Steve knew the portal was wrong the moment it answered back.
The End Portal frame had always been silent. Passive. A structure that existed to be used, not questioned. Twelve frames, twelve eyes, an inevitability written into the code of the world.
This one flickered.
Not visually—End portals didn't do visuals beyond void and stars—but conceptually. The way redstone flickered when a circuit looped incorrectly. The way a mod conflicted with another mod and reality shrugged, uncertain which rule to follow.
Steve stood at the edge of the stronghold chamber, inventory open, eyes scanning values that no longer made sense.
[Warning: Dimensional Endpoint Unstable][Cause: Cross-Mod Reality Desynchronization][Recommendation: Do Not Enter]
Steve closed the inventory.
He had ignored worse warnings before.
The world he came from was no longer vanilla. It hadn't been for a long time. Mods layered atop mods, systems stitched together by compatibility patches and community fixes. Magic mods. Tech mods. Ars Nouveau ran alongside industrial frameworks, spell logic braided with automation.
Reality worked because he understood it.
And understanding meant he could fix it.
He stepped forward.
The portal surface rippled—not like liquid, but like a failed texture load, stars stuttering into unfamiliar geometries. Glyphs flashed for a fraction of a second across the void, symbols that did not belong to the End, nor to any mod he recognized.
Steve frowned.
"Interesting."
That was the last thought he had in his body.
Falling did not feel like falling.
There was no wind, no acceleration, no direction. His inventory detonated into light, slots unfolding into raw data. Crafting recipes scrolled past faster than he could read. Enchantments unspooled themselves, looking for anchors that no longer existed.
Something grabbed him.
Not physically. Conceptually.
As if reality itself had reached out and said: You don't belong here—but you will.
He woke up screaming.
The scream cut off halfway through, choking against lungs that weren't his.
Steve rolled off a narrow bed and hit stone hard enough to bruise. The pain registered late, like lag. He sucked in air, sharp and unfamiliar, and stared at his hands.
They were thinner.
Smaller.
No calluses. No scars from creeper blasts or lava mishaps. Pale, untested hands, trembling not from fear—but from absence.
Something was missing.
He reached inward instinctively, the way he always did when checking mana flow, inventory state, system diagnostics—
Nothing answered.
For the first time since he could remember, Steve felt empty.
The room around him was cramped and dim, lit by a single floating orb of light that hummed faintly. Stone walls. A small desk. Shelves lined with books written in a looping script he didn't recognize but somehow understood.
Magic.
Not modded magic. Not system-bound mana.
This was… sloppy.
Emotional residue clung to the air like static. The kind of magic cast by instinct and tradition, not logic. The kind that worked because everyone agreed it should.
Steve sat up slowly.
His head hurt—not like damage, but like conflicting save files being merged. Memories that weren't his pressed against his own: whispered arguments, cold stares, a childhood spent watching others perform feats he could not replicate.
A word surfaced, heavy with inherited disdain.
Squib.
Steve blinked.
"No," he said hoarsely. "That's not right."
The body was wrong. The mana pathways were nonexistent. There was no core, no flow, no reservoir to draw from. In his world, even the weakest constructs had something.
This body had nothing.
And yet—
[Arcanist Interface Initializing…][External Mana Architecture: ONLINE][Warning: Host Body Lacks Internal Magical Core][Solution: Artificial Mana Lattice Deployed]
Light burned behind his eyes.
Invisible structures unfolded around his spine, latticework of force assembling itself where biology had failed. Mana did not flow through him.
It flowed around him.
Steve laughed, breathless and shocked.
"Okay," he whispered. "That's… clever."
A new interface snapped into place, cleaner than anything he'd ever used.
[Glyph Crafting Unlocked][Spell Threading Enabled][Inventory Restored – Partial Access]
His inventory opened.
Not fully. Many slots were locked, grayed out, inaccessible. But enough remained to confirm it was real.
Steve pressed his forehead to the cold stone floor.
He wasn't dead.
He wasn't home.
And he wasn't powerless.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside the room.
Voices—sharp, disdainful.
"—still useless, I don't care what Father says—"
Steve stood.
Slowly.
Carefully.
A builder didn't rush into a new world.
He learned its rules.
And then he rewrote them.