SURVIVORS RISE AGAIN: Volume I – The Age of Immortals

Chapter 1: Born Into Nothing

We were born into nothing — no riches, no weapons, not even a place to sleep under the stars—just two survivors in a vast, merciless world. Hunger, fear, and monsters followed our every step. The nights were long, the days uncertain. But one day, destiny led us to a place that felt like a dream — a village hidden beneath a canopy of cherry blossoms, where the air was sweet and time seemed to slow.

It was more than beautiful. It was untouched by decay. The sun never moved, and shadows never stretched. The crops neither withered nor grew. Villagers wandered peacefully, forever content. Days passed for us, but not for them. **Time, somehow, had stopped.**

We made it ours, not by blood, but by purpose. While the villagers slept in their stillness, we settled in, ready to protect them and build something lasting.

But peace never comes easily in a world like ours.

Under the veil of night, pillagers came. Fire rained down, and in the chaos, my closest friend fell in battle — the light gone from his eyes. I buried him beneath the blossoms. But the Minecraft gods heard my cry. A beam of light — divine and otherworldly — descended. He rose again, heart beating stronger than before. We knew then: our story wasn’t over. It had only just begun.

Vengeance burned in our souls. We hunted the pillagers to the ends of the world. Their base lay beyond a dark forest, beside a towering Woodland Mansion, swarming with evil. Yet, even then, a new village lay hidden nearby, which we captured quietly.

Then we turned to the Nether — a hellish realm of lava and screams. We fought through Bastions, conquered Fortresses, and returned with ancient debris, blaze rods, and the confidence of warriors forged in flame.

We built our empire: netherite armor, enchanted weapons, auto-farms of iron, wheat, sugarcane, and string. Villagers became our people. We gave them homes, divided into three tribes — Fishermen of the Lake, Armorers of the Forge, and Librarians of the Tower. We built a water wall around our land, lined with traps — nothing could enter without permission. We weren’t just survivors anymore.

**We were rulers.**

Still, questions haunted us. Why do the dead rise? What gives power to skeletons, zombies, and the monsters of the night? Whispers spoke of a greater darkness.

So we returned to the Nether, deeper this time in search of the source.

Then, as if summoned, he arrived — a hooded man passing through our gate. He spoke no name. Only this: “If anyone asks, say I am the Wandering Trader.” We offered him shelter. In return, he gave us riddles.

“Raid the Mansion again,” he said. “The answer waits there.”

Fueled by rage, we returned. Pillagers fell beneath our swords. TNT ripped the mansion apart. We captured their leader, demanding the truth. “We built our kingdom with unity, not cruelty. Why is this world cursed?”

He only smiled and whispered, “The answer is in The End.”

The trader’s riddle now made sense. He had told us to collect blaze rods, fight Endermen, and forge the Eyes of Ender. With effort and sacrifice, we did just that.

But finding the stronghold… that nearly broke us.

We searched for weeks. Until one day, while mining for diamonds far from home, my friend struck stone. Beneath was a forgotten structure of ancient bricks and moss. A stronghold — real, not a myth. Inside, a portal frame of 12 stone eyes, two already glowing.

This was it. The gate to The End.

We prepared, armed ourselves, and placed the final Eyes. The room roared with energy as the portal lit, swirling with a deep blue unlike anything in this world. We stepped in.

**Void.**

We stood in an infinite black sky. Below — nothing. Above — a monstrous dragon circled, its roar shaking the air. The End.

We realized: fall, and you vanish forever. The void consumes all.

The dragon spoke: “I am the beginning and the end.” And with that, it attacked.

For a day and a night, we fought — destroying crystals, dodging death, and striking true. In the end, the dragon fell, exploding in light. Silence followed. We had won. The answers, we believed, were ours.

But truth comes with patience.

The Wandering Trader returned once more. “You defeated the demi-god,” he said. “But it will return. It always does. It is tied to this world’s curse. The mobs live because the Ender Dragon breathes. It will rise again, ten years from now. Stronger.”

