The Cheongram Gallery Server
DiscoChat opened, and an invite window for a new server appeared.
The name, for one, was about as thrown-together as it gets. Still—Marblecraft. It really had been a long time.
I hit join, and the channel list opened at once.
Maybe because the server had only just been made, there weren't even ten people in it. The moment I stepped in, messages stacked up in General.
A few seconds later, a server address went up in General.
I opened the Marblecraft launcher and started the game.
Whenever someone asked what I'd do first once the CSAT was over, I'd always said I was going to play games. More precisely, a game I could cling to for a long time without thinking about anything at all. One where I wouldn't have to check the time, and wouldn't have to think about how I ought to be studying. A game I could keep playing until I got drowsy, and if my eyes closed, just sleep right there. As it happened, that game was Marblecraft.
I entered the address and connected. A brown loading screen passed, and an ordinary stretch of plains opened in front of me.
The chat window popped up at once.
I was already chopping, though. I looked down at the log in my hand. When I tipped my view up, a few trees floated overhead with nothing left but their leaves and a single log—the leftovers of someone too lazy to mine all the way to the top, who'd only erased the bottom.
"It does look ugly."
A moment later, a character in iron armor came running from far off. Mumyeong.
Mumyeong hit me without a word. One heart dropped away.
"……Ah."
I immediately ran in and punched him in the back. Going at someone in iron armor with my bare hands had an obvious result.
Thud.
One swing of the iron axe and nearly half my health vanished. The instant the second hit landed, the screen flushed red.
My items scattered in every direction.
……This is so unfair. I did hit him first, though.
I hit the respawn button right away.
I hadn't been in Marblecraft for even ten minutes, and yet it felt strangely familiar.
……Oh. I knew something felt off. The people who'd been running their mouths in the gallery comments had simply moved into the game.
I went somewhere well away from Mumyeong and started chopping trees again—this time without leaving a log stranded under the leaves. Far from spawn I made a crafting table, mined stone with a wooden pickaxe, and crafted a stone pickaxe and a stone axe. In the meantime, players connected one by one.
The main building?
I opened the photo channel. Mumyeong had left a single picture up: the front of Cheongram Academy's main building, shot from far away.
It had come out like a joke, but the talk turned serious almost at once. There was a wide plain north of spawn, and we decided to recreate Cheongram Academy's main building there. The problem was that nobody remembered the whole building exactly.
Someone dug up a few more photos of the main building online, and Mumyeong started sketching a rough floor plan off them. Watching the screen share meant joining a voice room, and I didn't. I could have gone in with the mic off…… but if I turned it on by accident, that would be a problem. I still didn't have the nerve to talk to anyone in this voice. Getting found out as a girl would obviously just be a hassle.
The plan grew more and more concrete. The outer walls would be some pale stone, the windows black glass. We'd start with the stairs and pillars in front of the main entrance, and the people who actually knew the layout would split up the interior. Anything nobody could remember, we'd just invent.
Once the opinions had narrowed, Mumyeong ran a rough count of the blocks we'd need and posted the number.
……Stone blocks alone: thirty thousand.
The roles split on their own. Some people would go down into the mines for diamonds and iron, to get their gear together. Others would clear the plain where the main building was going to sit.
……What do I do.
In the end I picked up a single stone shovel and started pushing dirt across the future site of the main building. The ground had looked flat, but it had a sneaky amount of rise and fall. Shaving it down a layer at a time and filling in the holes, the stone shovel broke in no time. Every time it broke I made another, and before long that one broke too.
"This isn't fun……."
I looked around. The plain that had held only a few people at the start was crowded now. One side was cutting dirt; the other had chests lined up, sorting materials. Mumyeong was marking the building's outline on the ground in pale blocks.
……Guess I dig dirt.
But after about ten minutes I was sick of that, too. While everyone fought over the size of the building, I slipped away, went down into a cave I could see nearby, and mined ore.
A few minutes passed. The sun must have set while I was under, because when I came back outside it was already night.
Uuurgh.
Two zombies spotted me and came running. Behind them, a skeleton loosed an arrow. My health dropped to three hearts in a blink.
