The sun rose with the same violent speed as it had set, snapping from "off" to "blindingly on" in a single frame.
Alex kicked down the dirt wall of his coffin-like shelter. The fresh air hit him, carrying the scent of dew and the lingering, metallic stench of the ozone-dissolved Zombie. He crawled out, his body stiff, his hand a throbbing mass of bruised flesh and dried blood.
Health: 9/10. The half-heart he'd lost to the Zombie hadn't regenerated.
Hunger: 7/10.
The hunger was worse. It wasn't just a rumbling stomach; it was a tremor in his hands. It was the Gamer's Paradox at work again—his mind knew he needed food to regenerate health, but his body felt too weak to hunt.
"Food," he croaked. "Apple. Oak leaves drop apples. 0.5% chance."
He looked at the forest. It was a grid of potential resources, but now he saw it for what it was: a minefield of physical labor.
He stumbled toward a nearby ravine, hoping to find exposed coal or iron without having to dig. The ravine sliced through the landscape like a knife wound, exposing layers of stone, dirt, and gravel in a perfect cross-section.
He peered over the edge. The drop was thirty blocks straight down. In the game, he would have jumped and placed a water bucket. Here, looking down the sheer, vertical cliff face triggered a wave of Geometric Vertigo. The world spun. The perfect straight lines of the ravine walls seemed to stretch and warp, pulling him toward the void.
He scrambled back, breathing hard. "Don't look down. Just... look for resources."
His eyes caught something near the edge of the ravine, half-buried in a block of gravel.
It didn't fit.
Everything in this world was a cube or a flat plane. Even the dropped items, like the zombie's rotten flesh, floated as 2D sprites or perfect 3D cubes.
But this object had a curve.
Alex crawled toward it, his heart hammering against his ribs. The object was dark, matte black, and jutting out of the gray gravel texture like a tumor.
He reached out. His fingers brushed against it. It was cold. Smooth.
Glass.
He dug his fingers into the gravel, ignoring the way the sharp stones cut his skin, and pried the object loose.
It fell into his hand. It wasn't a block. It wasn't a sprite.
It was a smartphone.
Alex sat back on his heels, staring at the device in his bloodstained palm. It was shattered, the screen a spiderweb of cracks, the casing bent and twisted. But it was unmistakably real. It had rounded corners. It had volume buttons. It had a camera lens.
It was an object of pure, smooth geometry in a world of jagged edges. Holding it made Alex nauseous. The contrast between the perfect, unnatural straight lines of the grass block and the organic, manufactured curve of the phone was jarring.
"This... this isn't in the code," Alex whispered. "There are no phones in Minecraft. No mods. No texture packs."
He turned it over. On the back, almost scratched away, was a sticker. It was faded, peeling, but he could make out a logo. A half-eaten fruit. And scratched into the plastic casing, crude and frantic, were letters.
H E L P M E
A chill that had nothing to do with the wind swept through Alex.
This wasn't a generated structure. This wasn't a Loot Chest item. This was a Relic.
A System message flashed in the corner of his eye, but it was glitching, the text garbled and flickering rapidly.
[Item Found: UNKN??WN_O??BJEC??]
[Error: Geometry Invalid.]
[System Clean-Up Initiated...]
The phone in his hand began to vibrate. Not a ringtone vibration, but a violent, molecular shaking. It was being rejected by the simulation.
"No," Alex gasped. He gripped it tighter. "No, wait!"
He looked at the screen. For a split second, the black glass flickered to life. It didn't show a home screen. It showed a reflection.
But it wasn't his reflection.
For a single, terrifying frame, Alex saw a face in the cracked screen. It was a young woman, her eyes wide with terror, her skin pale and blocky, her mouth open in a silent scream. Behind her, the purple static of a Nether Portal swirled.
Then, the phone burned.
It didn't catch fire. It simply became searingly hot, glowing with white, corrupted code. Alex yelled and dropped it.
The moment it hit the ground, the block of gravel beneath it hissed. The phone sank into the earth as if the ground were water, dissolving into a stream of glitching, binary numbers.
[Item Deleted.]
The message was final. The System had erased the evidence.
Alex stared at the spot where the phone had vanished. The silence of the plains returned, broken only by the wind and the distant bleating of a sheep.
He wasn't the first.
The realization hit him harder than the tree had. He wasn't the protagonist of a new story. He was just the latest iteration. There had been others—people with phones, people with lives, people who had scratched "HELP ME" into their most precious possession before the System deleted them.
He looked at his own hands. How long until he was just a glitch to be deleted?
"It's a graveyard," he whispered, his voice trembling. "This whole world... it's a graveyard."
The hunger pang hit him again, sharper this time, accompanied by a wave of dizziness.
Hunger: 6.5/10.
He needed food. He needed to survive. But as he stood up, looking out over the beautiful, terrifyingly perfect landscape, Alex knew the truth.
He wasn't playing a game. He was trespassing in a crime scene.