Alexei filled the furnace array with leftover cobblestone from yesterday's mining session, grabbed a full stack of gold ingots from storage, equipped his golden helmet, and headed into the Nether portal room.
Through the glass window he had installed for safety, he could still see the dense crowd of piglins stretching endlessly into the distance.
He opened the door just wide enough to toss the entire stack of gold ingots through, then slammed it shut immediately. The whole process took maybe two seconds.
No way in hell was he going to stand there surrounded by a mob of piglins while they fought over shiny metal. The piglins would pick up the gold and barter on their own. Once they finished trading, he could collect whatever items they dropped on the ground.
Sixty-four gold ingots did not take long to process. With the sheer number of piglins nearby, there was not even enough gold to give one ingot to each of them.
Five minutes later, the area where he had thrown the ingots was completely covered with bartered goods.
He opened the door again, quickly scooped everything into his inventory, and retreated back to safety.
Time to see what he got.
Nether Bricks ×24, Blackstone ×84, String ×15, Obsidian ×6, Crying Obsidian ×8, Quartz ×25, Gravel ×55, Ender Pearls ×4, Enchanted Book ×1, Arrows ×18, Fire Charges ×8, Splash Potion of Fire Resistance ×3, Potion of Fire Resistance ×1, Leather ×13, Soul Sand ×17.
"Only four ender pearls?" he frowned at the count. "I remember getting twelve from just thirty gold ingots once."
Still, he was satisfied with the other materials. Crying obsidian, fire resistance potions, and soul sand were all useful. Especially the soul sand. Now he could finally build those bubble columns for the water transport system.
He was about to close his inventory when something occurred to him.
Fire charges.
He stared at the stack of eight fire charges sitting in his inventory. In vanilla Minecraft, fire charges required blaze powder to craft. Which meant they had to contain blaze powder as a component. And if they contained blaze powder...
"No way."
He pulled out a fire charge and focused on it.
"Deconstruct."
[Blaze Powder ×8]
[Gunpowder ×8]
[Charcoal ×8]
The fire charges vanished, replaced by their component materials. Eight pieces of blaze powder sat in his inventory.
He grabbed the blaze powder.
"Deconstruct."
[Blaze Rods ×4]
For a moment, he just stared at the four blaze rods now sitting in his inventory. Then he started laughing.
The rods looked exactly like they did in the game. Occasional sparks drifted off them. But when he held one, it was only warm to the touch, not burning hot.
Blaze rods were one of the essential progression items in Minecraft. You needed them to craft brewing stands, which unlocked potion brewing. And brewing stands were required for clerics to restock their trades.
Normally, getting blaze rods meant exploring Nether fortresses and fighting blazes. He had been dreading that particular task. And now he had just bypassed it entirely. Through sheer luck and the piglin bartering system.
"I love mods."
---
With blaze rods in hand, there was no reason to stay in the Nether any longer.
Alexei jumped back through the portal, returned to his base, and immediately converted all four blaze rods into brewing stands at the crafting table. Four brewing stands meant four potential cleric villagers.
One would go to his existing cleric for restocking. The other three would be used to convert new villagers into clerics once he had more villagers available.
Which... he did not.
"Hm... That's a problem."
At the mob farm's current efficiency, getting three more zombie villagers to cure would take at least seven to ten days.
That was too slow. He needed to expand and renovate the mob farm. And while he was at it, he might as well install the water transport system and the mob-stopping lighting system he had been planning.
The main structure expansion was not particularly difficult.
His plan was simple: increase the mob farm from five layers to ten. Double the spawning platforms, double the output.
Based on current performance, water flushing the mobs toward the kill chamber was not even necessary. They fell through the trapdoors fast enough on their own. The real challenge was the redstone lamp lighting system.
Each redstone lamp illuminated a 15-block radius, roughly seven meters in every direction. To ensure adequate lighting, he planned to install two lamps on each layer. Crafting the lamps alone would require eighty pieces of redstone dust.
The wiring would require even more materials. Repeaters were necessary to maintain signal strength, and switches would need to be installed both on the AFK platform and in the upper corridor for convenient access.
He checked his redstone reserves.
