The Ultimate Pickaxe
Outwardly peaceful yet inwardly endless days of fierce competition stretched on for several days.
In that time, we made truly enormous progress.
The happiest news of all was that Lucy had fished up a Mending enchantment book in just three days.
And from a village she discovered while adventuring, Mayo had hauled back a mountain of materials for crafting an enchanting table—bookshelves, obsidian, the works.
For the past two days she had been mining alongside me, twisting her whole body in protest and complaining nonstop about how boring it was.
"I hate mining! Mayo wants to go on adventures."
"There's nothing left to do even if you wander around right now. Try anything with that gear and you'll just die. First, finish a full diamond set."
"Th-then just one set for now?"
"Hey! Is only your mouth a mouth? Is Mayo abandoning the team? What about Miho and Lucy?"
"Ugh! B-but mining is way too boring. I wanna play LoL!"
"If Mayo keeps this up, the mining-addict uncles will swarm the stream and go grrr, you know?"
Mayo grumbled endlessly, but I soothed her well enough that we ended up mining diamonds together.
Chatting over Discord while we mined seemed to ease the monotony for the viewers too; they looked like they were enjoying it.
……The mining addicts, of course, just loved mindless grinding with zero conversation required.
"Finally… finally!"
With the generous haul of diamonds we had mined, I crafted five pickaxes on top of the defensive gear.
Carrying those and a stack of lapis lazuli for enchanting, I headed down to the enchanting table we had built in the basement of V-Live House.
The house already looked gloomy from the outside; digging an extra underground floor made the whole place feel like a secret society plotting some evil scheme.
Just then Miho, who had been sorting items on the first floor, came down and put on some BGM.
No, with music like this I really did sound like the mastermind or the final boss.
I grumbled about it, but Miho just gazed at me with pure satisfaction, saying it suited me perfectly.
……Was that really the kind of image I had?
I clicked the enchanting table and slotted the diamond pickaxe and lapis into their places.
Then I hoped with everything I had.
Please give me the best possible options!
The enchants that appeared were random among the equipment-related ones, so all I could do was pray for luck.
"Oh! Efficiency IV!"
Efficiency governed mining speed, and since the absolute max was V, IV was nothing to sneeze at.
I happily hit the enchant button—and unexpected fortune followed right after.
"Jackpot! Unbreaking III attached too!"
If you got lucky, extra options beyond the ones previewed before the attempt could stick on; this was exactly that case.
The true endgame options for a pickaxe were Efficiency V, Fortune III, Unbreaking III, and Mending. We were already almost there.
If just one more of the remaining pickaxes rolled Efficiency IV, I could combine it with the first to make Efficiency V.
Levels are plentiful, so let's go as hard as we want!
Enchanting required not only materials but experience levels.
In particular, you had to stay at level 30 or higher to even select the highest-tier enchants.
That was why I had been secretly fishing with Lucy on the regular.
Part of it was greed for more Mending books, and part of it was that fishing gave pretty solid exp.
And even if it isn't Mending, useful enchant books drop sometimes too.
The decent ones were stacked neatly in the first-floor warehouse.
No need to worry about theft—Rena World let you set a "lock" on chests.
Once locked, no one but the owner could touch the chest, and it couldn't be destroyed either.
Without that feature we might have had to take turns standing night watch around the clock.
Anyway, the diamond pickaxe with full endgame options was completed without a hitch.
I was genuinely moved.
The very first maxed-out pickaxe on the entire Rena World server.
And it even used the precious Mending book Lucy had pulled!
If someone asked for the current market price of this gear, even a rough estimate would put it over three million Rena.
And I still would never sell it.
With this equipment I could widen the gap with everyone else from the very early game.
There was just one thing I absolutely had to be careful about.
From now on, I could never, ever die by falling into lava while mining diamonds.
Diamond gear melted the instant it touched lava.
If that ever happened, I was fully prepared to smash the keyboard I had been using all this time into pieces.
Do you have any idea how much effort went into this gear?!
Later on it would become more common and lose its rarity, but for the moment it was the server's one and only supreme weapon.
"Would I ever? You vicious bastard!"
