Transmigration in Mordor

Silence pressed down in the cave, a dull presence that crushed every breath Zac took. Before him, the water of the Cascade fell without a sound, its reflection displaying the silent rules of his torment. He had just made a discovery. Cold. Mechanical. Devoid of any mercy, but carrying a strategy: the Tears of Regret could be reassigned without penalty.

A new light, not hope but icy calculation, flickered in his empty gaze. 'If they give me the rules,' he thought, 'I'll use them against them. Against this world.'

He invested everything in stealth. Every tear, every ounce of his past suffering, was poured into "Coward's Stealth." He felt the knowledge infuse him, an unnatural understanding of silence and shadow, a mastery of his own cowardice.

He plunged once more into the labyrinthine depths. But this time, he was different. A ghost. His steps, even on the most brittle stone, made no sound. He was an absence, an anomaly in this world of noise and fury. He reached a sheet of spiderwebs, those traps that had already doomed him. Guided by an intuition born of his new skill, he set a foot on it. He didn't sink. He wasn't trapped. His lightness, his absolute stealth, allowed him to walk on the threads like a specter gliding over a sea of dead silk.

Hours stretched, days blurred into a cycle of walking and resting. He explored relentlessly, returning regularly to the Cascade to soothe the hunger and thirst gnawing at him—cruel reminders of his prison of flesh. He evaded countless spiders, hideous, misshapen creatures he didn't recognize. Several species seemed to have spawned in these depths, each more grotesque than the last, amalgams of legs and fangs. Their presence was a constant threat, a reminder of his fragility.

He discovered places that took his breath away, not for their beauty, but for their oppressive grandeur or the unspeakable horror they contained.

His path led him into a vast cavern, where the air was heavy and stagnant. Looking up, he saw that thousands of webs formed a shifting dome of sticky, glistening threads suspended overhead. The corpses of spiders hung there, grotesquely deformed, their carcasses serving as nests for writhing eggs pulsing with a sickly, greenish glow.

Farther on, the stone floor gave way to emptiness. He found himself at the edge of a bottomless chasm, where the remains of nameless creatures lay. Half-formed abominations, the sketches of nightmares, were caught in thick webs, agonizing in an eternity of silent suffering. Their despair was a psychic shockwave, a wave of pure misery that struck his soul and left him gasping.

His journey pushed him even deeper, into a long tunnel whose walls were not stone, but black, polished crystal that seemed to drink the light. The crystal did not reflect his image, but his deepest fears: twisted versions of his own face, ravaged by madness; the disappointed gaze of his parents, amplified to hatred; the shadow of the Void Entity, undulating just behind his shoulder. Every reflection was a whisper, every step an echo of his own damnation.

Fear and despair mingled within him, a macabre dance that drove him onward despite everything. But everything seemed too vast, too infinite. The paths vanished into a never-ending maze. He couldn't remember the passages, nor the forks. The exit slipped away from him, a cruel mirage in a desert of darkness.

Finally, he made a decision. He followed the webs. Thicker and larger, they led him toward the heart of this nightmare realm. He arrived in a cavern so immense it seemed a world unto itself. A cacophony of clicks, hisses, and muffled growls filled the air. Grotesque spiders—hundreds, thousands—wove webs, laid eggs in the still-warm corpses of their kin, fought over the remains of nameless creatures.

This nightmare vision terrified Zac. He remembered the even more nightmarish vision of the underworld, and his breath caught. Panic, that old enemy, seized him.

He was stealthy, but he felt watched. The unpleasant sensation didn't leave him; it grew, a pressure on his soul, an eyeless gaze fixed on him.

In the distance, far off, he finally saw it. Immense. Motionless. Hidden among the webs, a formless mass ten meters across, pulsing with a slow, monstrous life.

After an eternity of stillness, the mass moved. Grotesquely. Revealing a horror his mind at first refused to accept. A "skeletal spider", an amalgam of rotting flesh, broken bones, and pieces of other decomposed creatures, all held together by tendons of black silk.

Zac felt his heart clench, his mind waver. The despair he thought he had mastered, buried under a layer of cold resignation, resurfaced—stronger, crueler than ever. Panic, pure and primal, overwhelmed him.

The skeletal spider saw him. He knew it. He felt it. That gaze that wasn't a gaze, that consciousness that wasn't a consciousness.

Then began a hopeless hunt. Zac, hunted by this horror, gradually lost his mind. His stealth was useless against a creature that seemed to sense his fear. His strength faded, his mind fragmented. He ran, crawled, fell.

He was killed. Like a gnat crushed under a shoe. A quick, brutal, insignificant end.

He woke with a start, a scream of terror ripping through the silent night of the cave. Under his shroud, he shivered, his body slick with cold sweat. He thought back to the nightmare he had just lived.

In a cruel moment of truth, as fear continued to gnaw at his insides, he understood. This wasn't just another monster. It was a guardian. A "boss". Like in *Hades*, at the end of each level. A gate. And to pass through, he would have to face this abomination.

He took time to analyze the parallel, but the visceral fear never left him. He was a player in a game from which he could not escape, and he had just met his first real wall.

The cycle continued, relentless. And the exit had just receded into infinity.