37 dust remaining.
"Not even close."
After thinking it over, he decided to postpone the lighting system. He could add it later once he had more redstone from cleric trades.
For now, focus on the expansion itself.
---
The renovation took nine days.
The main structure was completed by day five. The remaining four days were spent on redstone wiring.
With the brewing stands installed, his cleric could now restock properly. Combined with the librarian, he was earning 36 redstone dust per day. But the lighting system was more complicated than expected. It needed a lot of repeaters to strengthen the redstone signal over long distances.
He also installed control switches at both the AFK platform and the upper corridor, so he could toggle the lights from multiple locations.
There was good news, though.
Starting on day five, he had begun actively farming zombie villagers again. Three new zombies were currently curing in their isolation chambers.
The first one was almost done. He would have his second cleric soon. By day nine, the entire mob farm was fully automated. Below the bone sorting chest, hoppers fed into auto-crafters. Bones transferred into the crafters were automatically converted into bone meal.
The bone meal was then output and transported via water streams and bubble columns all the way up to the new survival base he had built beside the villager residential area.
Rotten flesh and gunpowder followed the same route.
The upgraded mob farm now produced approximately 160 mobs per hour.
Over a full day, that meant more than 3,800 mobs.
Alexei's daily bone income had stabilized at over 1,000 bones.
After running at full capacity for just five days, the newly built storage unit had already filled nine and a half of them.
It was absurd. He had more bone meal than he knew what to do with. Which brought him to his current problem: the furnaces.
His coal reserves were completely exhausted. The furnace array was essentially on strike, sitting cold and empty while cobblestone blocks waited to be smelted.
He needed a bamboo farm.
A bamboo farm would require a hopper minecart system to distribute bone meal to multiple growth stations. The minecart would travel along rails, stopping beneath hoppers to restock, then continuing along the circuit to dispense bone meal where needed.
The problem was timing.
A hopper transferred one item every 0.4 seconds. If a minecart passed underneath too quickly, it would only collect two or three items before moving on. That was nowhere near enough for a full distribution cycle. He needed a way to make the minecart wait longer beneath the loading hopper.
His first instinct was to use a repeater delay circuit. Repeaters could delay redstone signals by 0.4 seconds each. To collect enough bone meal for a full circuit, he would need at least six to eight seconds of delay.
That meant 15 repeaters. Which required 45 redstone dust.
"Yeah, I don't have that."
He checked his inventory again.
[Redstone Dust ×37]
It wasn't enough.
"Why am I even thinking about repeater delays?"
The answer came to him almost immediately.
Hopper timers.
A hopper timer could delay a redstone signal based on the number of items stored inside the hopper. With enough items, the delay could stretch to several minutes.
More importantly, the mechanism was simple. It only required 17 pieces of redstone dust. The core principle was straightforward. An activated sticky piston could not push another activated sticky piston.
To build the timer, he would need two hoppers facing into each other. Behind each hopper would sit a comparator. And behind the comparators would be smooth stone blocks with redstone dust placed on top. Sticky pistons would face toward the hoppers, and a redstone block next to one hopper would lock it.
Once the structure was finished, he only needed to place items inside one hopper. Since a hopper transferred one item every 0.4 seconds, placing 75 items inside would trigger the circuit every 30 seconds.
A full transfer cycle, from one hopper to the other, would take one minute.
"Why didn't I think of that first?"
---
With the timer problem solved, Alexei moved on to testing the bamboo farm itself. Since he was in another world and not the game, he could not assume bamboo would grow instantly when bone meal was applied.
He needed to test it.
After some experimentation, he determined that bone meal took about one minute to fully grow a bamboo stalk in this world. Which meant a single bamboo farm unit would never produce enough fuel to sustain the furnace array on its own.
He did more calculations.
His current furnace array had 16 furnaces. Each ten-minute smelting cycle consumed 64 bamboo as fuel. A single bamboo farm unit produced only 10 bamboo every ten minutes. That meant he needed at least seven units just to keep up with consumption.
After more testing with his remaining redstone dust, he developed a working design.
