I activated my depth vision and looked down through the ground at my feet. A moment of searching later and I saw the mana spring, a gush of what looked like pale blue liquid emerging from a paler spot in the bedrock then dissipating in the earth.

Cracking my knuckles, I got to work, by which I mean I stood there and concentrated for a few sections. With a small flash of light and a 'pop' a small, spherical vehicle appeared, hovering just off the ground in front of me. I walked round it once, inspecting it.

I nodded my head. “That God really does do good work,” I thought appreciatively, climbing in through a hatch that had opened at the back. I sat in the seat and looked at the controls. The knowledge of how to use them came instinctively, which was good because they looked very complicated. I grabbed the handles of the main control unit and turned them. The futuristic craft floated in that direction at the pace of a light jog, somewhat awkwardly jinking back and forth until it was positioned directly over the mana spring, then I used my foot to press a pedal. With a slight hum, several large U-shaped pieces devices floated round the hull to point straight down.

With the push of another pedal, beams of pale blue light shot out and started tearing through the ground, cutting it into two-meter cubes and sucking them into my inventory. It took about three seconds to cut through the thirty meters of material between me and the mana spring, and another ten to clear the surrounding area, including the trees, creating a circle of space 24 meters across, the Architect Gizmo Pack accessory I had swapped with one of more usual ones giving me the ability to create perfect geometrical shapes.

Even I was surprised at how quickly the mining mount had cut away the ground, but I quickly pushed that to the back of my mind. Now the trickiest part: what to build my base from? I didn't want some boring commonplace material like wood or stone, and I didn't want anything too valuable in case someone broke my tower apart to steal it. I also didn't want a weak material.

“Aha!” I exclaimed, fishing around in my world storage, and pulling out a stack of 999 obsidian cubes. Only one seemed to appear in my hand, the rest remaining in my inventory. The cube in my hand was two meters on each side, so two meters cubed, yet I couldn't feel it's weight at all. The god seemed to have messed up the dimensions: each block in the game was supposed to be a 2-feet cube not a 2-meter cube. But I'm not complaining - it gives me more resources to work with. I tried placing the block of obsidian against the edge of the hole, as it left my hand it seemed to solidify somehow. I tried moving it again and I could feel it's weight now, though it still didn't seem to affect my ability to lift it very much.

I set the massive block of obsidian down again and stood back to inspect it. It was perfectly smooth, a deep black-purple, and seemed to be completely clear, though the light entering it only managed to go a few centimetres before being absorbed. In all, it was very striking.

I nodded to myself, pleased with my choice, and placed another block of obsidian above the first. This was when something unexpected happened: the two blocks merged seamlessly together, and when I tried pushing the top on, the bottom one rocked as well.

“Well, that's convenient,” I thought happily, and sunk eight deep (100 meter) shafts straight down into the rock at equidistant points around the circle, adding four horizontal passages to each one every ten metres, then filling them with obsidian that seemed to meld with the rock. They should act as a basic foundation to distribute the weight of the construction I was about to put in place. I set to work covering the walls with obsidian blocks, reducing the open space of bedrock to just twenty meters across. The blocks seemed to bend slightly as I placed them, conforming themselves to their new circular orientation. Then I started building up, above towards ground level. Before I had even reached that point, I had run out of obsidian in the stack. I simply pulled out another without hesitation. I had mined up several entire worlds at one point so I had no worries about running out of materials.

I had gone through about 6000 blocks by the time I decided I was high enough, then pulled the top of the tower out by four meters in all directions, smoothing the sides over so there was no sudden overhang but rather a diagonal starting eight meters below. I then raised this wider section by thirty meters or so before bring the walls together in a point some 32 meters above, the obsidian blocks seeming to understand what I wanted and reshaping themselves to make the angled slopes and sharp point, though I did have to help them along by trimming off some bulging edges. I noticed that these pieces of the blocks combined with other pieces to produce new whole blocks when I placed them back into my inventory, which was very useful.

I flew back a bit and admired my work. A deep black obsidian tower towered (“Heh”) above the forest, up to about 200m. I knew that a structure like this would never stand on Earth; the weight of the obsidian above would turn the blocks at the base into dust, but as I was placing the blocks I could feel mana flowing into them from the spring, strengthening them.

The setting sun behind the tower made it look even cooler, and I was struck by a sudden inspiration. I pulled out my cell phone and flicked through its functions. “Ah ha!” I exclaimed, activating camera mode and snapping a pic.

Smiling contentedly to myself I descended to the ground, at which point I smacked myself in the face.

“Right, a way in,” I groaned. Reaching into my world storage I pulled out some actuators. It seemed my floating piggy bank, which had provided an expansion to my inventory had been merged with the world storage, which I found a little sad.

I studied the actuator curiously; these devices made blocks become intangible when activated, which was something obviously not possible in my previous world. I pressed one against the wall where I wanted my door to be and it sank into the seamless obsidian wall. I pushed another one in above the first and stood back curiously. Nothing happened. Then I realised I had forgotten to wire them up. I pulled a complicated looking device, the Grand Design, from my world storage and activated it. My depth vision activated at the same time, and I knew that if I wished, I could place wires anywhere in my vision, regardless of any obstacle. So I did. I placed wire inside the obsidian wall where I could now see the actuators, connecting their cores together, then to a hidden switch on one side of the door, as well as to another switch I placed through the wall onto the inside of the tower.

When I flicked the switch, the obsidian seemed to shift slightly and become more like a murky black fog. I stuck my hand in cautiously, then walked through. “That's cool,” I said, closing the door.

Then I looked down, finding myself hovering in the air above a thirty-meter drop. I hadn't even noticed when I started flapping my wings. “Needs a floor,” I said, then looked up. “And stairs.”

I willed my wings to beat more powerfully and shot up the stem of the tower and hovered at the point where the tower expanded outwards. Here I used my grappling hook, which emerged from my back below my wings Doc Oc style, to connect to four points on the tower walls and started putting in a temporary wooden floor, on which I placed a bed. I also placed a lamp next to the bed as a temporary light source, it being pitch black inside the tower, the giant eyeball emitting teal light floating over my right shoulder notwithstanding, then went to sleep.