"Damn it, why are there so many mobs."
I turned and sprinted for spawn. I was jumping along, fleeing for all I was worth, when another character came into view up ahead.
Iron armor, a shield in hand. It was Limit.
Limit sprinted straight past me. He caught the arrows on his shield, took the zombies first, then worked through the skeleton in turn. I stood a little ways off and watched, perfectly well-behaved.
Thud.
With the last monster dead, Limit walked over toward me. A few pieces of bread he'd thrown landed on the ground, and I picked them up and ate.
That was the first real conversation I'd had with Limit.
Limit. A fixed nick who'd worn the vice-mod badge for a while, starting around May. He didn't troll, and he wasn't the type who stood out, either. I was pretty sure he'd taken the CSAT like a normal person. Or not. Whatever.
I followed the way he'd gone and headed back down into the mine. This time, set on finding iron, I didn't even bother with stairs—I dug straight down under my feet. I'd broken maybe a few blocks of stone when the ground suddenly opened beneath me.
"……Ah."
My character dropped straight into a dark cave.
Chat got loud immediately.
I meekly pressed respawn.
I hadn't checked my coordinates before I died. I couldn't even remember which way I'd gone in……. In the end I gave up on every item and went back to the build site.
In the meantime, the site had taken on a real shape. A huge rectangular outline lay across the ground, and two temporary pillars stood where the front gate would go. A little while ago it had been an empty plain. It was only an outline, and still it felt strangely familiar. People were rushing around, raising the building.
……It started as a joke, but everyone's working harder than I expected.
Less because they liked the academy, I thought, and more because they could—now that they never had to go back. Rebuilding, inside a game, the building where we'd spent most of every day for months. It was a strange thing to be doing. In the real main building, these were people who had only ever studied in silence. Here, they were fighting over how high the walls should be. Watching that quietly, it hit me late: the CSAT was over.
Crunch. Crunch.
I took a shovel out of a chest and started pushing dirt again. I hadn't been at it long when Limit came up beside me. He kept his distance and started digging the dirt on the opposite side.
A moment later, Limit tossed me five iron. I picked up every piece.
Ting. Ting. Ting.
And I immediately made an iron helmet. Glinting helmet on my head, I walked up in front of Limit.
Limit stared at me for a while. Then, as if he'd given up, he turned and started pushing the dirt on the other side. I kept shoveling beside him.
For a long stretch, there wasn't much talk. Dig dirt, fill the holes, and when the shovel broke, make another. Every time I got up to use the bathroom in between, the white-haired girl in the mirror caught my eye and I faltered for a second. But the moment I sat back down in front of the monitor, I forgot. Nothing on the screen had changed.
Moving the keyboard and mouse with slightly smaller hands wasn't awkward anymore. The character just moved like anyone else's.
I stepped away for a bit, and when I came back the pillars at the front gate had climbed about four blocks. It was still only pillars and a floor, but little by little it was starting to look like Cheongram Academy's main building.
Back to pushing dirt, then…….
It didn't matter how late I slept tonight.
As the hour grew later, General and the in-game chat both went a little quiet. A few people left the server, and the ones who stayed simply kept at whatever job they'd taken, without talking. The clock in the bottom right of the screen had passed two in the morning.
"Haaahm……."
The exam was over, so there was nothing I had to finish today, and no reason to sleep early. Even so, I was getting sleepy. When the shovel broke one more time, I stopped digging dirt.
"Nnngh…… should I sleep."
I quit the game and left a message in DiscoChat's General channel.
I let out a short little laugh and shut the computer off. In the monitor, gone black, the white-haired girl's face reflected faintly. That morning, just looking had been strange. After running into her several times over the course of the day, it wasn't as startling as it had been at first. It still didn't feel like my face.
I left the computer, went to the bed, pulled the blanket up, and lay down.
……Now that I think about it, I learned almost nothing today about this body I've changed into. Not why I'd become a girl. Not whether other people's memories had changed. I hadn't checked a single thing. Still, maybe that was all right. I could check later.
"Guess I'll just play Marblecraft again tomorrow."