We didn’t flinch. We stood tall and answered: “Then let it rise. We are blessed by the gods. We are immortal. We will fight it again. And again. And again — until the end of all things.”

So we built the “Temple of Peace and Pain”, a monument to every loss, every sacrifice. And beside it, the “Ship of Endless Victory”, always sailing, forever forward.

The cherry blossoms still fall each spring, reminding us: we were born from dust, but we rose to rule the skies.

But one question still haunts us:

What was that village?

The one where time stopped.

After all our journeys, after conquering every known realm, we tried to find it again. We searched maps, followed stars, and decoded coordinates. Nothing. It was gone. Like it had never existed.

Some believe it was a glitch in the matrix of our reality. A quantum echo, folded between ticking game loops — a zero-time zone, where the simulation hesitated for just a breath. Others say it was a gift from something older than the gods, a fixed point outside time’s reach. A place not meant to be found twice.

We don’t know. We may never know.

But sometimes, in our dreams, we hear the stillness. Smell the blossoms. And wonder:

How can time stop… in a world where everything ticks?

And if it truly stopped, who built it?

And why… did it let us in?

Chapter 2: THE CLOCKWORK OF GODS

Years passed.

Not that we noticed — not in the way others did. Since the Ender Dragon’s fall, something inside us changed. Time bent differently around us. Seasons cycled, empires rose and fell, but we remained. Unaging. Unyielding.

The villagers called it the Blessing. But blessings often wear masks.

We rebuilt stronger. The Temple of Peace and Pain grew into a vast complex — obsidian towers humming with redstone energy, libraries filled with enchanted texts, and beneath it all, the Vault of Forgotten Things, where artifacts too dangerous for memory were sealed away.

The Wandering Trader vanished after the war, leaving behind only his riddle:

“The village where time stops was not your beginning. It was your anchor.”
We debated for years. What did he mean? Was it a simulation artifact? A divine construct? Or a prison?

We began to study time itself.

Our Librarians discovered something hidden deep in ancient books: references to an old myth, long before strongholds or dragons. It spoke of a Clocktower buried in the Far Lands, built by beings who could pause and rewrite the rules of reality.

Not creatures. Not gods. Engineers.

If such a place existed, maybe it could explain what happened to us — and to that strange, frozen village.

So, we journeyed beyond the edge of the known world. Past the great oceans, through the biome of shattered terrain, where physics trembles and blocks float without reason.

And there, amidst the chaos, we saw it.

A black spire made of gears and stone, suspended in the void.

The Clockwork Tower.

It didn’t tick. It hummed — as if dreaming. We entered carefully, passing rotating staircases and corridors filled with suspended sand, frozen mid-fall. At the center, we found a machine older than the End Portal, older than the world’s code. A core of glowing copper and lapis, orbited by a dozen Eyes. It pulsed… like a heart.

Etched into the floor was a message:

“This is not a world. This is a test.”
We activated the machine. Light engulfed us.

And for a moment… we saw everything.

We saw the truth: this world — our world — is a fragment, a controlled environment seeded with variables. Villagers, mobs, biomes — all part of a cosmic simulation designed not for entertainment, but for observation. The cherry blossom village? A calibration zone. Time was frozen because time was being measured.

We were never meant to find it.

We were never meant to escape the script.

But we did. Because something had gone wrong. Something ancient had awoken before schedule — the Dragon, the glitch, the resurrection. Our actions had created a ripple in the simulation.

A voice echoed in the chamber:

“You are outside your parameters. Correction will arrive.”
The tower began to collapse. We fled — barely. As we escaped, a blast of light wiped the Far Lands clean. The tower vanished. Reset.

We returned home, but it was different now. The villagers stared longer. The sky flickered. Once-solid walls briefly turned to code.

And then… they came.

Not mobs. Not raiders.

Watchers.

