The Observation Deck was quiet for once. No alarms, no red warnings screaming in the corners of my vision. Just the soft hum of data streams floating like lazy fireflies across the consoles.
I exhaled slowly, leaning back in the chair. For the first time in what felt like forever, I wasn't scrambling to patch holes in my fragile reality. Shuri and Spider-Man were both logged out, their avatars frozen mid-session in digital stasis. That gave me a sliver of breathing room—thin as a spider's thread, but better than nothing.
"Okay, Alex," I muttered to myself. "Time to figure out the boring stuff. The numbers."
A panel blinked open at my command, scrolling lines of crisp white text over a deep blue background.
[Game Analytics — Creator Access Granted]
[Total Copies Sold: 12]
[Current Player Base: 9 Active Users]
[Concurrent Streamers: 2]
[Total Gross: $240]
My throat tightened. Two hundred and forty dollars. On Earth, that was maybe a week's rent in a cheap apartment. Here, it was my lifeline.
I tapped a command, opening the converter app built into the deck.
[Conversion Rate: $200 = 1 Gaming Point]
[Total GP Available: 1]
"One… freaking… point." I dragged my hands down my face, groaning. "I'm running a god-tier simulation where princesses and superheroes are poking around my code, and I've got the budget of a broke college kid ordering dollar-menu tacos."
The cruel math lined itself up before me:
A small event module? 10 GP.
A new expansion biome? 50 GP.
A major system patch to stop the corruption? 200 GP minimum.
At this rate, I'd need forty thousand dollars in sales just to afford a basic safety net. Forty. Thousand.
I clenched my jaw. Back in the old world, Minecraft had sold hundreds of millions of copies. It was a cultural titan, the kind of game that shaped childhoods and YouTube empires. Here? I was starting at ground zero. No Mojang, no Microsoft marketing machine. Just me, a half-broken deck, and the hope that enough curious streamers picked up my game to snowball word of mouth.
"Maybe this is karma," I muttered. "Godhood on a shoestring budget. Not exactly what the brochure promised."
Still, there were silver linings. I pulled up the player breakdown, and one stat made me smile despite myself:
[Ned_Leeds — Livestream Audience: 82 Concurrent Viewers]
Ned wasn't a superhero, or a genius princess, or a billionaire philanthropist. He was just some kid with a laptop and a Twitch account, fumbling through blocky landscapes with more enthusiasm than skill. But people were watching him. More people every hour.
And that mattered.
Every viewer laughing at Ned's clumsy attempts to build a hut was another potential buyer. Every "clip" of him screaming when a creeper exploded was free advertising I didn't have to pay for.
"Hook them with the small fish," I whispered, eyes narrowing. "Then reel in the whales."
The thought made my stomach twist. It sounded predatory. Manipulative. But wasn't that what I was already doing with Shuri? With Spider-Man? Dangling shiny quests in front of them like bait, keeping them engaged, making sure they didn't look too closely behind the curtain?
The deck beeped, interrupting my spiral.
[Notification: Player Chat — Ned_Leeds]
Curious, I pulled it open.
[Ned_Leeds]: "Yo Notch, if you're real… thanks for the game, man. Never had so many people watch me before. Feels good."
For a moment, I just stared at the words. They weren't a demand. They weren't suspicion or threat. They were gratitude.
I swallowed hard, fingers hovering over the reply field. Normally, engaging with players directly drained GP—expensive, dangerous. But something about that message tugged at me. It was raw. Honest.
In the end, I typed just two words:
[Notch]: "Keep going."
The system deducted [–2 GP] instantly, flashing red, but I didn't care. The grin that spread across Ned's pixelated avatar a second later was worth it.
Maybe… maybe I wasn't just a manipulator. Maybe I was a creator, too.
I leaned back again, pulling up the projections. If Ned kept growing, if the sales kept doubling, if Shuri and Spider-Man's interest turned into viral fuel, then maybe—just maybe—I could crawl out of this financial grave.
[Projected Sales (30 Days): 200 Copies = $4,000 = 20 GP]
Not enough to stop the corruption, but enough to buy time. Enough to build a few shiny distractions.
The Observation Deck lights dimmed slightly as the system shifted into low-power mode. My eyes burned, exhaustion weighing on me like sandbags. For once, I let it take me.
As the screens blurred into darkness, a stray thought lingered in the back of my mind:
If survival cost this much… what would winning take?
The soft hum of the Observation Deck lulled me into half-sleep, but the system wasn't done with me.
[Player Session Detected: WakandanPrincess]
[Player Session Detected: Peter_Parker]
I groaned, rubbing my face. "Of course they log in while I'm broke."
