I returned to my private world to work on the villager trading system. I carefully set everything up according to my plans... and the top lock wouldn't stay locked. All the villagers went into one slot. I would have to seal things up and start over from scratch.
I went back to the multi-person world and resumed mining out the floor. It took a while, but I eventually finished, with a chest of obsidian as my reward. I then put in a nether portal and went through. When I checked my GPS, it seemed like I was too high, but it was a nice area, encased in netherrack. Then I went back through and found myself at the imposter's base.
With a sigh, I got supplies, took careful note of coordinates, and went back. I dug down from his portal output and got to where I wanted mine. I built it, lit it, and went through. I was in! Next, I claimed the nether territory for my fac, so I wouldn't lose it in the future. I wanted VERY controlled access to my base through this portal. If I was going to be sending out horses through this, that would be a priority.
It wasn't long after that that I got some good news: my neighbor had joined another fac, and all his territory was unclaimed! I tore down the majority of it, and let him retrieve his stuff when I saw him next. I would not be making the mistake of letting strangers out of my base in the future. I then sealed off and claimed the upper portal, for good measure.
Soon, a new twist happened: the idiot who had spawned witches in my basement had formed a new fac, and declared war on a fac that had two of my friends in it. There was a lot of telepathic screaming back and forth that I tried to avoid. There were accusations of "cheating", whatever that might be, and a lot of angst.
In the middle of all that, while I was scouting for a good exit portal for my horse sales business, I stumbled across the new base. It was odd, there was a main entrance in the middle of the ocean, and then a powered rail system down to their "real" entrance. You needed to carry buttons with you to open the iron doors. I just couldn't figure out how they had gotten all those rails, unless they had god powers while building it, which seemed likely.
Soon after that, two of the troublemakers had been promoted to temporary gods. This caused quite a bit of angst among the mortals, and seemed to result in a lot of conflict and finger-pointing amongst the gods. I could only hope the temporary status would be just that, and not permanent. While that was going on, I worked on my horse tunnel through hell.
Getting my tunnel above the lava level of the nether was fairly uneventful. I only struck one lava pocket, which was easily sealed. Once on the "surface", I launched in a straight line towards my target. This led me past a nether fortress, which I raided for several pieces of horse armor and some nether wart, along with pushing me to build under a lava waterfall.
Did you know lava behaves differently in the nether from the overworld? It turns out, lava likes to "splooge" wide, which meant my little ceiling resulted in lava flowing under it, making things rather tricky to navigate. It took several false starts before I finally managed to get my tunnel through it without getting singed once!
I quickly realized that I was burning through my supply of stone at an incredible pace. For a third the resources, I could place JUST the floor to run along, and leave it to them to avoid ghast fireballs and such. I'd put up walls and ceilings, as needed, to stay safe from lava, but no more. It was at about that time that I discovered my sorting system was glitching again. I would have to fix it... again.
A few moves later, and I had the eight or so filters fixed. I would have to keep an eye on those things. I then decided to make use of the nether wart I'd collected in a nether fortress I'd raided. I started building a nether wart farm the size of an entire level, with a few glowstones scattered about the floor for light.
With that done, I returned to building the nether pathway while I contemplated the wisdom of my most recent decision. I had applied for godhood. It was something I had avoided for a while. Being a god is a great responsibility, and it's very easy to get a power trip where you use those vast powers to short-circuit the hard work of collecting and processing resources.
This impressions was soon confirmed, when one of the newer gods decided to help me and my, now two, assistants build our road through hell. He was able to simply build without having to restock, he actually restocked us often, and with no fear of the lava. I found my role changing, as I fought off ghasts to protect the other, earthbound mortals. At one point, I also ended up lighting up a couple of blaze spawners. I had some VERY intense battles to secure the route.
On the plus side, we made a LOT of progress, getting to the forty percent point. We also located a possible exit that would be a little bit closer. We would have to check with the owner before we used it, though.