Okay, so I had died. Waking up after a death wasn't new to me, but this was not my spawn point. Instead of a field of grass, what greeted me was a rocky wasteland of black and red granite. A ravine bordered by sharp cliffs. Aside from being devoid of life, the ground was unnaturally flat. It was a floor. Either a mad emperor had enlisted an army of serfs to sand down the landscape, or this was the construct of a Survivor. My eyes struggled to adjust to the dim light filtering through an improbably hazy sky. What the hell was I doing here? And also, where was here?

  I couldn't see the sun, and what light there was seemed distorted as if I was looking up at it through water. The ravine had a ceiling, but that made little sense. How could the sky be a ceiling?

  It was at least eighty degrees out, so at least I wasn’t freezing, but that was meager consolation. The last thing I remembered clearly was Godwod talking about an oath. Freaking Godwod. Why was I so mad at him? He'd done something to me. Time had passed, but that time was a blur. Dark shapes, dreams. This ravine. I'd been in this ravine for a while. And I'd been dying. Dying screwed with my memory. But I remembered the important stuff, who I was, who I'd met in this world. My past, my other life, it wasn't as important anymore.

  It mattered, my original family, but I would never see them again. I could never tell them about any of this, or ask for their advice. My brothers, what were they doing? What had they thought after I disappeared? Did they think I was on the run? Given my background, it wasn't an impossible stretch. God. My mind was all over the place. It felt like this was my first day as an isekai. But it wasn't. Get centered. Figure this out. Focus on what you know.

  It was warm, and it was morning. Had to be morning, because that was when I respawned. The sky was glass. No, not glass. It was diamond. And above it was a storm, but the clouds were cast in shades of red and brown instead of gray. The air smelled like it did when I'd been carving stone. Dust. Minerals. And I was naked. That was nothing new, but it was a problem if this was some kind of Survivor prison. Prison sucked. That I remembered. My body felt good, weirdly good. Respawning always put me at full health, but this was something else. Had the System made more changes to my physiology?

  A diamond box, similar to what encased the orichalcum armor in the underground base, sat in the center of the ravine. Inside the box was another box, this one made of obsidian. Gold bands, red glowing runes, it should have been in the arms of a troll. Godwod had betrayed me to the demons. The demons had brought a troll, and the troll had been holding this box.

  Oh. Oh, shoot. In Maincraft, there was an item called a Respawn Anchor. You powered it with glowstones, and it was the only way to set your respawn point in the Nether, because you couldn't sleep there. It wasn't a great leap of the imagination that something similar was going on here. Without the right tools, there was no way for me to mine my way through diamond.

  A quick glance was enough to assure me that the box containing a box was complete. Six sides, no way to dig under it and come up through the underside.

  The ravine wasn't enormous, about the length of a football field from end to end, and as dim as an alley. Two cliffs, and two diamond barriers. Crevices and caves pockmarked the rock walls all along their lengths. Surely, whatever had happened to me was worthy of a notification. The elder sign on my hand looked as fresh as the day it had appeared, and I tapped it to bring up my status screens.

  The latest journal entry told me everything I needed to know.

  The mention of Bill had caused me to jerk up and look around, but my immediate surroundings were clear. The cliffs would have blocked the sun even if the clouds hadn't, so the ravine was thick with shade. However, one end was distinctly brighter than the other, so I headed for that side of the canyon while I continued to read.

  Bill was either getting let in and out by Bojack or sheltering in the caves during the day. If a previous me had killed him the night before, he wouldn't reappear until sunset at the earliest, but there was no note about that. I would err on the side of caution and assume he was in here with me already. The ravine was twenty paces wide at its thickest, and thinner toward the ends.

  As Bill had once survived by hiding in the lee of one of my shelters after sunrise, I had no doubt that he could act freely in the shadier areas, and I moved through them as quickly as I could without either tripping or losing sight of my surroundings. There was a pool of brightness at the barrier, and through it, I could get my first glimpse of the environment around my cage.

  It wasn't the sun providing the small safe zone, it was an Eternal Torch planted a few feet beyond the diamond. Was the light a lure? I spun back around, expecting to see a zombie wearing my face sneaking up behind me, but I was alone. The land was straight-up Mordor, vast and desolate beneath an endless storm.

  In the distance, a volcanic mountain, its peak shrouded in smoke, tipped above the horizon. Flashes of crimson and orange lightning contrasted with the dark landscape, but they were eerily silent. No grass or shrub had taken root in the cracked earth that I could see, but there were patches of what appeared to be giant mushrooms. This was Dargoth. I'd been captured and brought within the bounds of Kevin's evil empire. Did the Anchor cause any hero who died near it to respawn beside it the next day, or had they done something else to keep my soul with them while they crossed the Wastes? If I did get out of here, would my spawn point still be linked to the Anchor until I found a way to reassign it?

  The "Last" comments in my journal went on for a while, and didn't include any answers to my questions. Before checking the other tabs, I added one more "Last" to the log entry. Why not? We had a tradition going. The "Formulas" tab included a lot of new entries. They were all new versions of things I'd made in the past, but with bones substituting for sticks.

  It looked like I could make a full tool set as long as I killed enough zombies to supply me with the materials. While that was a relief, it wasn't exactly something to celebrate about if I couldn't use them to dig my way out or so much as wound the demon who was running this show. My notifications were surprisingly sparse, but they did contain some interesting information.

  A hundred-times. Past me had said that we died almost every night, and I'd been here for over three months, so that checked out. It was still a lot to get my head around. It looked like the upper limit to respawns, if there was one, did not depend on the number of deaths. If that was the case, why did I keep coming back? The other heroes were gone. What had caused them to leave the world for good?

  Kevin was using me to farm mobs. That much was obvious. Monsters were a useful resource to a Dark Lord, and having them appear around heroes at night was a convenience for him rather than a curse. He was incentivized to keep me around and producing zombies for as long as possible.

  Was the Anchor what was causing me to keep coming back?

  Not that I wanted to permanently die, but the idea of being indefinitely trapped in a personal purgatory was not attractive. It would have been nice to know there was an "Quit Game" button somewhere, but it didn't look like there was.

  Might and Speed had both gone up, and I did feel light on my feet. While this wasn't the time to run around testing the limits of my improved body, I gave myself a look-over.

  Abs, very little body fat. My legs and arms were definitely bigger than they should have been. Bulging would not have been an inappropriate adjective to apply. I gave myself a moment to be pleased about that before letting myself wonder what it meant that my Presence had actually gone down.

  It wasn't just that I had lost the bonus from having a town; Presence was back to the level of the penalty I had started with. That wasn't a good sign. Apparently, my "base physiology" was locked now, which might have been a positive thing if there were negative consequences from so many repeated deaths. But it also meant I wouldn't be getting any new notifications about the exact number of demises I endured.

  How long had I really been here? I wouldn't be holding out hope that my "pending assessment" would provide any kind of solution. The System was good at a lot of things, but there were clearly some flaws in the programming.

  Tapping off the screen, I looked the valley up and down. The locations of my shelters were supposedly marked with single block openings. If the area closest to the torch was safe, it would have made sense to put one nearby. Sure enough, there was a missing block in the wall right at the edge of the light. I stepped over to it, already nervous about having my back exposed, and swiped at the rock above the hole.

  Cracks formed in seconds, and my shoulders relaxed. At least, the Mining skill was operating properly. Having the first block pop and become a coin in my hand filled me with satisfaction. Whatever else had gone wrong, I was still me, still a Survivor. Naked and afraid I might be, but not without power.

  A laugh echoed in the ravine, high and wild.