The battle with Inferna intensified.
She'd sensed my distraction—the memory of those empty decades weakening my focus. She pressed the advantage, driving me back toward the void's edge with relentless ferocity.
"THE GRAY TIME," she said. "I FELT IT FROM THE END. YOUR EMPTINESS. YOUR LONELINESS."
"I was tired," I admitted. "Tired of being. Tired of not-ending."
"AND YET YOU ENDURED."
"Endurance is all I had."
---
Year 2-10.
The first decade of my immortality was the worst.
After discovering that I couldn't die, I fell into despair. Real, clinical, overwhelming despair. The kind that makes existence feel like a prison and time feel like a curse.
I screamed at the sky. I begged for death—real death, permanent death, the kind that would release me from this blocky purgatory. I tried every method I could think of to end my existence.
Nothing worked.
The void killed me slowly, but I always came back. Lava burned me to ash, but I always respawned. Even the game's most lethal effects—the Wither, the Dragon's breath—were temporary inconveniences.
I was immortal in a world where everything else died.
I watched villagers grow old and pass away. I watched animals breed and die and breed again. I watched forests grow and burn and regrow.
Everything changed except me.
Everything ended except me.
---
The screaming phase lasted about two years.
Every day, I would find a high place and yell at the sky. Curses, pleas, demands, questions. Why me? Why here? Why this?
The sky never answered. The sun continued to rise and set. The moon continued to wax and wane.
No god responded. No system administrator appeared. No explanation was offered.
I was alone in a world that didn't care about my suffering.
After two years, I stopped screaming. Not because I was better, but because I'd lost the energy. Screaming required passion, and passion required caring.
I didn't care anymore.
---
Year 10-70. The wandering phase.
I started walking one day and didn't stop for eighteen years.
Direction didn't matter. Destination didn't exist. I just moved—one foot in front of the other, across every biome the world had to offer.
Forests. Deserts. Jungles. Tundras. Oceans—I walked across the bottoms, drowning and respawning and continuing. Mountains. Valleys. Swamps. Mesas.
I saw things in those decades. Beautiful things. Strange things. A village built entirely of emerald block, created by some long-dead villager or procedurally generated by the game's infinite creativity. A mountain carved into the shape of a face, eyes staring at nothing. A forest where every tree was made of diamond ore, glittering in the sunlight.
None of it moved me. None of it broke through the gray fog that surrounded my mind.
I was a ghost haunting a world that couldn't be haunted.
---
The villagers called me "The Walker."
I learned this much later, after I recovered enough to ask. They had legends about me—a figure who crossed the land without stopping, without speaking, without seeming to notice the world around him.
They left offerings at the places where I'd passed. Food I didn't eat, tools I didn't use, books I didn't read. They prayed to me as a god of journeys, a spirit of passage, an omen of change.
I was none of those things. I was just a man who had given up.
But the world kept moving around me, even if I didn't.
---
Year 18. I stopped walking.
I lay on a hill at the spawn point in a grassland biome—nothing special, nothing significant. But something in me just... stopped.
I sat down at the top of the hill and didn't get up.
The villagers who lived nearby—close enough to see, far enough to ignore—watched me with a mixture of fear and reverence. A man pristine clothes who appeared from nowhere and sat without moving for days, weeks, months.
They approached once. Tried to speak to me. I didn't respond.
They brought food. I didn't eat it. (I starved, eventually, and respawned on the same hill the spawn point. They didn't see the death—just the continuation.)
They built around me. Houses first, then walls, then towers. A village grew from the hill where I sat, my motionless form at its center like a statue in a plaza.
I was aware of it all. I could see, could hear, could process. I just couldn't bring myself to care.
Let them build, I thought. Let them live. What did it matter to me?
I was immortal. They weren't. Their entire lives would pass in the blink of my endless eye.
And I would still be here when they were gone.
---
The Gray Time had begun.
For the next fifty-two years, I barely moved.
I sat on that hill and watched generations of villagers live and die. I watched them build their village into a town, their town into a small city. I watched them develop agriculture, architecture, even a primitive form of writing.
They worshipped me. I knew this without responding to it. They called me The Silent God, The Eternal One, The Watcher. They built temples in my honor. They wrote scriptures about my purpose. They sacrificed animals to gain my favor.
I didn't favor anyone. I didn't disfavor anyone. I just sat.
And waited.
For what, I didn't know.
Maybe for death to finally claim me. Maybe for the world to end. Maybe for something—anything—to change.
But nothing changed.
For over five decades, nothing changed at all.