Each individual bamboo farm unit required:
Observers ×3, Piston ×1, Dispenser ×1, Hopper ×1, Rail ×1, Redstone Dust ×1, Smooth Stone ×2, Grass Block ×1.
The total redstone cost per unit came to nine dust.
It was not cheap, but it was still manageable.
During testing, he had initially been concerned that the observer placed at the top would detect the bamboo as soon as it reached the third block. If that happened, the piston would trigger too early and waste bone meal.
Fortunately, his concerns proved unnecessary.
The observers in this world behaved exactly like in the game. They only detected the bamboo at the exact moment the third block finished growing, not a second before.
As for the sugarcane farm, he planned to build only a single unit. The design was identical to the bamboo farm. The only difference was replacing bamboo with sugarcane.
With sufficient bone meal, a single sugarcane unit could produce approximately 1,440 sugarcane per day. After processing through auto-crafters, that would become 1,440 paper.
Enough to trade with ten librarian villagers simultaneously for emeralds.
Except there was one problem.
"I don't even have ten villagers total," he muttered, looking at his current villager count.
He pulled out one of the clocks he had bought in Verdantree City and checked the time.
It was late evening, almost sunset.
With his current redstone shortage, linking together the bamboo farm, sugarcane farm, and automatic furnace array would take at least three more days of material gathering and construction.
He left the building and headed back toward the main courtyard.
Unexpectedly, Yan had not left yet. She was still in the pavilion, talking with Qingxue.
When Yan spotted him, she waved him over. "There you are. Come here for a moment."
Alexei immediately became suspicious.
What did she want now?
"Is there something you need?"
Yan looked slightly exasperated. "I have a request. I would like you to excavate a new cave dwelling next to your courtyard when you have time."
"A new cave dwelling?" Alexei frowned. "Why?"
"I am planning to move next door. It will be more convenient for sect operations and easier to coordinate on projects."
Alexei noticed something odd about that explanation. "Don't disciples of this sect usually live at least a kilometer apart? Why would you want to move right next door?"
Qingxue answered before Yan could. "The separation distance was originally established to prevent competition for spiritual energy when Spirit Gathering Arrays were operating in cultivation rooms. With your spirit stone torches providing independent energy sources, that limitation no longer applies."
Alexei didn't have any real reason to refuse the request. Aside from finishing the automatic furnace and farm setups over the next few days, he didn't have much else scheduled.
Well, there was enchanting equipment. But with the cleric only supplying twelve lapis lazuli per day, that meant just four enchantments daily. At Level 30 enchantments consuming 306 experience points each, four enchantments would only take about an hour and a half total.
The upgraded mob farm was now producing roughly 160 mobs per hour, which meant he was conservatively gaining over 800 experience points per hour.
He would have plenty of time tomorrow to build the cave dwelling.
"The specific location will need to be determined tomorrow. I will need to survey the area first."
"That's acceptable." Yan stood and headed toward the pavilion exit. "I will return tomorrow morning."
She summoned her sword and flew off into the sky.
He watched her go, then turned to head back inside.
---
The next morning, Yan arrived at the courtyard shortly after sunrise.
Unfortunately, Alexei was still asleep.
He heard knocking on his door, followed by Yan's voice. "Are you awake? We should begin early."
"What time is it?" he called back groggily.
"Past eight in the morning."
Alexei groaned, rolled out of bed, and quickly dressed himself in his sect robes. When he emerged, Yan was waiting in the courtyard with her arms crossed.
"You are not a morning person, are you?"
"I am a person who appreciates reasonable sleeping hours," Alexei muttered. "Let's just get this over with."
Yan led him to the mountain path at the edge of the courtyard.
The location she had chosen was very close, less than fifty meters away. A narrow stone path covered in moss wound along the mountainside toward the excavation site.
Alexei examined the path critically. "This needs to be rebuilt first. It is too narrow and slippery. Someone is going to fall and break their neck."
"I can fly," Yan pointed out.
"Mengyao can't. Neither can any non-cultivator guests you might have. Safety comes first."
He pulled out his diamond pickaxe and immediately began widening the path.
His plan was to widen the mountain path to three blocks across. Along the outer edge, he would install stone brick walls. For the roof, he would use polished blackstone brick stairs and smooth stone stairs to construct a covered walkway in a style that vaguely resembled traditional architecture.
