Justice Lives On
Player Mayo has achieved the Diamond Mining achievement.
"Oh, for fuck's sake! This RNG-ass garbage game!"
I'd risked falling into lava. I'd put in that much effort. And I'd still lost to a single lucky click.
This had nothing to do with the server-first diamond mission that had ballooned to two thousand Candy just ten minutes ago. This was pure rage at an irrational world.
"Ugh. My two thousand Candy…"
Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap has donated 1,000 Candy.
"That's my President! You're the only one I've got. Everyone else just teases me and picks on me. Thank you so much!"
Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap has donated 5 Candy.
"……."
Traitor! I had no allies left anywhere.
I poured every ounce of that seething emotion straight into my pickaxe and swung like a maniac. Ugh — deepslate. The stuff barely broke.
I kept up the rage-mining for another ten minutes or so. And then, at last, nestled among the dark piles of deepslate, I spotted a soft sky-blue shimmer.
"Diamonds! Finally, diamonds!"
I cheered. And it wasn't just two or three diamond ore blocks, either. After clearing away all the surrounding deepslate, the vein turned out to be a massive cluster — a full eight blocks.
Theoretically, veins can go up to ten blocks. Jackpot!
Anything over ten only happened when diamond ore spawned right on the edge of two adjacent chunks, so eight was already an excellent haul. Fifty minutes for the first diamond… yeah, that had genuinely been a cursed run. But pulling a whole cluster at once more than made up for it.
Man, if only I had Fortune on this pickaxe right now.
The Fortune enchantment was an option that increased material drop rates by a set probability. Alongside Mending, it was an absolute must-have for any farming gear. You could laugh it off if you wanted, but once you actually looked at the numbers, it was impossible to ignore.
Assume you mine diamond ore with a Fortune III pickaxe: there's a 40% chance you get one diamond, same as a regular pick — but the remaining 60% of the time, you get anywhere from two to four. With eight ore blocks like this, even two max rolls of four would create a staggering difference in yield.
That's why I need diamond gear and enchantments ASAP. If I push hard early, I can open up an even bigger lead.
While everyone else is mining one diamond at a time, I'm averaging two to three times that? And that wouldn't even be the end of it. Slap on the Efficiency enchantment and rock-clearing becomes several times faster — the entire work pace changes. That was when I'd truly taste a world turned upside down.
"Eight diamonds! All you haters from earlier, get back in here!"
The moment I dropped the results, those cocky mining-trolls who'd been talking big suddenly grovelled, hailing me as the Goddess of Diamonds. I watched my diamond-mining achievement message spread across the entire world map and smiled with deep satisfaction.
But I was still hungry for victory. Like Guus Hiddink, if you will.
"Huh?"
Right then, another streamer's nickname tumbled onto the achievement feed, flipping back and forth with mine. Who was this? They were pretty fast too.
"……."
The admiration lasted only a moment. The moment I saw the nickname Tu-nyang-i, memories from before my regression came flooding back — the single biggest scandal Rena World had ever seen.
Rena World had run for nearly half a year, drawing viewership that topped a hundred thousand. Naturally, incidents and scandals had piled up. The fact that most of them stemmed from Rena-ttang's management decisions, behavior, and verbal slip-ups was comedy gold in its own right — but it was also somewhat understandable. When a game exists, the people who catch the most flak are always the admins.
Class balance is off — whine. Resources are too hard to get — whine. Make them easier and suddenly every scrub has endgame gear — whine. There's no content — whine. Just an endless festival of complaining. In all my years watching Pangea TV, I had never once seen an admin team go uncriticized. That didn't mean I was defending Rena-ttang's every move, of course.
Still, even she had handled one particular incident with absolute ruthlessness: the worst scandal in Rena World history — the X-ray resource pack bust.
A handful of streamers on Rena World had used an X-ray resource pack that let them see through walls, stockpiling absurd quantities of diamonds. Then they'd used the sale proceeds to pocket unfair advantages — greasing big-name corporate streamers with cash and items to curry favor, or overselling their own abilities within their affiliated "companies."
