Cold. Trembling.
And the damp, earthy scent of soil and grass.
Mason curled in on himself and slowly pushed to his feet, blinking open bleary eyes.
The moment his surroundings came into focus, his pupils contracted.
It was a forest -- pristine, thriving, almost absurdly well-preserved. Flowers competed in riotous bursts of color. Birds wheeled overhead in slow, lazy spirals.
As vacation spots went, this would be hard to beat.
But nothing about the scene matched the last thing he remembered.
"I remember... a dump truck. It came out of nowhere..."
He pressed a hand to his forehead. The phantom pain still lingered at the edges of his memory.
At this point, it wasn't hard to figure out what had happened.
The classic isekai truck death. Just the same old story -- and today it had landed on him, a twenty-first-century corporate drone, instead of someone else. Nothing particularly worth panicking over.
He closed his eyes and drew a slow, deep breath, drinking in the sensation of a body that felt genuinely, startlingly healthy. When he opened them again, the glazed numbness that had lived in his eyes for years was simply gone. They were clear.
"First priority: figure out what kind of world this is."
He walked to a nearby tree and rapped his knuckles against the trunk.
And immediately got the urge to punch it.
He looked at his fist. Then at the ancient oak beside him, its bark dense and hard as stone.
He hesitated.
This feeling... why is it so familiar?
In the end, curiosity won.
Mason swung.
Thwack!
A clean, crisp sound rang out. No pain -- but his fist had connected, and solidly.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
A rapid flurry. With each hit, a ring of visible compression formed around the impact point, the bark giving way in a way that felt distinctly... deliberate.
That feeling. It just keeps getting stronger.
Driven by a suspicion he couldn't quite name, he kept going.
Seconds later.
With one final swing that snapped the last supporting trunk, the whole tree toppled with a resounding CRACK --
And shattered on impact into a cascade of small brown cubes, sticks, and tiny saplings.
[Achievement Unlocked: Timber! Timber! Timber!]
[Reward: World Coins x100]
The notification floated above his head in clean, unmistakable text.
He crouched down and quietly began scooping up the scattered Oak Logs and other drops from the ground. Then, with the practiced ease of five years of muscle memory snapping into place, he opened his inventory, converted the logs into dozens of Wooden Planks, and arranged four planks into a Crafting Table.
Mason. Twenty-first century corporate drone. Devoted Minecraft player.
Oh, absolutely yes.
Half an hour later, on a sun-warmed hillside.
Mason sat gnawing on an apple.
"Okay. First confirmed fact: I am one hundred percent in a Minecraft world." He murmured to himself, staring out at the landscape. "The visuals look like someone cranked the shaders to ultra and dropped a photorealistic texture pack on top, but the underlying mechanics are all standard MC."
The thought made him wince slightly, because it reminded him of everything he hadn't bothered to learn.
As a dedicated builder, he'd spent his entire Minecraft career constructing elaborate Baroque palace complexes -- vaulted ceilings, grand colonnades, ornamental fountains. Basically treating the game as a second job in architecture.
His best friend, on the other hand, the guy he'd played alongside since childhood who'd gone on to study computer science, was the exact opposite. Every time Mason booted up an adventure modpack, his friend would scoff at him. "Why are you playing adventure packs? Do some technical Minecraft for once!" ...and then, without fail, immediately go off and spend the next six hours building a mob grinder, a villager trading hall, and a redstone automation system that ran itself while he slept.
Honestly, if his friend had been the one to get truck-kun'd instead of him, he'd probably be thriving out here.
At minimum, basic resource gathering would never be a concern.
"Right -- World Coins. What even are those? Some kind of transmigrator cheat system?"
He focused inward, and the inventory panel smoothly swapped out to reveal something that looked unmistakably like a shop.
[Starter Pack: 100 World Coins]
[Supporter's Red Potion x12: 100 World Coins]
[Supporter's Blue Potion x12: 100 World Coins]
[Bottle o' Enchanting: 1 World Coin]
[Random Modpack Box (1st Draw): 100 World Coins]
[Grand Lottery (x1): 100 World Coins]
[Grand Lottery (x11): 1,000 World Coins]
[Grand Lottery (x120): 10,000 World Coins]
A three-by-three grid. Eight items arranged around the outer cells. Dead center: two options -- Buy and Refresh.
None of this is from vanilla Minecraft. And with graphics this rough, is this some half-finished browser game?
He muttered the complaint under his breath and tapped purchase on the Starter Pack.
For the past half-hour he'd been happily punching trees, and his inventory was sitting at roughly ten stacks of Oak Logs. He'd been just about to scout out a good lakeside location to build his first house.
The Starter Pack had arrived at the perfect moment.
If this comes with something like MineColonies, he thought, I won't need to build manually at all. Just drop a blueprint and let the colonists handle the construction.
"Open Starter Pack!"
The thought was enough. The wrapped bundle in his inventory burst open with a cheerful cascade of chimes.
[Obtained: Modpack -- Dragon's Adventure]
[Obtained: Supporter's Red Potion x12]
[Obtained: Supporter's Blue Potion x12]
[Obtained: Building Blueprint -- Forest Cottage]
[Obtained: Maid Talisman (Unused) x1]
Five items. The notification chimes rang one after another.
And the contents hit him like a lottery jackpot.
"Dragon's Adventure -- is that actually the modpack I'm thinking of?"
For someone who'd only been playing for five years, he still had a solid catalogue of major packs under his belt: Infinity, Otherworld Fantasy Life, Craft of the Gods, Nature's Journey, Dragon's Adventure -- each one a full game unto itself, every first playthrough a surprise.
"The only question is which version. Every version bundles different mods, and some of them ship with bugs." He paused. "And then there's the Ring of the Seven Curses."
The Ring of the Seven Curses.
In certain versions of Dragon's Adventure, every player spawns with this accessory locked onto their finger, and it cannot be removed.
It granted powerful buffs. But the early-game curses it inflicted were absolutely brutal.
Hostile neutral mobs. Reduced armor effectiveness. Double incoming damage. For anyone who didn't know what they were walking into, spending the first few hours getting slaughtered by sheep in full iron armor was more than enough to make a grown adult uninstall the game and go cry in the corner.
"I'll develop at a safe pace before I think about any of that. I don't even know if respawning works here -- I'm not going to test it the hard way." He shook his head. "One step at a time."
He slotted both potion types into his hotbar and kept walking, scanning for good terrain.
The difference in mindset from before was significant.
Originally, he'd been perfectly prepared to dig a dirt hole and call it home for the first night -- standard early-game survival, no shame in it. But now that he had a building blueprint, he could afford to be selective about the land.
One hour later.
The sun settled directly overhead, and Mason finally found exactly what he'd been looking for.
A broad river delta carved out of an alluvial plain.
A colossal waterfall roared down from a distant cliff face, gouging out a vast, fan-shaped lake at its base. The lake's mouth opened into a wide river that stretched toward the horizon, eventually emptying into the sea.
Less than a kilometer east: a birch forest, pale and clean in the noon light.
To the west: flat, open grassland stretching as far as the eye could see.
The land was generous. Cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens wandered the plains in easy abundance.
Plains this wide will handle any farming I ever need. Once I eventually get a proper colony going, I can use this lake as my capital and expand outward from here.
Satisfied, he pulled out the Forest Cottage blueprint.
A massive holographic projection burst into existence in front of him.
"..."
He stared at it in silence.
The blueprint sprawled over a hundred meters in every direction -- a sprawling, multi-wing estate of grand and frankly unnecessary proportions.
Mason fell into a long, contemplative silence.
...You're calling this a cottage?