless heart.

The little knowledge he had picked up from the Science and Education Channel made him realize the crisis he was in.

Humans are creatures who cannot endure loneliness. If locked in a dark room, mental problems usually start to appear after more than three days.

And now, Fang Zheng’s situation was no different from being locked in a dark room.

“I have to find something to do, or I will go insane!”

Driven by fear and to avoid madness, he began experimenting with building. Using the various blocks in Minecraft as construction materials, he created novel and beautiful structures, attempting to alleviate the deep despair in his heart as much as possible.

The Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Palace Museum, the Pyramids, the Paris Opera House...

Every building vaguely imprinted in his memory from television, Fang Zheng painstakingly recreated with blocks, calming his mind in the process.

He desperately tried to cast aside all distractions, suppressing the despair and restlessness within, devoting himself wholly to the act of building.

By doing so, he managed to endure the first three months with great difficulty.

At the beginning, these activities served as a certain healing balm for his mind.

Fortunately, whether he had transmigrated into Steve—the immortal, indestructible protagonist of Minecraft—or had become a brain in a vat created by some mad scientist, Fang Zheng felt no physical fatigue, nor the mental haze that should accompany prolonged, uninterrupted activity.

This allowed him to persist for so long.

However, as time passed and more and more strange and towering structures—pushing the height limits of block placement—rose in Minecraft’s three dimensions: the Overworld, the Nether, and the End, the oppressive restlessness in Fang Zheng’s heart grew increasingly difficult to contain.

His mind repeatedly pushed to its limits, he began to scream and wail continuously, then frantically destroyed the buildings he had painstakingly constructed using TNT, lava, flint and steel, the Wither, and other means.

After destruction, he would rebuild them again, cycling endlessly between ruin and reconstruction.

Through this madness-fueled catharsis, his despair and restlessness were temporarily relieved, allowing him to slowly pass several more months.

Over half a year of Earth time had passed, amounting to over 15,000 Minecraft days.

At some point, Fang Zheng realized something remarkable: despite being just an ordinary middle school student with a mediocre memory, he could recall every block he had ever seen during those 15,000 days, every action he had taken—even down to the pixel textures on each block, and every move accurately timed to each frame.

It was then that Fang Zheng finally confirmed one undeniable fact: he had truly transmigrated.

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

Yet this immortal, indestructible body—dreamed of by countless Minecraft players as a “God of Creation”—had become a prison for Fang Zheng’s mind.

Though he could remember every detail of his memories clearly, he despairingly realized that the human named “Fang Zheng” was slowly being eroded by this torment.

The human mind, a marvel of intelligence, harbors a fatal flaw: humans cannot endure such monotonous, endless immortality.

Staring at the pixelated sunset of blocks, having not uttered a single word to himself in over a month, Fang Zheng murmured, “This is the 16,867th sunrise and moonset…”

From the next sunrise onward, he ceased building and destroying those strange, bizarre structures meant to stimulate novelty.

Instead, Fang Zheng began to attempt something new—a desperate act of self-rescue to save his soul.

He started trying to construct a Redstone circuit computer.

In Minecraft, Redstone circuitry is a skill only veteran players master.

For the rarest hardcore players, Redstone circuits can be crafted into elaborate contraptions.

They can exploit block properties and even bugs to design monster farms and automated resource production lines, achieving near-infinite resources in survival mode.

For the few god-level players, Redstone circuits become tools for programming.

They can build Redstone computers operating on the same binary principles as real-world computers!

Within these Redstone computers, such players can code programs as programmers do on actual machines, performing calculations, playing videos, music, and even games.

However, such Redstone computers, the domain of god-level hardcore players, were far beyond Fang Zheng’s abilities as a casual gamer passing time.

He only knew these devices existed and had no idea about the specifics of their construction.

He could only repeatedly calm his repressed, despairing, near-breaking spirit, recalling and pondering the binary logic gates he had seen in tutorial videos, and how to replicate them using Redstone circuitry.

Time passed slowly; after another 3,000 cycles of day and night, Fang Zheng had both succeeded and failed.

In the first few days of thinking, he had figured out how to construct a Redstone computer.

The rest of the time was spent building and adding logic gates.

However, the complexity of making a computer run is unimaginable to anyone without specialized knowledge.