Several people had been punished, but the one who'd raked in the biggest haul and drawn the most hate for her attitude was Tu-nyang-i. She'd gone around claiming she had a secret diamond-mining technique, even name-dropping Chunkron. She'd needled her own company members for not mining diamonds efficiently enough. All that bad behavior came back as poison — when the X-ray scandal broke, not a single person stood up for her. Even her own company mates had laughed and said she had it coming.
That's a little bitter, honestly.
What kind of mindset led someone to commit that kind of cheating? Personally, guilt and fear alone would have stopped me cold. Desperation to succeed? The urge to make more money than anyone and stand out? I didn't know. Ultimately, only the person themselves could know. And I didn't particularly want to understand, either.
What I'd actually fretted over before entering Rena World was how to handle the incident. Should I tip off the admins in advance and get it dealt with? But doing that risked changing the known history far too much. I needed to fully exploit my future knowledge from before the regression and milk every advantage — changing things that drastically would be a net loss. So for now, I'd chosen to look the other way. Scandal or no scandal, I had to move in whatever direction benefited me most.
Of course, as someone with a conscience, if this incident had been causing massive harm to innocent people, I would have cleanly abandoned the profit and reported it. But it wasn't. Only the people who committed the crime got punished. No need to lose sleep over it.
For now… let them go wild with it. I don't know exactly when they started using it, anyway.
And I made myself a promise: stay as far away from that streamer as possible. If the scandal blew up and someone got the wrong idea about me, it could turn into a real headache…
"Agh! I'm out of food. Heading back to the village for now."
"Monsters? That's because I went deep underground early. Monster spawns follow certain rules — look those up yourselves. Just know that in a tight space like this, you're not likely to see any."
After a brief deliberation, I decided to go ahead and use a Rena Coin. I'd been mining so frantically that I'd come way too far — walking back would be a massive time sink. Diamonds sold for five thousand Rena each, so the cost of a Rena Coin came out even. The mindset had to be: if the time I save lets me mine even one more diamond, it's pure profit.
Honestly, selling diamonds does feel wasteful…
But I had nothing else to sell. I'd gone all-in on diamonds, barely farming enough iron ore for the minimum requirements before digging straight down to Y-level -54. No choice. Sell a few diamonds, buy a coin and some food, then head back underground and mine even more…
"Oh!"
Getting back to the village was simple. I held the Rena Coin and activated it, and the screen switched instantly — I was standing next to the village fountain. Usable anytime except during combat, it was an incredibly convenient item.
I'll just sell two for now.
I found the miner NPC, sold two diamonds, and walked away with 10,000 Rena. Rena was the server's currency unit. For streamers to trade with each other, you had to convert through an NPC into physical Rena coins as items, and the type varied by denomination:
— Bronze Rena (100) / Silver Rena (1,000) / Gold Rena (10,000).
Later, as more money flooded the server, an even larger denomination — Platinum Rena — would appear, but that was a long way off.
I bought one Rena Coin and a pile of bread, then paused to think.
Come to think of it, it's night right now. I heard mobs are roaming around a lot.
I needed the gear anyway, so after a short deliberation I crafted two diamond pickaxes and one diamond sword. Pickaxes cost three diamonds each, the sword two — leaving me with seven diamonds remaining.
I'll hold off on the armor. Who knows — I might get unlucky enough to spend another fifty minutes just finding the next vein.
Right now, pickaxe performance was the top priority. Having made that call, I headed for the world map.
"Huh?"
The moment I stepped out of the warehouse, I ran straight into two streamers. Checking the nametags overhead, they read Dorai and Coco-nyang.
Wait — how is someone's nickname literally Dorai?
"Freeze! Hands up, hand over everything you've got!"
In that instant, both of them raised iron swords and threatened me. Judging by the vibe, they were mid-way through some kind of bandit roleplay bit.
Committing crimes this early into the server? Absolutely unforgivable!
My sense of justice blazed to life. Faced with such injustice, I simply could not stand by. I drew my diamond sword and shouted:
"Hands up! Hand over everything you've got!"
"……."
In Rena World, justice was alive and well.