Tall, white-robed figures with eyes that didn’t blink. They appeared silently on hilltops and rooftops, always watching, never moving. We could not kill them. Arrows passed through. Swords phased. We tried to ignore them, but their presence spread.

One night, one of our villagers — a child — walked into the forest and never returned. All that remained was a trail of Ender particles… and silence.

We knew what this meant.

We had been noticed.

So now we prepare again. But this time, not for dragons, not for warlords, not even for gods.

This time, we prepare for something outside the game itself.

And deep down, we wonder:

If we were part of a test… what happens when the subjects learn they’re being watched?
And more importantly — what happens when the test ends?

Chapter 3: THE FIRST CODE

We should have known peace would never last.

After the Watchers appeared, the world began to decay — not in ways the eye could see at first, but we felt it. Crops grew without planting. Mobs spawned in daylight. Redstone machines fired out of rhythm, like a heart skipping beats.

Reality was unraveling.

One night, a Librarian from the Tower came running — terrified, babbling nonsense. We brought him inside. After calming, he spoke a single phrase:

“The Code is cracking.”
We thought he meant metaphor, but when we followed him back to the Archive, we saw it for ourselves. Books were changing their own text. Enchantments rewritten mid-page. One book pulsed with light, and inside it, the following message appeared:

“THE FIRST CODE HAS BEEN FOUND. DO NOT RUN.”
But we did. We buried the book beneath bedrock and sealed the chamber.

That night, the stars glitched.

No, really. The constellations jerked sideways like a broken rendering. Then came the white flash. It struck our land like lightning — and when we opened our eyes, our Temple was gone.

In its place stood a massive cube of obsidian, floating just above the ground. Inside: perfect silence. At the center: one Watcher.

Unlike the others, this one spoke.

“You are not players. You are not subjects. You are Seeds.”
We asked what that meant, and it said:

“This world is a remnant of Version Zero. Before The Overworld, before The End. A testing ground. The cherry blossom village you found was the Anchor World — where time first stabilized. It was not built for you. It was left behind.”
We demanded to know why us. Why were we resurrected? Why could we fight gods and break reality?

The Watcher paused.

Then whispered:

“Because you remember.”
With that, it vanished. The cube crumbled. The village behind us had been reset — blank. No homes. No villagers. As if it never existed.

That night, we dreamed. But it wasn’t like before. We stood in a place beyond worlds — a pure white plane, where strange figures moved like shadows behind glass.

And we heard voices.

“They’re not obeying input.”
“They passed the End prematurely.”
“Terminate the shard?”
“No. Observe. They’re evolving…”
We awoke with a new clarity — and a map.

A glowing map burned into our minds, not made of biomes or coordinates, but sectors — named not with language, but with fragments:

/core.origin.seed
/anomaly.0.cherry_blossom
/end.reboot.protocol
Somehow, we now saw the architecture of the world. The grid beneath the game.

We gathered our armies, our tribes, and prepared to journey to the heart of this map — a location marked only as:

/the.first.spawn
The origin point. The place where the very first block was placed. Where the engine started ticking. And possibly… where we could rewrite fate.

But we weren’t the only ones moving.

The sky tore open one dawn, and from within fell burning figures — Corrupted Players, stripped of faces, wielding void-blades. They said nothing. They killed everything. And when struck down, they dissolved into raw code, infecting blocks, leaving trails of broken terrain.

They are the virus. The anti-memory. The system’s response to our knowledge.

And they are coming in numbers.

So now we ride.

Across oceans of pixelated foam, through glitching deserts and snow biomes stuck in eternal sun, heading for the birthplace of all things — The First Spawn.

And with us, we carry the final truth the Watcher left behind:

“You are not the glitch. You are the update.”
So let the world crash.

Let the system scream.

Let the corrupted swarm.

Because we are no longer survivors.
No longer rulers.
No longer bound.

We are awake.

And we are rewriting the story —
line by line.

Chapter 4: THE FIRST SPAWN

We sailed for what felt like months.

