The outside of the castle was in even worse shape than the inside. Entire blocks of stone were missing, the walls in several places revealing the contents of the rooms inside. And the decorations had been torn apart seemingly more by wild monsters than the elements.

Sam wasn’t worried about that though, he knew he could rebuild all of it. First however, there was a path leading from the castle to a rickety rope bridge. He tested the ropes by putting pressure on them, they held, and he crossed safely. The forest was alive, all sorts of sounds of creatures washed over him.

As he walked along, he occasionally swung his Diamond axe at a tree a few times, the entire thing disintegrating into his inventory. He called the aforementioned screen up. So far, he had collected at least three stacks of what was called wildwood. As far as the mysterious memories and blueprints in his head said, this wood could be used for anything normal oak could be used for.

The sound of hooves trotting down the path made him look away from his inventory. He didn’t know what it was, but if it was a monster, he would make sure all of its drops were his. He quickly leapt up towards a tree next to him, the bottom of his shoes stuck into the bark before he pushed off, grabbing at a low hanging branch before pulling himself up.

One thing he had found while mining and fighting the wooden wolves was that he had three new upgrades on this server. He was super strong, he was agile as a bat, and his balance was impeccable. So much so, that he could stand on a ledge by the tips of his toes and plank over thin air.

The creature looked like a smaller zebra, only more adorable. The stripes looked more like tribal markings than an actual evolutionary advantage. On the equines flank was a symbol like a spiraling sun. The mohawk on it would be the most curious thing, if not for the golden jewelry like the wristband around one leg, or the neck rings, or even the hooped earring.

He stood still and held his breath high up in the tree, which he could do for a solid twenty minutes. The Equine scratched the dirt road, scanning the treeline. Did the equine see him? He was fairly far away from his spawning point, if it proved to be something beyond his capacity to fight at the moment he’d be spending another two hours getting back.

“Ah, there are the needed berries,” His mind stopped as the equine talked, we’re they another player in this strange minecraft game he had found himself in? Or was it merely a delusion of his lonely mind, already breaking from madness? “The cure to a lot of aching bellies.”

He was already standing still, but he made sure that no part of him was in motion as the mini zebra plucked berries from a bush at the base of his tree. It somehow used its hooves to pick each berry before placing them in a basket he had only noticed now that he could see the left side of the equine.

As the zebra turned away, Sam let out a sigh of relief, not seeing the zebra’s ear twitch. He wasn’t exactly ready to become social just yet, but this proved to him that he needed to start protecting his castle from griefers. From the tops of the trees he had a good vantage point to climb higher.

When the thick branches ended, he hopped onto thin ones, little more than twigs, and like some martial arts master he barely bent them as he walked along them. Sam didn’t like thinking about where real physics ended and minecraft began.

Where he knew Minecraft was, was when he began stacking blocks of stone on top of the aforementioned twigs. They stayed there, perfect cubes in some middle finger to the laws of physics and all that was normal. Placing blocks from his inventory was pretty simple, he just looked where he wanted it, pantomimed putting a block down with either hand, and the block was placed. Of course he had to have it highlighted in his hotbar.

Once he was high above the trees, he saw for miles in every direction. The path he was heading on, which his compass indicated was north, was a colorful town, waterfall and all. Probably host to a few hundred or so creatures like the zebra earlier.

To the west the trees seemed to thin out and the ground turned into the Murky green he associated with a swamp. While east sent him either to some plains or a mountain ridge depending how far south he went.

Of course, due a bit south by southeast was the castle he had claimed as his own.

He jumped off the pillar he had made, sliding gently down the vertical surface. Setting off towards the swampy west as he ran from branch to branch.

The swamp was quite oppressive, the muck water wasn’t that deep, as he could reach the surface with one stroke. Thankfully he could hold his breath for around ten minutes, allowing him to search for and collect slime. Turns out sentient oozes were’t the source here, but piles of mucus-like material along the swamp floor.

He collected as much as he felt like with a shovel, which netted him an entire stack of slimeballs. After which he groaned as he was staring at the ragged cloth of his bed. Apparently he found out what made those mucus piles, some sort of Hydra, and his diamond armor did jack squat against its attacks, as even with it, each bite dealt four hearts, and with only ten to go around, and four heads, he was deader than deadwood.

Regardless, He got to work. For three tireless days he worked on crafting. The first thing he started was automating everything. From farms, despite his lack of hunger, as he didn’t even have a hunger bar, to mining drills that would mine by themselves. This was where he found out someone screwed with ore-gen even more by having the generation set in reverse. He found diamonds and such at the highest levels, followed by gold and redstone, till several hundred meters below the earth, he found an abundance of iron and copper.

With that, he began working on magic and personal armor. He found some books on magic in a library, which as it turned out, despite having words in them, counted for any recipe calling for a book. Regardless, the books talked about how every creature had their own source of magic, how they manipulated it, blah blah blah. Well, the instructions in his head told him that he could just take magic from the environment, as everything bled off this kind of raw magic. He tried the book’s way, but he felt absolutely nothing, no force, no nothin, so he went about building whatever this new mystical building sense taught him to.

Sam then began experimenting with other things afterwards, rituals that summoned the undead which were then used for their souls, which he was confused as they were all zombie or skeleton equines. Rituals to dark and forgotten gods fueled by sacrifice (he didn’t have any animals to slaughter, so he just killed himself repeatedly), Even Blood magic was not exempt from his experimentation, although he abandoned that soon after finding juggling four branches of magic at once was time consuming.

By the time he left the castle once more, he had begun collecting all the parts necessary for building a suit of Power Armor, he also had a spellbook, which while allowing him to create an almost infinite list of spell combinations from runes, only allowed ten spells to be saved and cast at a time. When he made the spellbook, a new bar on his hud was unlocked, a mana bar. Apparently his minecraft system was pulling in wild magic to refill it, which the library told him was impossible. Then again, so was a vertical line of perfect square cubes atop leaves.

He had decided to head north towards the town now that he could finally defend himself. It would either be overrun with monsters, he hoped vampires, something in his head told him that’d be a really great idea, or players who could trade with him. Maybe even villagers who he could exploit with his twenty stacks of emerald in his backpack he had made.

Well, that is until he saw a white Pegacorn on the other side of the rope bridge.

"We need to speak, outsider. I shall ignore your transgressions this time as you clearly are not interested in my ponies, but if you approach a city or village, I will strike you down," she said, glaring at him. "I need you to hunt a fellow dark mage."

Author's Note

In case it wasn't obvious, we're switching back and forth between the two for the first few chapters, at least until the characters meet up for the first time.