32 – The unmeasurable potential of an integrated world

Almost as if conscious that there was a girl watching him, Jacob appeared at the top of his tower. He was muttering to himself, sure that nobody would see or hear him from this far, about the stupid changes to the recipes and such.

“Bloody integration, be damned.” He went on. “To craft a stupid wind turbine, I had to basically replicate all the discoveries from the 1800s to the 2020s. Isn’t my ability supposed to be a cheat? Well, okay, it is a cheat. I suppose putting stuff in a crafting grid, where it magically becomes the right item, which works, is quite a cheat. I bet all the engineers and scientists would have traded their souls for this.”

He wasn’t aware of the fact that the elves, now Sky Elves, had been granted many new special abilities when they evolved. In fact, if he concentrated enough, he could have felt something change back when he proclaimed them to be a new breed of elves.

Mana, one of the fundamental particles of this world. But he had so much of it, that he could not even feel the change as it occurred, his mind focused on other thoughts. By approximation, his mana could even be considered infinite. At the time, at least. Now that the integration was complete, things were a bit different. But he was still far from being interested about magic, of course.

Lumia, who among all elves received the most formidable gifts after the change, could see and hear Jacob perfectly well. She wondered what he was going on about, and even for a moment thought about going there herself.

She didn’t though.

Jacob circled around the topmost ring of walls of his tower. Up here, the wind was quite strong, blowing constantly. It was the perfect place to put down some wind turbines. The making of them turbines had been a nightmare, and he almost cursed the integration for making everything so bloody difficult.

He liked the word bloody. In any case, now that he was done, he felt quite satisfied and his spirit was high. So high in fact, that his mind was thinking about how it liked a certain word, instead of worrying about things constantly like it did over the last few days. It was as if the sun shone a little bit brighter, and he could almost fly away how light he felt today.

Because, thanks to the integration, he felt he could now do almost anything. It didn’t matter that he could not remember how to do stuff the Minecraft way. As long as it made sense, both the recipes and the rest of the process just worked. He could not just pretend something made sense, of course, the long and tedious making of the turbines proof of that.

He had tried just using a 5x5 crafting grid with random stuff in it, but of course it did not work. In the end, he managed to make an almost working generator by crafting copper into a coil, and then housing the coil together with a girder inside a metal housing. It was all done via crafting, of course, and only the most minute details were added by hand. Then, he applied redstone and a touch of minor adjustments, and he had a generator.

The rest of the turbine was made with stone and metal, trying to make it blend as much as possible with the style of his tower. And all in miniature, working in the grid of a crafting table. Every time the recipe got too big for the grid to handle, he plucked the half-finished item from the right hand square and put it back into the grid, so that he could add more and more things to it.

He placed the first wind turbine down, and immediately a 20-meter tall structure of stone and dark metal appeared before him. It was large, round and imposing, just like the rest of his tower.

“Worth it.” He said.

The customization potential was limitless now. Never had he even dreamed about a stone tower full of wind turbines in Minecraft, the tech feel clashing too hard with the medieval looks of a tower. Here, now, instead it was so perfect it felt natural.

He filled the balcony with turbines, and then retreated back to the lab below, running a power line inside the wall.

Three days later, Lumia spotted him from the tree as he came out of his tower. Behind him, a behemoth made of jet-black metal stomped its gargantuan metal legs on the ground.

“Jacob!” She immediately launched herself towards the tower. “Behind you!”

It did not occur to her that, since the robot came from inside the tower, it was probably one of Jacob’s newest creations.