On Earth, the earliest rudimentary computers were enormous devices composed of vacuum tubes, relays, and punched cards, occupying hundreds of square meters.

With technological progress and the invention of silicon transistor chips, computers shrank dramatically while gaining immense computing power.

Yet to replicate such a chip using Minecraft’s colossal blocks of Redstone circuitry would require an unbelievably vast area.

The scale of work needed was staggering.

Even the simplest old mobile phone chip, when scaled proportionally and recreated 1:1 with Redstone circuits—each logic gate at least one meter, or one block, in size—would become a monstrous structure spanning tens of kilometers.

Fang Zheng could calculate the time required to build such a giant, but he could no longer endure.

After 3,000 cycles of day and night since starting work, he paused placing blocks.

Facing the massive, sprawling Redstone computer occupying the maximum build height of the Minecraft Overworld, he clumsily began debugging, searching for circuit errors.

Starting from scratch, he attempted to write binary programs based on his memory of computer programming principles from videos.

It was a painful, arduous process.

When programming finished and testing began, he input a simple multiplication or division problem.

The Redstone computer slowly whirred and clicked, laboriously processing.

After an eternity, it finally solved a simple addition or subtraction problem that even a kindergartner could instantly compute.

Fang Zheng wept.

Expressionless, trapped within the immortal blocky body of Steve, the mortal inside wailed in collapse.

In theory, given enough endless time, Fang Zheng could build a vast Redstone computer surpassing all earthly computers combined in power.

But he had already tried the impossible from the start.

In this pixelated block world, aside from simple commands to teleport or change weather and time, complex commands like those in the PC version of Minecraft did not exist.

It was impossible to build a Redstone computer through commands.

Every block had to be placed painstakingly, one by one.

But Fang Zheng was human!

He was just a middle school student of average academic ability!

He was not a machine that could endlessly input programs and operate with unlimited power.

His soul was being worn down by this ceaseless work.

Fang Zheng could estimate his block placement speed and thus calculate the time needed to build a Redstone circuit system matching even a single-core 1Hz CPU in computing power.

Even ignoring errors in construction and programming time, it would take continuous, unceasing work for at least several months of Earth time.

If he wanted computing power comparable to a more advanced chip, it would require hundreds of sleepless years.

Moreover, Redstone circuits have a significant flaw.

Redstone signals propagate only every fixed distance and take 0.1 seconds per signal jump.

Even a perfect gigantic Redstone computer would operate at a shockingly slow speed.

Fang Zheng, who didn’t know how he’d held on so long, finally gave up—utterly despairing.

Though his memories remained crystal clear—every pixel on every block during all this work—he could clearly feel his personality, his human mind, his mortal consciousness, nearing its final collapse.

“What will I become once I completely break down?”

“Will I become a corpse frozen inside this immortal, blocky pixel body?”

Fang Zheng did not know.

He howled and howled...

Calling out to family, to friends, to everyone he knew...

Slowly, he stopped.

His mind shattered, he could no longer even cry.

Before his personality’s final collapse, Fang Zheng abandoned the tiresome Redstone computer.

He found a seaside spot where, despite the blocky art style, the scenery was still quite beautiful.

He stared at the pixelated sea water, stuttering as it flowed and washed the dirt blocks, quietly gazing at the blocky sun rising from the ocean’s edge.

Another 3,000 cycles of day and night passed in this silence.

Fang Zheng’s mind nearly came to a complete halt within this immortal block body.

He remained still there, as if waiting until the end of time.

Yet...

The weather changed again to a violent rainstorm.

Not far from him was one of the countless Nether portals he had built to try and crash the server.

It was struck by a bolt of lightning from the sky.

With the familiar nauseating activation sound, a pure white light shimmered within the obsidian portal frame.

Milky white particles flickered in and out of the shimmering portal screen like flying snow.

Watching the milky glow, the blocky body that had been frozen at the seaside for 3,000 cycles moved.

That stagnant soul was awakened by this sudden anomaly!

“I... what is this...?”

Fang Zheng’s voice hesitated.

“A white Nether portal?!”

Unlike the usual purple Nether portals, this lightning-struck portal’s screen was white.

This meant that the world beyond it might not be the familiar Nether Fang Zheng knew, but an entirely new realm!

Without hesitation, Fang Zheng broke into a sprint, moving at his fastest as a blocky being, and dashed right into it!