Inferna landed a blow that should have killed me.
Her claws, each one as long as my arm, caught me across the chest. The impact cracked my armor, sent me tumbling through the air, tore through muscle and bone.
I felt death approaching. I'd felt it before—forty-seven times in the first month alone, and thousand of times since.
But this time was different.
This time, I had something to live for.
I activated [Harden], my armor becoming temporarily indestructible. The enchantment gave me ten seconds of invulnerability—enough time to stabilize, to drink a healing potion, to keep fighting.
"You should be dead," Inferna observed. "AGAIN."
"Death and I have date," I replied. "It doesn't likes me."
---
Year 1-2.
I discovered my immortality by accident.
It started with a mining expedition. Deep underground, following a vein of diamonds, I broke through into a lava pocket. The molten rock poured over me before I could react.
I died.
I woke up at my spawn point.
At the time, I thought it was normal. Minecraft had respawns—that was just how the game worked. I'd died dozens of times before. This was no different.
But then I started testing.
Fall damage: Lethal. Respawned.
Drowning: Lethal. Respawned.
Starvation: Slowly lethal. Respawned.
Wither effect: Lethal. Respawned.
The void: Slowly lethal. Respawned.
Every death brought me back. Every time, I woke up at my spawn point, whole and alive.
I should have been relieved. Immortality was supposed to be a gift, a power, a blessing.
But as the tests continued, as the reality sank in, I felt something else entirely.
Horror.
---
I couldn't die.
Not permanently. Not forever. Every death was temporary, every respawn a return to life.
The implications were staggering.
First: I was trapped. If death couldn't release me, what could? Was I stuck in this world forever? For eternity?
Second: The stakes were gone. Without the possibility of permanent death, what did danger matter? What did survival mean if survival was guaranteed?
Third: I was alone. More alone than any human had ever been. Everyone else in this world—villagers, animals, even the monsters—they could die. They could cease to exist.
I couldn't.
I was the only immortal thing in a mortal world.
---
The breakdown came in year two.
I'd been living in Minecraft for over a year. I'd built bases, explored biomes, mastered systems. I'd become powerful by the world's standards—netherite armor, enchanted weapons, stocked supplies.
None of it mattered.
I couldn't go home. I couldn't die. I couldn't escape.
So I stopped.
I stopped building. Stopped exploring. Stopped trying.
I walked out of my base one day and just kept walking. In one direction, through forests and deserts and oceans. When I died, I respawned and continued. When night fell, I didn't seek shelter—I let the monsters come.
What did it matter? What did any of it matter?
I walked for years.
---
The villagers told stories about me.
I learned this later, after I came back to myself. The Silent God, they called me. The Eternal One. The Ghost Who Walks.
They built shrines where I'd passed. They left offerings at places I'd stopped. They prayed to me—for protection, for blessing, for mercy.
I didn't know any of this. I was too empty to notice.
For almost seventy-two years, I barely existed.
I was a body moving through a world that couldn't kill me. A mind that had shut down rather than face the truth of its imprisonment. A soul that had given up.
The Gray Time, I'd call it later. The decades where I was barely human.
It took a child to bring me back.
---
Year 72-something. I'd stopped counting.
I was sitting on a hill at the respawn point, as I often did. Not moving. Not thinking. Just existing.
A village had grown around me—I'd been there so long that the villagers had built their homes around the hill, accepting my presence as a fixture of the landscape.
A child fell.
One of the villagers' children, playing too close to a cliff edge. I watched without really seeing—the fall wouldn't kill the child, probably, and what did it matter anyway?
But something in me moved.
Before I knew what was happening, I was on my feet. I was running. I was catching the child before she hit the rocks below.
She looked up at me with wide eyes. "The Eternal One," she whispered. "You moved."
I looked at my hands. They were shaking.
When was the last time I'd moved? When was the last time I'd cared about anything?
"I moved," I said. My voice was rough from disuse. "I... moved."
And something inside me—something that had been frozen for decades—began to thaw.