Back on the Going Merry, laughter and chaos filled the deck as usual.
Marcus stretched lazily, his back popping in several places. The past days had been absolutely brutal. He'd been grinding nonstop in the Nether, and even with the Construction Wand making placement easier, all the actual excavation still had to be done by hand.
The void project was maybe a third complete at this point. But even with just that fraction finished, the results were already pretty damn impressive.
He pulled up his EMC counter and whistled softly. Around 150 million EMC now. The Shroom-Shroom Fruit hadn't been useful for anything practical, but since he had more than enough EMC to spare, he had gone ahead and converted it anyway.
Before he'd accumulated enough EMC, he had all sorts of grand plans for the void, automated farms, experience grinders, the works. But now that he actually had enough resources, he found himself oddly unmotivated to implement most of them.
"Maybe I should finally make an Enchanting Table," he muttered to himself.
He was Level 55 now. In regular Minecraft, that wasn't particularly high, but it was more than enough for basic enchanting. Level 2 or 3 enchants weren't ideal, but they'd work in a pinch.
Still, just thinking about the experience points required for leveling made his head hurt. He'd literally changed the structure of Arabasta's entire society, affecting the fate of over a million people, and he was only Level 55. If he lost levels from enchanting and had to grind them back up, he might actually cry.
But sitting here overthinking wouldn't accomplish anything. Better to just do it and see what happened.
The enchanting table recipe was simple enough: four obsidian, two diamonds, and one book.
He crafted it quickly and placed it in the ship's library area, a small section where Nami kept her hand-drawn nautical charts and various reference materials. Sanji's carefully preserved collection of recipe books was there too, including that weird one he'd found in Arabasta.
He wanted to test whether the enchanting table would work on books from outside the Minecraft system. The mechanics here were different enough that it was worth checking.
When he placed the table and activated it, he tried putting a diamond pickaxe in the slot. The interface showed he'd need lapis lazuli as fuel, which was expected.
Surprisingly, the enchanting system actually worked. Though the effectiveness wasn't quite what he'd hoped for. Even with bookshelves arranged all around the table in the proper configuration, the maximum enchantment level only reached 20.
"Not at full strength," Marcus observed, frowning at the display. "Figures. I'd still need at least two levels worth of experience for anything decent."
He scratched his head, considering his options for farming experience points. Now that he had proper access to the Nether, he could bring livestock there for breeding. Cows, sheep, chickens, they could multiply exponentially if given enough space and resources. With enough animals, he could probably stack experience points through sheer numbers.
Might as well test it out. No point in theorizing when he could just experiment.
He grabbed two cows from the ship's pen and led them through the Nether Portal. The animals seemed nervous about the transition, mooing uncomfortably as they stepped through the purple swirl.
On the other side, he brought them to a cleared area on the bedrock layer and started feeding them wheat. When he had four cows, the two adults and two calves they'd bred, he pulled out his diamond sword.
He'd been developing a theory about why MC mobs gave experience points, and this was the perfect opportunity to test it. The cows born in the regular world should drop experience when killed. But what about the ones born here in the Nether?
He targeted the two calves that had been bred using wheat and killed them quickly.
"Just as I thought."
He stared at the drops. Leather and raw beef, but no experience orbs.
This confirmed something he'd suspected ever since Clucky had eaten that Devil Fruit. What actually dropped experience wasn't the Minecraft creatures themselves. It was the soul within them.
The Nether's biome settings matched the game's configuration, and piglins and zombified piglins followed their rigid programming. But these cows born here had no souls in the traditional sense. They were just... entities. Empty vessels following basic AI patterns.
He turned back to look at the two remaining adult cows, which were still trembling nervously.
Ever since arriving in the Nether, they'd been shaking nonstop. They'd developed something that shouldn't exist in standard Minecraft mobs: fear. Emotion. Some kind of basic consciousness that went beyond simple programming.
"Yeah, you two are different," he said, leading them back through the portal to the regular world.
After that experiment, he became even more curious about the soul sand that appeared near Nether Portals. This was clearly tied to the mechanics of souls in this weird hybrid world.
During his recent excavation work in the Nether, he'd naturally encountered plenty of soul sand throughout different areas. But none of that other soul sand had the special properties of the stuff found specifically near portal sites.
Regular soul sand still spawned ghasts, skeletons, and endermen like it was supposed to. But if you placed that same soul sand near a Nether Portal and connected it to the original soul sand network, suddenly it gained that strange property of pulling mobs down into it.
"So is it only the soul sand near Nether Portals that has this effect? Or is it something about that specific area?" Marcus wondered aloud. "Or could it be that the world's rules were altered during initial world generation because of how Nami was involved in creating things?"
