Strawberry's Descent

The tabs multiplied. Damascus steel gave way to modern mining techniques, then rock hardness scales explained, then, at 2 a.m., why do miners use timber supports and should I be worried.

Her logic was simple enough: if the game modeled real blacksmithing physics at low levels, there was no reason mining wouldn't follow the same rule. Rock was rock. Load-bearing stress didn't care whether it was simulated or not. If she wanted to dig deep without her tunnel deciding to cave in on her at the worst possible moment, she needed to actually understand what real miners did to stop that from happening.

She filled half the notebook with crude sketches of support beams and stress distribution before admitting to herself that she had no idea if any of it applied underground in a realm built from ember-warm stone instead of ordinary rock. Didn't matter. She bookmarked it all anyway, closed the laptop somewhere around sunrise, and logged back in with the particular determination of someone who had turned a passion project into unpaid structural engineering homework.

In-game, weeks blurred into a steady rhythm, swing, chip, brace, repeat, and the tunnel crept downward one stubborn meter at a time. By the time she next stopped to properly check her progress, the pit had long since stopped being a pit at all.

[Current Depth: 47 meters][Mining Lv. 22]

Arista wiped her brow, glanced up at the distant, barely-visible mouth of the tunnel far above her, and grinned.

"Okay. Now we're getting somewhere."

The first crack didn't look like much, a hairline seam near the base of the pick's head, barely visible unless the light caught it right. The notification, though, was harder to ignore.

[Item Durability: 78% → 71%][Warning: Tool degradation accelerating]

Arista paused mid-swing, turning the pickaxe over in her hands. "Huh. That's new."

She did the math a beat later, the way she always seemed to do things, after the fact, rather than before. Mining Lv. 22. Pickaxe forged at Blacksmithing Lv. 15. Somewhere in the last several dozen meters, her mining had quietly overtaken the level she'd built the tool at, and the tool was, apparently, keeping score.

"Right. Yeah. That tracks." She sighed, but there wasn't much sting in it. "Okay, pick. You served me well. You're going to keep serving me for a little while longer while I figure out your replacement, but the writing's on the wall."

[Objective Reminder: Return to Forge Recommended]

She climbed back up through her own crooked tunnel and by the time she reached Ashfall Reaches again, she'd already half-decided that "make another pickaxe" was a boring answer to an interesting problem.

"If I have to go back anyway," she muttered, pulling her RETIRED sign down for what she promised herself was a very temporary reversal, "might as well actually think about this properly."

She dug out the plain, unused notebook she'd picked up on her first trip through the marketplace, the kind every crafting-class player apparently ended up owning sooner or later, and flipped it open to its first blank page.

"Okay. Problem: swinging a pickaxe by hand is slow, and it's my arm doing all the work, every single swing. What if the tool did more of the work for me?"

She sketched a circle. Then, underneath it, a second shape, narrower, tapering to a point.

"...Wait. If it's a ring, the teeth only ever touch the outer edge. Middle never gets cut. I'd just be drilling a perfect little stone doughnut and leaving the core standing there like an idiot."

She crossed out the ring entirely and redrew the shape as a solid cone instead, teeth spiraling across its full surface from tip to base.

"A cone. Wide end here, point first into the rock. Whole surface cuts as it goes in, not just the rim. No leftover core, because there's no inside left untouched."

She stared at the sketch a moment longer, then glanced down at her own character sheet, at the stat allocation screen she still hadn't touched once. Zero points spent, anywhere.

"...Right. And since I apparently have the raw physical strength of a sleepy toddler, this thing needs to go down by rope, not by carrying it anywhere."

"Well. No recipe for that either."

Building the cone took longer than the pickaxe ever had, a solid iron shell, teeth shaped and tempered individually across its entire tapering surface, a few internal support struts welded in for rigidity. By the time it was done, it was wide enough at the base that Arista had to step back just to properly appreciate the sheer, ridiculous scale of what she'd made.

[Item Crafted: Hand-Cranked Boring Cone (Prototype)][Blacksmithing XP +40][Blacksmithing Lv. 15 → Lv. 19]

Getting it to the pit mouth turned out to be its own small engineering problem, solved with three sturdy branches laid side by side as rollers, the cone walked forward one log-length at a time, oldest roller pulled from the back and placed at the front, over and over, until the whole assembly sat properly balanced at the tunnel's edge.

She rigged a simple rope-and-pulley line to the overhead brace, lowered the cone down the shaft under its own weight instead of her arms, and bolted the crank assembly into place once it settled against the rock face below.

An experimental turn of the handle.

It moved. Slowly, with a satisfying grinding heft, the great toothed cone began to bite into stone.

"Oh, this is incredible—"

Crack. One tooth sheared clean off. Crack. Crack. Several more followed, the cone juddering unevenly the moment its surface lost symmetry.

[Structural Failure: Tooth Integrity Exceeded][Item Damaged: Hand-Cranked Boring Cone — Durability 40%]

Arista stared at her beautiful, expensive, now visibly gap-toothed cone like it had betrayed her.

