Steve watched the endless drove of pigs meandering around his farms. Very confused.
And obviously, the first thought that came to mind was the pig pile he had found the other day far to the south west. For obvious reasons.
Absently he shifted his Inventory to swap his favorite enchanted pickaxe ('Picky the Pickaxe' was always there for him!) to his diamond work sword.
It wasn't his best work, he had a full set of enchanted diamond armor and equipment hidden away in a secured location within the third secret base hidden inside the second hidden base, but it was sharp and had enough durability to handle most messes.
Probably. "Hello?"
"Oink." "Oink?" "Oink."
Steve blinked.
Well… What had he expected?
Still. "If any of you start mutating into giant monsters or slowly shift forms into piglins or something I WILL stab you. Just… Just a heads up."
"Oink."
At least the crowds of pink animals were mostly staying away from anything delicate. No trampling crops from the more basic farms (The boring ones without automation and just set up on ground level), they weren't damaging any of the mechanisms…
So best not to risk hurting one of them and unknowingly enraging the endless pink horde.
After all, he still remembered the first time he opened a portal to the Nether and attacked a zombie pigman out of shock and fear… Summoning all similar monsters within a certain range and enraging them to suicidally attempt to murder him, making him a target despite their normally passive behavior.
Thus: No stabbing the piggies. "Can… Can you talk?"
"Oink."
…Was that a response? Or just a random oink?
Either way, that was technically a confirmation of a sorts, even if what Steve REALLY wanted to know was 'Do you have the ability to interact with people or are you just a collection of raw instincts that might suddenly murder me'.
The pigs, being pigs, acted like… Well.
Pigs.
If there weren't a bazillion of them and they weren't acting so freaking unnatural, Steve would be feeling like a moron taking this so seriously, but still: Pig army, best to verify it wasn't about to eat him.
Now, how exactly to DETERMINE whether or not an army of pigs were being controlled via a hive mind over lord entity or pig deity or something, Steve was a tad unclear about.
So.
Uh.
"Oink."
Fuck it. "Can I walk through here? I have a full inventory of junk and I just want to shove it into my self-sorting storage system."
"Oink." "Oink."
…He was going to assume that meant 'No problem my dude!' and just try to ignore how massively outnumbered he was. Also, best be polite: "Thank you."
And carefully, without pushing too hard or moving too quickly, Steve began to wade through the pink piles of porcine problems.
Every step he felt tense as all hell.
Each step the endless pigs did NOT give a shit.
So it didn't take long before he mentally threw up his arms, said 'Whatever', and began to crowd shuffle his way to the various stations. There were lots of things to do, after all… And without a storable storage medium like a shulker box to help carry shit, his inventory was STUFFED right now.
Seriously, you never appreciate the benefits of a portable mini-chest you can put in your inventory until you head to a new Instance and haven't unlocked 'The End' dimension to craft a few new ones.
Oh sure, he had once set up mine tracks and chest minecarts and complicated loading and unloading systems in the past… But it was FAR easier to just stuff a dozen shulker box with thousands of things and then head off to where they needed to go.
At least, it was the best option when you didn't want to set up a long term facility.
In THIS case, however, he would need to go with the tunnel idea from earlier and connect this farming base up with the skeleton spawner harvesting setup he had finished establishing a day or so ago.
A simple, straight forward, pig-less tunnel from here to the infinite skeleton drop chests.
Because despite feeling less endangered right now, he was NOT willing to risk shoving or hurting pigs when surrounded like this, and that drastically slowed his progress towards the input chests for his filtering and storage systems.
~~~Pocket System~~~
John was running out of ideas.
Step one of 'Save the Baby Zombie in Cute Armor with a Tiny Sword Riding a Chicken' had gone GREAT… But uh. Step two was a bit iffy.
Right now, he had managed to lure BZ(iCAwaTSRaC) away from the mob drop farm and set up a little glass cage for the tiny dude. After which it was trivial to undo all the damage he had done to the kill system and so forth using the scans taken earlier in the day and the blocks gathered in his Pocket.