He would have preferred using deepslate, but he did not have any of that material available.
The construction process was significantly easier than building the pavilion had been. With Yan present and capable of flight, she could position blocks in places he couldn't easily reach. Aside from needing to craft the materials himself, it was practically like having Creative Mode enabled.
The entire covered walkway took less than two hours to complete.
They reached the end of the corridor, and Alexei began digging straight into the mountainside.
Minecraft had been his favorite game before the transmigration. He had spent the vast majority of his free time immersed in its world, and that included extensive building projects.
For him, a beautiful survival base could keep the game interesting far longer than a structure that was merely functional but ugly.
Players who casually threw a bed in the open, set their respawn point, and called it home were nothing short of heretical in his eyes.
In his opinion, Minecraft lost at least a third of its fun without building. The remaining two thirds came from survival and redstone engineering.
All three were essential.
---
"Almost done."
Excavating the cave dwelling had not taken much time.
His enchanted diamond pickaxe had a mining speed of roughly 3,600 blocks per hour. The newly opened cave dwelling was a rectangular space measuring 13 meters by 3.5 meters by 17 meters. The cultivation room was carved separately, extending outward from the main rectangular section.
In total, that came to 246 square meters of livable space.
The floor was paved with Minecraft smooth stone slabs to prevent mob spawning. The surrounding walls were all MC-style smooth stone bricks, accented with cobblestone decorations. Spiritual energy leakage was completely eliminated.
Yan opened her eyes and looked around.
"This is excellent. How many rooms do you recommend dividing this into?"
Alexei had already been thinking about the layout. "Aside from the cultivation room, you will probably want four main areas. A reception hall for guests, two bedrooms, and a storage room for materials. One bedroom can serve as the primary room, while the other can be used for guests or additional storage."
"That sounds acceptable."
In his mental plan, the residential section would occupy a 13×3.5×10 meter area. The remaining 13×7 meter section would be divided into a 4×5 meter stone-paved area and an 8×5 meter lawn.
He would place MC grass blocks there. They were soft, clean, and comfortable to sit on, making them perfect for outdoor tea or entertaining guests.
As for the interior room layout, that was straightforward.
Excluding the walls, the storage area would be positioned on the far right, occupying a 3×10 meter space.
The remaining 10×9 meter area would serve as the living quarters.
After reserving a 3×5 meter corridor connecting the two bedrooms, the master bedroom would measure 5×5 meters, the secondary bedroom 4×6 meters, and there would also be a small 2×3 meter chamber directly connected to the existing alchemy room deeper in the mountain.
Why include that small chamber?
Mainly because if the secondary bedroom were a 4×9 meter space, it would look strange. His sense of spatial aesthetics simply wouldn't allow such an awkwardly proportioned room to exist.
---
The spirit stone torches that had once supplied spiritual energy indoors were now completely obsolete.
Spirit stone lamps were far superior.
During construction, Alexei made another trip back to the villager trading area to purchase that day's redstone dust supply. Including the eighth villager he had just converted that morning, he obtained a total of 60 redstone dust.
He used 40 redstone dust to craft 10 redstone lamps. The remaining 20 were used for wiring.
The outdoor lamps were connected to a daylight sensor. Every time the sun set, the lights would automatically turn on, ensuring the lawn area would not fall into darkness at night.
Otherwise, if mobs started spawning at night in the middle of someone's home, that would be a disaster.
As for the indoor redstone lamps, he decorated them simply to keep things aesthetically pleasing. The switches were handled directly by levers.
Interior furnishings were minimal. Each bedroom had two beds merged together. There were a few empty bookshelves, several stone platforms for placing storage chests, and a solid gold clock hanging in the corridor that looked somewhat garish under the redstone lighting. Additional furniture would depend on how Yan wanted to arrange things.
In the cultivation room, he planted fifteen Brightglow Fruit trees. They perfectly surrounded the 5×5 meter cultivation chamber in a ring.
A mid-grade spirit stone lamp could provide spiritual energy to a six-meter radius, perfectly covering the entire cultivation room with energy to spare. Even in the thinnest areas, the spiritual energy concentration was still four times normal density.