She hauled it back up the same rope-and-pulley line that had lowered it, the mechanical advantage doing the actual work in reverse this time, and set it down at the pit mouth for a proper look.

"...Okay. That's not ideal."

Each tooth had taken the entire torque of every crank turn, all at once, against solid rock, over and over, with nothing to soften or spread that force.

"Right. Research time."

Back in her own bed, tablet propped against her knees, she typed why do gears break under load and fell down a rabbit hole considerably deeper than her tunnel.

Torque. Mechanical advantage. Gear ratios. One diagram clicked something into place, a small gear driving a much larger one.

"Wait." She sat up straighter. "So if I put a small gear right behind the crank, and it drives a bigger gear, the big one turns slower, but it turns with way more force per tooth, spread across a bigger structure, instead of one crank-turn dumping everything straight into a single point on the boring head."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"It's not about cranking harder," she murmured. "It's about making the machine absorb the hard part, in stages."

"Okay. Round two."

The gear assembly took another full day to build. When she finally hauled it back down and gave the crank a turn, the difference was immediate.

[Structural Failure: None Detected][Boring Cone Integrity: Stable]

The teeth bit into the rock face steadily now. Just a slow, grinding, satisfying chew through solid stone.

"Yes! Yes, there it is—"

Twenty minutes later:

[Stamina: 24%]

"Okay, so, good news, the gears work. Bad news, my arms are going to fall off." She eyed the crank with open betrayal. "You're stronger than the pickaxe. You're also exhausting. There's gotta be a better way to turn a wheel that doesn't involve my arms doing literally everything, forever."

She logged off frustrated, stomach growling loud enough to remind her she hadn't eaten anything that wasn't virtual in longer than she'd like to admit, and shuffled out toward the corner store, half her brain still stuck on gear ratios and torque curves.

A sharp ding-ding of a bike bell cut through the fog, immediately followed by a rush of air and a very close, very fast blur of metal and rubber.

"H— hey, watch it!" the cyclist yelled, swerving hard.

"Sorry! Sorry, my bad—" Arista stumbled back onto the curb, heart hammering.

She stood there for a second. Then her brain latched onto something else entirely.

Legs. Legs were bigger than arms. Legs did the pedaling on a bike, not the arms. Legs could sustain effort for way, way longer.

"...Oh my god," she said out loud. "Pedals. I need pedals."

She turned around and speed-walked home without buying a single snack.

Back at the forge, sign flipped from RETIRED to a hastily scrawled ACTUALLY, ONE MORE THING, Arista stared down at a small pile of iron links.

"Okay. Chain. How hard can a chain be. It's just... loops. Connected loops."

The first loop came out fine. The second came out slightly too small.

[Freeform Craft Attempt: Failed][Component Mismatch: Link Diameter Insufficient]

The third loop was too big. By link seventeen, she'd developed something like a rhythm, heat, shape, cool, measure, groan, reheat, adjust: but the margin for error kept turning out to be brutally small.

"This is worse than the gears," she muttered. "The gears just needed to be the right shape. This needs to be the right shape and the right size and flexible enough to bend around a corner without snapping and not so loose it just falls off mid-crank."

Still, the gear work hadn't been wasted effort. She already understood tolerance.

"Okay," she said, holding up link thirty-one. She set it beside link thirty, threaded them together, and felt the connection settle with a satisfying, snug little click.

[Component Compatibility: Confirmed][Chain Segment Assembled: 2 links]

"...Only ninety-eight more of these to go, probably."

The hundredth link clicked into place with the same satisfying snugness as all the ones before it. Arista held the completed chain up, coiling in the forge light like some kind of iron snake.

"I made a chain. I am basically an engineer now."

She paused mid-motion. "...Wait. How does a bike actually go together?"

She thought it through properly instead, sketching from memory, half-remembered childhood bike rides mixed with basic mechanical logic. A frame. A seat. Pedals connected to a chain, connected to a wheel. Do you even need a seat, though?

The saddle turned out to be less essential than she'd assumed. She didn't need comfort. She needed something that kept her anchored while gravity did the pressing-down work and her legs did the cranking.

The handlebars were where the actual insight hit.

"Wait, a normal bike needs the handlebars to turn, because you're steering the front wheel. But my front wheel's the boring head. I'm not steering anything. I'm going straight down. There's no turning."

She sketched a rigid, fixed connection instead of the usual rotating steering column. "So the handlebars don't need to pivot at all. A fixed frame's probably stronger. No moving joint means no weak point where the whole rig could twist or shear under load."

"Okay. Let's build a very stupid, very effective machine."

Building it took three days of in-game time. The frame came first: a rigid triangle of welded iron, no pivoting joints. Where a normal bike would have a seat, she forged a simple standing brace. The handlebars, fixed solid, gave her something to grip without a single hinge that could twist under stress.

Behind that: the pedals, connected via her hard-won chain to the small gear, feeding into the large gear, turning the drive shaft, spinning the boring wheel bolted where a front tire should have been.