The screens lit up, splitting into two feeds. On one, Shuri's avatar walked through her gleaming pixelated Wakanda, adjusting railways and running diagnostics like a queen with a lab coat. On the other, Spider-Man zipped across a city skyline that hadn't even existed yesterday, his webs flinging him between buildings like a kid who'd hacked the laws of physics.
They weren't just playing. They were working. Testing. Pushing limits.
And each test made the GP counter at the corner of my vision blink like a mocking reminder:
[Total GP: –1]
Yes. Negative one. I had actually gone into debt.
The system dinged again.
[Warning: Unpaid GP balance may affect game stability.]
My stomach twisted. That was the last thing I needed. Game stability meant life stability. If the walls of this simulation cracked, if the corruption spread unchecked, I might not be around to complain about it.
I pulled up the sales tracker, praying for good news.
[Copies Sold: 3 (Today)]
[Gross: $60]
[Conversion Available: Pending]
Three copies. A measly sixty bucks. Not even enough to cover a single GP. At this rate, I'd need a miracle—or a marketing team.
Luckily, I had something close.
On the third screen, Ned's livestream was climbing. Eighty viewers had become a hundred and thirty. Then one seventy-five. His chat scrolled in a frenzy, emojis and spam flying as his blocky avatar tried (and failed) to build a stable roof over his hut.
"Ned, you absolute legend…" I muttered, watching as one viewer donated five dollars, then another ten. His goofy laugh carried through the feed, infectious in its sincerity.
It wasn't much. But it was momentum.
Momentum I desperately needed.
---
Shuri's feed chimed, yanking my attention back. Her avatar stood at the edge of her maglev system, eyes narrowed at a freshly spawned quest marker glowing in the distance.
[Questline Unlocked: Hidden Vibranium Archive — Progress: 12%]
She wasn't just chasing breadcrumbs anymore. She was dissecting them. Each step, each crafted block, was a deliberate test. Her session log was full of entries like:
[Attempted Code Bypass: Failed]
[Attempted Duplication Exploit: Success]
[Player Note: Replication of vibranium lattice possible]
I swallowed hard. She was documenting. Cataloging. Treating my game like a research project.
If she ever compared her notes with Peter's…
My stomach dropped again, because Peter's session log was no better.
[Module Created: Dynamic Swing Physics]
[Module Created: Spider-Sense Event Trigger]
[Module Created: Wall-Crawling Behavior]
His city was alive now. Cars. Pedestrians. Even pigeons. None of it coded by me. He was pulling it out of the ether like the game itself bent around his imagination.
And all of it was draining me.
[–5 GP]
[–10 GP]
[–3 GP]
I hissed, slamming a fist against the console. "I can't keep this up!"
For a moment, the feeds overlapped. Shuri's train line curved into the corner of Peter's skyscraper. Their avatars froze, both turning in perfect sync.
[Cross-Session Resonance Detected]
"No, no, no…"
They looked at each other.
Spider-Man waved first, playful as always. Shuri tilted her head, then typed something in chat.
[Shuri]: "You're… not an NPC."
[Peter_Parker]: "Neither are you. Weird, huh?"
The words cut through me like glass.
They weren't supposed to meet. Not yet. Not like this.
The system's warning flared in red across my dashboard:
[Warning: High-Influence Players Engaged. Risk of Discovery Increased.]
I could almost feel my remaining GP bleeding out like water through cracked glass.
---
I needed a distraction. Something cheap. Something shiny enough to pull their focus without draining the last of my nonexistent reserves.
My fingers flew across the console, digging into the scraps of modules I'd shelved. A crafting recipe here. A cosmetic item there.
Finally, I pushed it live:
[New Item Recipe: Golden CupNoodle Block]
Yes, it was stupid. A joke item. A glowing cube of ramen that restored hunger bars and added a faint particle effect. But sometimes stupid worked.
Shuri's avatar froze. Then, unbelievably, she crafted it.
"...A noodle block?" her mic picked up, her accent laced with disbelief.
Peter swung down, landing beside her. "Yo, is that food? I'm starving over here!"
She handed it over. He slurped pixelated noodles noisily, his health bar filling.
Chat messages popped up instantly.
[Peter_Parker]: "Okay, whoever coded this has a sense of humor."
[Shuri]: "Or a hidden motive."
I sagged into my chair. It wasn't much, but it bought me a little more time.
The GP counter stopped flashing. For now.
---
I flicked open the sales tracker again. Ned's stream had crossed two hundred live viewers. His donation bar was filling. People were tweeting about "the weird Minecraft clone with Wakandan trains and Spider-Man physics."
The projections shifted.