Testing this theory was actually pretty straightforward. All he needed to do was create another Nether Portal far enough from the original one, place soul sand nearby, and observe what happened.
He returned to the void he'd been excavating. The area was completely empty now.
He built a new Nether Portal in the void and laid down about seventy or eighty blocks of soul sand in a square around it. Then he placed a simple stone platform nearby to give mobs a spawn point.
As soon as he turned around, a zombified piglin had already spawned on the platform, grunting and shuffling aimlessly.
Marcus grabbed the zombified piglin, and pushed it onto the soul sand.
Nothing happened. The zombified piglin just stood there looking confused, grunting twice as if annoyed at being shoved around.
"So the rules really were rewritten for that specific location," he concluded. "That explains a lot."
This meant the original soul sand near the first portal was truly unique. A one-of-a-kind phenomenon created by whatever weird interaction had occurred when the worlds first merged.
"How about trying soul sand in the regular world?" he asked himself.
He looked at the still-grumbling zombified piglin and made a decision. Time for another experiment.
He stepped through the portal back to the ship and placed some soul sand on the deck in a contained area. He sealed it off with stone blocks to prevent any disasters if something unexpected happened, then returned to the Nether to fetch the zombified piglin.
When it emerged into the One Piece world, nothing unusual occurred. It still looked just as mindless as ever, shuffling around with those dead eyes.
He studied it carefully, wondering if zombified piglins in this world could still drop experience when killed. If they could, he might seriously consider splitting the portal network and setting up a proper mob grinder farm.
He pushed the zombified piglin onto the soul sand.
As expected, no sinking effect occurred. The soul sand behaved like normal sand.
"So it really was just that one special area after all."
Marcus couldn't help but imagine what might happen if he summoned a Wither in that location. Would it create a Wither Storm like in some of the crazy Minecraft mods?
"Nope, not risking that. I'm not that curious."
Looking at the zombified piglin standing awkwardly on the soul sand, he drew his diamond sword. A different thought occurred to him.
"Come to think of it, I've never actually tested fighting a zombified piglin properly. What if I let it hit me?" He considered the idea, turning over a theory he'd been developing about Minecraft mobs.
His hypothesis was that monsters actually attacked the very source of life energy itself. After all, in Minecraft, even wearing full netherite armor, you still took damage from attacks. Zombified piglins wielded golden swords, weapons that theoretically shouldn't be able to pierce netherite armor at all.
"Only one way to find out. I'm wearing diamond armor. Three hits won't kill me, and I can heal up after."
He took a breath and swung his diamond sword at the zombified piglin's head.
Just like in the game, it was knocked backward even though the strike came from above. The physics made absolutely no sense, but he had stopped questioning Minecraft logic a long time ago.
The zombified piglin recovered quickly and prepared to retaliate, its golden sword raised. Marcus narrowed his eyes and braced himself, ready to take the hit and observe what happened.
Clang!
The golden sword struck his diamond chestplate directly. He felt a spike of pain shoot through his body, and his health bar dropped slightly.
The armor hadn't been pierced. There was no visible damage to the diamond plates. But somehow, the attack had still hurt him and reduced his health.
"So I was right," he said, quickly finishing off the zombified piglin with another sword strike. "The attack bypasses physical defense and strikes at life force directly."
If that was true for all Minecraft mobs, then Clucky would have the same property. And if it worked against Logia-type Devil Fruit users who could turn intangible...
"That would basically be true damage that ignores defense," Marcus realized. "Holy shit."
He returned to the Nether Portal on the ship and completely cleaned up all the soul sand he'd placed. Even though it hadn't shown the sinking effect with the zombified piglin, it might still affect regular people differently. He hadn't tested that yet, and this was still aboard the ship. If something went wrong and it pulled someone under, that would be a disaster.
He dismantled the temporary Nether Portal he'd built on deck as well. He tore down the pathway he'd constructed earlier, and during the demolition, several zombified piglins that had spawned fell to the ground below, shattering into drops of rotten flesh and gold nuggets.
Back in the Nether, Marcus turned his attention to optimizing his mob farm setup. The Nether here didn't have item despawn mechanics like the game, which meant any dropped items would remain on the ground forever unless picked up.
On top of the bedrock layer, he paved a large area with stone half-slabs to prevent spawning where he didn't want it. Beneath the slabs, he installed a network of hoppers to automatically collect drops.
The design was simple but effective: zombified piglins would spawn on designated platforms, fall to their deaths on the bedrock below, and their drops would be funneled through hoppers into collection chests.
This was his alternative mob farm design. Since the Nether here worked differently from the game, the farming methods need to be adjusted too.