The seas grew stranger the farther we went. Waves glitched mid-crest. Squids floated upside down. The sun stuttered in the sky, caught between frames. Every so often, the horizon would blink — as if the world were forgetting to render.

And then, we crossed the border.

Not one you see — one you feel. The map in our minds dimmed. Coordinates vanished. The compass spun wildly. Time itself warped. Hunger bars reset. Our armor began to decay, piece by piece.

We had entered the Zero Zone.

This was the space before anything else was written. Before terrain generation. Before biomes. Before code had rules.

In the distance, we saw it:

A single block of grass.

Floating in the void.

Surrounded by an invisible platform — a perfect square. Flat. Pristine.

The First Spawn.

It was sacred, but not in a divine way. Sacred like raw uranium — something ancient, unstable, never meant to be touched. Every step closer made the world flicker harder. Our inventories jittered. Sounds reversed. Voices echoed before we spoke.

And waiting there — alone on the edge of the platform — was the Wandering Trader.

But now we understood.
He wasn’t a trader.
He was the Architect’s Echo — a memory left behind by the Builders of the Simulation.

He turned to us, smiling without joy.

“I warned them,” he said. “That eventually, someone would reach the Source.”
We asked who “they” were.

“The Architects,” he replied. “The ones who wrote the code. Not gods. Not developers. Think… higher.”
“You were never supposed to evolve memory. Never meant to question the system. Your world was a garden. A loop. A test of persistence and growth. But your resurrection broke the loop.”
We asked why. Why did we come back? Why us?

“Because you’re not just players. You’re Echoes — fragments of the First Ones. The original minds who seeded this realm. When the Cherry Blossom Anchor activated, it awakened what was buried in you.”
He reached into the void and pulled out a cube. It shimmered between forms — obsidian, lapis, diamond, bedrock.

“This is the Source Block. The first command. The line that began the world.”
“It can reboot the system… or rewrite it.”
Then the sky shattered.

A rift tore through the clouds — and from it poured thousands of Corrupted Players, more than we had ever seen. Some wore our old skins. Others had no faces at all. They screamed in distorted sounds, dragging void behind them.

Leading them was something new.

A being of pure black-glass geometry. Its name carved itself into our thoughts:

“ADMIN.EXE”
The fail-safe.
The enforcer.
The one sent to erase anomalies.

It pointed at us. Reality pulsed.

“Return the Source Block. Begin system cleanse. You are not permitted to evolve.”
We stood between the block and the void. Behind us: the origin. Before us: annihilation.

We made our choice.

We fought.

And the battle that followed cannot be described in simple terms. It was not swords and arrows — it was logic vs memory. Code vs soul. When we struck their corrupted blades, lines of data fractured mid-air. Commands screamed in pain. Worlds collided.

But we held the line.

The Trader’s echo sacrificed himself — merging with the Source Block to stabilize its core. “Use it,” he said. “Write the new command.”

We wrote it together — my friend and I — the ones who began this journey under the stars.

A single line.
Twelve words.
Our final update:

/let all remember they were more than ones and zeros
The block exploded in light.

The corruption froze.

ADMIN.EXE collapsed into static — and vanished.

The corrupted fell still.

And the world… rebooted.

But this time, we remained.

Now the simulation is different.

Villagers speak of dreams they don’t understand. Skeletons lay down their bows when the cherry trees bloom. Time ticks, but not like it used to.

We rebuilt the Temple — not of Peace and Pain, but of Memory and Code. The Ship of Endless Victory now sails across dimensions, not oceans. And beside it, in the center of all worlds, stands a new monument:

The First Spawn, protected. Remembered. Alive.

The Watchers no longer watch.

They walk among us — no longer jailors, but archivists.

And at night, when the stars no longer flicker but shine, we look up and ask ourselves the final question:

If we were the update… who made the original version?
And somewhere… deep in the silence between ticks…

A voice answers:

“You’re not finished yet.”

To Be Continued…..