Plus, the little guy and chicken were not actually alive enough to need FRESH air, just air in general. So despite being perfectly sealed up in glass, neither one cared that much.
Although, the baby zombie was technically dead, yes? So uh… He might not need it at all. It was a bit tricky to know for sure since John hadn't been able to Pocket any mobs without them popping into their component drop form.
His system was working on the issue, but it was a tricky and fanangly process that was best left for a later experiment.
Right NOW, John had a captive chibi chicken rider and was very unsure about the next step.
For one thing: The tiny dude was nearly suicidal AND beyond aggressive. The glass case was needed, period.
For another? John couldn't leave.
The raw fury that the tiny dude felt being near his target was actually part of the empowerment that kept him existing. He was so angry, he refused to fade away back into the raw energies that initially formed him and his tiny chicken mount in the first place.
Based on what John could tell, OTHER monsters, if they wandered too far away from a person or target, well… They were on borrowed time. TOO long like that, and they would just… Unravel.
Despawn entirely, drops and all.
So he had to stay nearby or the itty bitty zombie committee would suddenly be dissolved and disbanded entirely.
Though the chicken mount itself might survive, the tiny dude was focused on more passive ambient power than the malicious zombie riding on top… And passive mobs were more fundamentally stable than other entities.
Interesting side note, from what the passive sensors could detect: The interaction between the passive and hostile mob was in an odd state of balance and flux. It let the Zombie become far more stabilized (And ignore fall damage of course), but it also redirected the energy chickens used to generate eggs to instead boost it's riding speed and attack value.
You know, for that extra fast and dangerous chicken needed when picking out your badass pimped out ride.
So without more data, or more dangerous experiments that he wasn't willing to submit the baby zombie to, John was sort of stuck here watching the tiny confused thing wander around the glass container home he had slapped together.
Frustrated and without much else to do, he checked on Jessica's decontamination status… Which was still annoyingly slow. Only 15% cleared so far.
Too bad she can't just toss out her body like he had, it was VERY convenient… But while his Pocket System backed up stuff like his Soul and Body and Mind and stuff, she was not the HOST, just a pocketee really.
There was some space allocated to restore her to 'best kept form', but not one to disconnect and reconstruct portions of her existence while 99% damage like with HIS setup.
So while John's body was easily recycled and a new (local) one generated for temporary use while the new one was constructed, SHE was stuck with intensive regeneration and Conceptual cleansing. Ugh. So slow.
John poked the glass cage with a stick (tree wood was easily broken into sticks with barely any effort) and tried to get the baby zombie to follow the tip of it, to little success.
At least his new body would be massively enhanced after this. His Pocket System was frantically researching the conversion of materials into Essence and back as it was a HUGE improvement to his storage capacity.
First of all, it wasn't just normal contaminants that got extracted when something was converted into Essence… It was all SORTS of stuff. Odd auras, unrelated Concepts, historical information, states of existence like temperature or potential energy, electrical charge or magnetic properties… All SORTS of stuff wasn't part of the Essence of an item.
So when John shoved a some wood scraps from other worlds into the conversion process it not only returned some amount of wood Essence, he also gained all sorts of trace elements and energies and impurities and concepts like [[aging]] and [[scars]] and [[weathered]] so forth.
THOSE bits and pieces could actually be gathered and combined too in their OWN form of Essence, which would likely have all SORTS of uses later on too!
But more important to John in particular? When the junk stuff in his inventory was converted into Essence, it became massively more compressible. Entire mountains could be reduced into a few stacks of dirt and stone and gravel and stuff, not requiring the volume or weight or density of the object to be considered at ALL.
Oh, it interacted oddly sometimes. For example? Take the local version of a wooden door.
It was crafted from a two by three vertical rectangle of pure wood Essence, and it did NOT permit further stacking at ALL. Not because a single door was too much compared to an entire stack of sixty four blocks of coal or anything, but because a door from THIS place was not just a wooden surface hinged to the wall.