[Item Crafted: Gravity-Fed Boring Rig (Prototype)][Blacksmithing XP +85][Blacksmithing Lv. 19 → Lv. 26][Achievement Unlocked: Reinventing the Wheel]

She did not submit this one for public recipe approval.

Getting it down the shaft was its own comedy of errors. She climbed on. Boots planted on the brace. Hands gripping the fixed, unmoving handlebars.

"Okay. Moment of truth."

She pedaled. The chain caught, the small gear spun, the large gear turned slow and heavy, and the boring wheel began to chew into rock with a steady, grinding rhythm.

[Excavation Rate: +340% relative to manual pickaxe][Stamina Drain: Moderate — Sustainable]

Arista let out a whoop that echoed absurdly down the shaft.

"IT WORKS. IT ACTUALLY WORKS. I INVENTED A DRILL BIKE AND IT WORKS—"

The demon assassin found her three days later, wheeling something part-bicycle, part-battering-ram, entirely covered in rock dust.

"I need more caltrops," the assassin said, flatly. "One of them saved my life last week. I'll pay whatever the going rate is now."

"Okay, business proposal," Arista said. "Caltrops are fifteen copper each now. Or, five copper a piece. Materials cost, basically nothing on top. But you pedal my bike for half an hour while I'm down in the shaft."

The assassin looked past her, at the drill-bike, then back at Arista. "You want me to pedal your mining device."

"Half an hour. That's it."

"...Fine. But if I fall off that thing into your hole, this arrangement is over."

The assassin pedaled with the stiff, deeply suspicious form of someone performing an action she'd never once seen modeled anywhere in this game's entire existence.

"How," she called back up the shaft, "did she build this."

Up at the forge, Arista had settled into a rhythm that no longer required conscious thought. By the time the half hour was up, she had a neat row of fifteen caltrops laid out on the anvil.

"That," the assassin said, accepting them with weary solemnity, "was the strangest half hour of my entire life. And I fight things for a living."

Two weeks blurred into a rhythm so steady it barely felt like effort anymore. The depth counter had long since stopped feeling real.

[Current Depth: 3,987 meters]

Then the rock stopped feeling like rock. Arista's instincts screamed that something was wrong a full half-second before her brain caught up.

[Warning: Terrain Integrity Anomaly Detected]

She threw herself sideways off the brace, rolling away just as the ground gave out entirely. The gravity bike tipped forward and vanished into a sudden black gap.

Arista lay flat, staring down into the dark.

"...Okay. That was close."

The walls of the gap flickered, faint and geometric, thin lattices of pale lines over gray, featureless surfaces. Raw, unrendered scaffolding that had absolutely no business being visible to a player.

[Notice: You have entered an undeveloped region.][Notice: Standard physics may not apply.]

"Pfew. That was just in time." She laughed, a little shaky, staring down at the raw, unrendered gap that had nearly swallowed her whole. Ultimate mode meant no do-overs, one wrong step and it would have been character deletion, three weeks of gravity bikes and caltrop empires gone, over a hole nobody was ever supposed to find.

"...Okay but also. What is this."

Arista sat cross-legged at the edge of the wireframe gap, chin in her hands.

"Okay, so, theory time. If this is the actual bottom of what the developers bothered to build, then everything above me, all four kilometers of it, is real content. But this isn't. So what happens if I start eating away at the layer right above this boundary?"

"Best case: nothing weird happens. Worst case—" her eyes lit up "—the engine doesn't check how far down support goes, and something completely mundane, near the surface, turns out to have the load-bearing strength of solid steel."

She had no way of knowing that several hundred kilometers away, in an office that had nothing to do with elves or demons or gravity bikes, a very different kind of alert had just gone off.

The next three weeks turned into the most methodical stretch of digging Arista had done since the tutorial. She widened the shaft carefully with her pickaxe, layer by careful layer, until she'd carved out a flat, level plateau thirty meters by thirty meters, hovering right at the boundary.

She'd tried, once, sending a bike down ahead of her to speed through a thick layer, a decision she immediately regretted when the wireframe boundary swallowed it whole, exactly like the first one.

"Yeah, okay, not doing that again. Two bikes. I've lost two entire bikes to this stupid void."

Three weeks later, she logged in to a full patch summary window.

[PATCH NOTES — v4.7.2][The Demon Realm has been found to extend significantly deeper than previously catalogued. An additional 10km of depth has been added to accommodate this discovery.]

Arista stared at it. "...Wait. That's not a discovery, that's a patch."

She arrived at her plateau to find solid rock where the void had been, deep, saturated green, veined faintly with something that caught the torchlight. Beside it, a small wooden sign:

"This Adamantium is for compensation. Please don't dig deeper."

"...I lost two bikes for this?!" She kicked the nearest rock, which did absolutely nothing except hurt her foot. "I caused an actual dev alert, you gave me adamantium, and you're asking me nicely not to do it again? That's: okay, that's actually kind of sweet, but also deeply suspicious."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!