[Projected Sales (7 Days): 80 Copies = $1,600 = 8 GP]
It wasn't victory. But it was survival.
For now.
The glow of the Observation Deck dimmed as the system shifted into night mode, the screens softening from blinding white to muted blue. My heart was still racing, but the adrenaline had burned itself into exhaustion.
For the first time in what felt like days, the chaos slowed.
Shuri and Peter had gone their separate ways again, distracted by the ridiculous CupNoodle block I'd dropped into their laps. Shuri was running tests on its properties, breaking it down in a crafting table as if she expected to extract vibranium strands from ramen noodles. Peter, on the other hand, had turned the recipe into a personal mission. His chat window scrolled with things like:
[Peter_Parker]: "Okay, but what if I build a whole noodle skyscraper?"
[Peter_Parker]: "Golden Ramen Tower, coming soon to a server near you!"
I buried my face in my hands, groaning. "Why do I feel like he's going to bankrupt me with instant noodles…"
The system dinged softly, dragging my eyes back to the numbers.
[Player Session Length: +3 hours]
[Obsession Level: Sustained]
[Cross-Session Resonance: Stabilized]
For now, the storm had passed. They were distracted. Not safe, not contained, but distracted.
And distraction was the only currency I had left.
---
I pulled up the GP ledger again. The negative sign was still there, glaring like a scar.
[Total GP: –1]
One GP in debt. My shoulders slumped. I couldn't even buy a cosmetic tweak, let alone defend against another corruption breach.
The "business" side of the dashboard wasn't much better.
[Copies Sold: 9 (Total)]
[Gross: $180]
[Converter Rate: $200 → 1 GP]
Nine copies. Not even two hundred dollars. I needed thousands—tens of thousands—to stay afloat. The math chewed at the edges of my brain, harsh and unrelenting.
Nine copies. Two hundred viewers on Ned's stream. $200 for one point. $40,000 for two hundred points. And I'd already spent more than that just patching holes in the system.
It was insane.
It was hopeless.
But then…
Another notification pinged.
[Social Media Activity Detected: #BlockVerse trending (Regional)]
I blinked. "BlockVerse?"
The tag unfolded into a feed. Screenshots. Clips. Memes. Ned's bumbling attempts to build a roof had become comedy gold, spreading across timelines with captions like "This game makes no sense but I love it" and "Is that… Spider-Man???"
And then, buried among the chaos, a shaky recording of Shuri's maglev train. Sleek, futuristic, elegant. The caption read: "Minecraft clone? This feels like Black Panther DLC."
My lips curved despite the exhaustion. It was starting. Slowly, yes—but starting. The kind of word-of-mouth wildfire that no marketing budget could buy.
Maybe I wasn't out yet.
---
I leaned back in my chair, eyes half-closed, letting the soft hum of the consoles fill the silence. My body ached, my brain was a mess of calculations and panic, but underneath it all was something I hadn't felt since I landed in this prison.
Hope.
Fragile, flickering, but real.
If sales kept climbing, if Ned kept streaming, if Shuri and Peter didn't blow my cover… maybe I could dig myself out of the red. Maybe I could stabilize the game, patch the corruption, even expand.
I let the thought linger, daring to imagine it.
A bigger game. More modules. New worlds.
Not just survival. Growth.
The idea was intoxicating.
And then the system, ever merciless, cut the fantasy short.
[Warning: Latveria Node Activity Detected]
My heart lurched.
The feed shifted to a dark screen, jagged red text crawling across it like veins.
[Unstable Code Fragment — Origin: Latveria]
[Classification: Corruption Event — Pending Activation]
The word Latveria alone was enough to twist my stomach into knots. Doom's shadow, creeping in again. I could almost feel his eyes watching from the cracks.
My GP counter flickered. –1 glared at me again. I had no tools, no currency, nothing left to fight with.
Not now. Not tonight.
I killed the feed with shaking hands.
"Tomorrow," I whispered to the empty room. "I'll deal with it tomorrow."
---
I forced myself to focus on the small victories as I powered down the nonessential feeds. Ned's laughter echoed faintly in the background. Peter was still building his absurd noodle tower. Shuri was muttering to herself in Wakandan as she tried to reverse-engineer the crafting recipe.
They were alive. They were entertained.
And for tonight, that was enough.
I leaned back, letting exhaustion pull me under.
The Observation Deck's lights dimmed further, casting the chamber in a soft twilight glow. The last thing I saw before sleep claimed me was the GP counter, still cruelly negative, but no longer flashing in warning.
For once, the silence felt like mercy.
Tomorrow, Latveria could come knocking. Tomorrow, I could be exposed.
But tonight, I let myself breathe.