With the sustained supply from the mid-grade spirit stone lamp, the Brightglow Fruit trees would have no trouble growing. Their spiritual energy conversion efficiency was not quite enough for Yan's advanced cultivation needs, but for Mengyao it would be more than sufficient.
At Yan's current cultivation level, whether she used pure spiritual energy or regular spiritual energy didn't make much difference anyway.
---
By late afternoon, the entire cave dwelling had passed Yan's inspection with flying colors.
Alexei headed back toward his own residence. Time to get the mob farm running again. He had work to do.
He climbed down into the spawning tower below his house and flipped off the redstone lamps. Darkness flooded the spawning platforms, and within seconds he could hear the sounds of zombies and skeletons materializing.
Today he had obtained twenty-four pieces of lapis lazuli from his two clerics. At four pieces per enchantment session, that meant he had at least three hours of enchanting ahead of him.
Might as well grind some zombie villagers while he was at it. The conversion process took long enough that he could multitask. As for the automatic furnace array he had been planning... that would have to wait until tomorrow. He was completely out of materials for it anyway.
Not that it mattered much. Even if he dumped every piece of redstone he had purchased today into the project, he would still be about a hundred units short of what he needed.
Tomorrow, though, his remaining two zombie villagers would finish converting. Two more clerics meant two more sources of redstone dust. That would bring his daily redstone acquisition up to one hundred and eight pieces.
With ten villagers total, it was probably time to start building an iron farm.
Fortunately, iron farms were relatively simple to construct. He just needed to clear out a 17x17 area in the center of the villager housing district, place down MC blocks, and pour water into the four corners.
Iron golems could spawn in water, so the current would wash them toward the center where campfires and lava would execute them. Hoppers and chests would automatically collect the drops.
The main reason for building it, though, was safety.
Keeping iron golems spawning inside the villagers' living area was asking for trouble. If someone accidentally bumped into a villager and triggered a golem's protective instincts, that person would be on the receiving end of a several-hundred-kilo metal fist traveling at high velocity.
A blow like that could easily kill a normal person. Even a cultivator could suffer serious injuries if caught off guard.
It was far safer to relocate the entire setup somewhere away from daily foot traffic.
Alexei settled down and got to work.
----------
[POV: Yi Mengyao]
Meanwhile, at Yan's original cave dwelling on the other side of the mountain, Mengyao had just finished her evening cultivation session when she noticed something strange.
Her master was... packing?
Yan moved quickly through the residence, pulling items from storage chests and sorting them into neat piles.
"Master? What are you doing?"
Yan didn't even look up from the chest she was currently ransacking. "Hm? Didn't I tell you we were moving?"
"Moving?" Mengyao blinked. "Moving where?"
"Next door to your senior brother, of course!"
Mengyao mentally reviewed her visit to Alexei's courtyard just yesterday. She hadn't seen any new cave dwelling under construction. In fact, she was fairly certain the mountainside next to his residence had been solid rock.
"When did..."
"Hurry up and pack. We are moving in tonight!"
Mengyao knew better than to question her master when she was like this. Once Yan made a decision, it would happen whether the universe was ready or not.
She gathered her belongings, which consisted mostly of the clothes she had bought in Verdantree City along with a few personal items. Everything was packed into a small bundle. She owned very little. Her previous life had taught her the wisdom of traveling light.
After slinging the pack over her shoulder, she watched as Yan summoned her flying sword with a simple gesture and stepped onto it with practiced ease.
"Let us go!"
Mengyao wrapped her arms around Yan's waist. The sword rose into the air and carried them across the mountain, catching the last rays of the setting sun as they flew toward their new residence.
They landed on a small platform that Mengyao immediately recognized.
"This is..." She looked around, studying the covered walkway that stretched from the platform toward a door built into the mountainside. "Alexei built this?"
She had heard Yan mention that Alexei had constructed the pavilion, pond, and building by himself, but seeing was different from hearing.
She still couldn't figure out his methodology. The structures appeared overnight, fully formed, as if they had simply materialized from thin air.