No, a door from HERE was the Essence of [[Permitting Entrance.]]
It only seemed so basic and normal because EVERYTHING here was formed from Essence, but elsewhere? Elsewhere a door like this would just let you enter a place, or a group, or an idealized state, or an event, or…
Yeah, compared to that a block of pure stone seemed trivial.
Anyway, all that aside: Converting stuff to Essence technically lost some trivial amount of material in the process, but the benefits were massive!
John could hold more stuff!
Oh, and using the Essence stored to craft new objects would form items so beyond perfect they may accidentally cause esoterically powerful side effects enhancing their nature… And maybe the gathered 'impurities' and stuff was technically incredibly valuable and rare collectibles useful for all sorts of stuff and would likely drastically improve his Pocket System's more impossible components…
But still! More stuff! After all, a massive amount of space was currently occupied with materials marked for recycling and raw resource use, squishing all that down into more compressible forms was just pure profit!
Sure, John would have to leave Jessica's area of his Pocket alone as well as important things like his Pocket Pals and other stuff, but this was going to give him so much space for activities!
He winced as the most recently converted 'Ham Sandwich' he had been testing with evaporated into a messy explosion of nonexistence and over-existence.
Eventually. Eventually this would end up giving him a bunch of freed space.
Right now the process itself was still being examined and stuff, and maybe a tad stuck at the 'corrupting laws of impossibility' stage.
He mentally confirmed that Jessica's decontamination progress had increased by some unimpressive minute fraction of a percent… And sighed as he kept poking his captive chicken rider glass cage.
Well at least he had plenty of time to get this right before he could leave. Not to mention that gathering a few dozen blocks of stuff randomly here was VERY valuable for recycling purposes, so there was some profit to be had there.
John poked the glass box again, while the tiny baby zombie just sort of ignored him and was petting his chicken mount. Which was SO adorable!
"Why are there MORE pigs over here than at my wheat farm!? There's not even anything HERE for you guys to try and eat! Move, dang it!"
John blinked. Huh? "Hello?"
Silence filled the area.
"Oink."
Oh alright, fine: A certain level of silence combined with an ongoing low level of oinking filled the area.
That voice spoke up again. "Is that you, pig god?"
Uh. "Maybe?" It WAS a new body after all. But statistically, that was not likely. Right? "I don't think so though." Not that he could see the other speaker due to the cute piggies in the way. "Are YOU a pig god? Are there a LOT of pig gods?"
It would explain why so many kept showing up.
The voice was closer now. "I… I don't know? I've seen some strange stuff though."
Oh! Maybe the voice was a ghost or something! "Well, I'm not entirely sure about what would be considered strange here, I've been spending most of my time watching Sir Zombleton, Chicken Knight of the Glass Death Tube and Potential Eater of Non-existent Brains."
The awkward oink filled silence returned.
John poked the glass cage again. "I'll be honest though, now that I've built a glass cage around Sir Zombleton, Chicken Knight of the Glass Death Tube and Potential Eater of Non-existent Brains… I'm not sure where to go from here. Maybe build him a tiny castle or something, or a tiny scabbard for his itty bitty sword."
Can't let him out or he would potentially try to eat some non-existent John brains or pig brains.
The unseen voice now sounded confused. "What?"
Huh? "You know, so he can sheath his little sword? Zombie or not, he IS a baby… And it can't be safe for a chicken mounted baby zombie to wander about with a sharp sword out and about. He could poke someone or something."
A moment of hesitation.
"Oink."
Yes, yes, a few oinks too.
The voice was a bit lost. "Let me… Let me just find where you are first, and then maybe things will make more sense."
Probably not. "Alright."
And John once more poked the glass box with a stick, but NOW it was to helpfully pass time while waiting and not just from a lack of ideas about what to do next.
Which was totally different! Huzzah!