Vicious trolls constantly hunting for any chance to screw me over.
I ignored their sabotage and set out to test the performance of my supreme gear.
On the way I ran into other streamers.
"Hyungnim! Live long and prosper!"
"Alright, alright. You juniors have fun playing today too."
The moment our eyes met, Dorai and Coco-nyang came sprinting over and bowed deeply.
Yeah, that had been two days ago.
The two of them had come looking for me again to settle the grudge over the bread pieces I had extorted.
They must have put in some real work since then—both were holding diamond swords.
They shouted with full confidence.
"Hands up! Hand over everything you've got!"
"……."
Alas, how tragic.
Why had they failed to learn any lesson from their previous actions?
I had no choice but to step forward once more to uphold justice in Rena World.
Gear I normally left unequipped to save durability because it lacked Mending.
Clank, clank—!
With sound effects that felt exactly like a mecha transformation or combination sequence, diamond armor, helmet, boots, and leggings wrapped my entire character.
"Uh? Uh-uh?!"
I bellowed at the two flustered figures.
"Hands up! Hand over everything you've got!"
"……."
And thus justice was preserved.
Truly a story overflowing with warm life lessons.
To add a little more of the aftermath: both of them cried and begged, insisting the diamond swords were their entire fortune.
Ahem. But honestly, what did that have to do with me?
Still, if I squeezed them too hard I risked getting a reputation for bullying small-time streamers, so I moderately cleaned out their inventories while leaving the diamond swords alone.
"I'm going live right now. Huh? Open that inventory properly. Anything you hide is one headshot per bread. I take no responsibility if you die."
The miscellaneous junk wasn't to my taste, so I confiscated one Rena Coin from each of them. They still had leftover diamonds, so I snatched those too.
Ah, and I took five more breads from each of them as well.
Food always tastes best when it belongs to someone else.
After that, the hierarchy between us settled naturally into place.
The two of them would come running over like gangsters just to greet me.
Hmm hmm. I later found out both were older than me, but there was nothing to be done about it.
A story had already formed among us.
I figured I could reorganize the family tree later if the situation ever changed, and leisurely headed underground to test the ultimate pickaxe's performance.
The two of them probably didn't feel all that bad about it either.
A pair of small-time streamers getting involved with me meant they received a little trickle-down fame and a few popular posts on the FM Community.
They might even have been happy about it deep down.
Judging by how they kept sprinting over to greet me, anyway.
"C-crazy…!"
Thoughts about those two didn't last even a full minute.
The instant I swung the pickaxe, I understood.
This was innovation.
Rocks that used to take two or three hits with a regular diamond pickaxe now crumbled and vanished like soft tofu.
This was the power of Efficiency V!
Digging speed had more than doubled.
And that wasn't all.
A short while later, the first diamond ore of the day appeared underground.
I couldn't hide my anticipation; I even rubbed my palms together before mining.
Three diamond blocks right in front of me.
Previously that would have meant a grand total of three diamonds.
The mining addicts were losing their minds harder than I was.
A whole crowd who had first encountered Minecraft streams and discovered a brand-new taste(?).
They fired off every demand imaginable just to feed their own fetish.
Sleepless 24-hour mining, no-cam streams until two thousand diamonds, dig all the way to the edge of the world, and so on.
Honestly, wasn't that last one just psycho?
I did my best to ignore the vicious ones and mined the diamond blocks with a pounding heart.
Then, accompanied by a brilliant sound effect, the diamonds entered my inventory.
3, 2, 4—nine total.
Jackpot! How many times the normal drop was that?
Right now it might only feel like a difference of six, but what if I mined for a full hour?
Two hours, three hours, the entire day?
The gap with every latecomer would become meaningfully huge.
And as a crew, not as individuals, we would also craft the second and third ultimate pickaxes that much faster.
Synergy achieved through teamwork.
Still, we could not let our guard down and think this was the end.
The server was crawling with small-time streamers who volunteered as slaves to the big corporate streamers and ground 24-hour mining and labor without complaint.
Especially when I thought about the infamous "Bagchu" crowd that would flood in later—even more so!
There was still a long way to go.