So far, she knew that he possessed incredible physical strength, had access to some kind of massive storage space, and could craft spirit stone torches. Oh, and he had that fishing rod artifact that could pull impossible objects from water. Though she suspected the fishing rod itself was the source of that particular ability, not Alexei himself.
Unlike Mengyao, who was studying everything with curiosity, Yan was already striding confidently toward the entrance. She had toured the entire residence earlier that day and knew exactly where everything was.
"Come along. Let me show you around. If all goes well, we will not be moving again anytime soon."
Mengyao hurried to catch up as Yan climbed six stone steps and opened the door.
The first thing she noticed through the glass panels was a small patch of grass. Yan led her directly to a tapestry woven from colored wool that hung on the wall of what appeared to be a storage area.
"This is the warehouse," Yan announced, and then walked straight into the tapestry.
Mengyao followed without hesitation.
The space beyond was impressively organized. A central corridor allowed passage, with ten of Alexei's signature storage chests lined up on each side. At the far end of the hallway, a lamp rested on smooth stone bricks.
They sorted and stored their belongings in silence, then exited back to the main residence and headed down the corridor toward the living quarters.
Yan opened a door. "This will be our bedroom."
Mengyao stepped inside and looked around. The room was spacious, measuring roughly five meters on each side. A bed stood in the center, noticeably larger and far more comfortable than the standard furniture found in most sect quarters. Several empty bookshelves lined the walls, and a chest rested on a smooth stone platform.
She gave a small nod of approval.
Yan then led her back outside to the lawn area and pointed toward another tapestry hanging on the wall. "And this is the cultivation room."
Mengyao followed her master through the painting. The moment she stepped inside, she froze.
Dense spiritual energy saturated the air.
"This is...?" Her voice came out faint with shock.
Fifteen Brightglow Fruit trees encircled the entire cultivation chamber, their branches heavy with glowing fruit. Each tree bore dozens of fruits, maybe seventy or eighty per tree.
That was over a thousand Brightglow Fruits!
A single Brightglow Fruit could sell for enough gold to buy a respectable house in Verdantree City. A thousand of them could purchase a large portion of the city itself.
She had suspected for some time that the Aureate Summit Sect had a hidden expert skilled in spirit plant cultivation. But suspicion and seeing fifteen mature Brightglow Fruit trees arranged in a cultivation room were two very different things.
What shocked her even more was the complete absence of formations or restrictions. The trees had simply been planted in the grass.
In her previous life, she had visited the outer regions with her sect and toured their legendary spirit fields. Those operations had formations layered upon formations, with restrictions so complex they required teams of specialists to maintain. Each high-grade spirit plant was surrounded by hundreds of meters of bare earth, tended by multiple healer cultivators who monitored growth conditions around the clock.
The only other place she had seen spirit plants growing this casually had been in Alexei's building. And even that had not prepared her for this scale.
The density of spiritual energy in this room couldn't rival the premier cultivation facilities in the outer regions. Those places concentrated energy to a level comparable to directly absorbing high-grade spirit stones.
But compared to her former sect, this place was far superior.
They left the cultivation room. She was still trying to process everything she had just seen when another door suddenly caught her attention.
"Master, what is that room for?" she asked as she pointed toward it.
Yan stiffened at once. Then she turned around with unusual seriousness and placed both hands on Mengyao's shoulders.
It was rare to see genuine gravity in her master's normally playful expression. Mengyao straightened instinctively.
"Mengyao, you must not go near that room. Something very frightening will happen if you do."
Mengyao felt alarm. What could possibly frighten her master?
Yan's expression immediately brightened back to her normal cheerful state. "Now, let us get some sleep. It has been a long day."
"Ah... alright." At this point, Mengyao was simply used to her master's mercurial moods.
---
That night passed dreamlessly.
Mengyao normally had trouble sleeping in unfamiliar places.
But the bed in their new residence was absurdly comfortable. The mattress felt like sleeping on a cloud, somehow perfectly supporting her body while remaining incredibly soft.
She fell asleep within minutes and didn't wake until morning sunlight filtered through the windows.
When she finally opened her eyes, she realized that it was the most comfortable bed she had ever slept in.