Transmigration in Mordor

Slowly, with a calm that was anything but peaceful, Zac rose from the fountain. Water streamed off his shoulders—not washing away grime, but revealing something new, sculpted from inaction and clarity. He stepped out of the basin, each footfall on the cold stone marked by a certainty foreign to him. He was no longer a lost young man, broken by panic and remorse. Panic had died of exhaustion. Remorse had crystallized into a diamond-hard understanding.

He fixed his gaze on the cascade, no longer with fear or hope, but with the detachment of an engineer studying a hostile machine.

'A lure,' he thought, clear and sharp. 'It was never help. It's a great ledger, a mirror of my failures. Every skill is a cage, every upgrade a heavier chain.'

Yet, amid this architecture of torture, there was an anomaly. A paradoxical exit.

[Song of the Ainur: 92 / 999,999,999]

It was the only path to purge the taint of `Echo Distillation`. He knew it with absolute certainty. But to fuel this Song, to buy his own cleansing, he had only one currency: the Echoes. The very essence of evil.

A dry, joyless laugh escaped him—the first sound he'd made in an eternity.

'To gain a single drop of purity, I must drown in an ocean of corruption. To cleanse myself, I must first soil my soul.'

The system's perversity was total, but for the first time, he saw it as a challenge to overcome, a mechanism to exploit. He couldn't destroy it—not yet. But he could turn its rules against itself. His newfound lucidity hadn't brought peace, but a plan. A terrible plan, born of the coldest logic.

The skeletal spider. The guardian. The boss. She was the gate, and he had no key. Raw strength was failure. Stealth was useless against a creature that sensed his fear.

'But what would she sense if she no longer sensed fear?' he wondered. 'What would she sense if, instead of the scent of a terrified prey, she smelled the scent of one of her own? The scent of emptiness, of primordial hunger?'

The plan solidified in his mind, bold and monstrous. He would not defeat the skeletal spider. He would not hide from her. He would walk straight toward her, passing as one of her own. To do this, he needed a perfect disguise, a camouflage woven into his very soul. He had to raise his `Echo Distillation` to a level where corruption was no longer a mere stain on his being, but its very essence. He had to smell so strongly of evil that the mother of all evils would recognize him as her own.

He approached the cascade, his mind focused. All nuances, all attempts at balance, were swept away. Survival through passivity? An illusion. Stealth? A joke. There was only one path.

With an act of pure will, he tore the 31 `Tears of Regret` from their previous allocations. He felt the potential of `Coward's Stealth` and `Healing Stagnation` fade within him. Then, without a shred of hesitation, he poured them all into the only skill that now mattered.

[Forge of Brutality: 31/?]

A wave of raw, savage power surged through him. It was not the strength of a hero, but the vigor of a predator. His muscles knotted, his senses sharpened—not to perceive danger, but to inflict it. The world seemed simpler, reduced to a fundamental dichotomy: hunter and prey.

He turned, the fused razor-stinger feeling lighter, more natural in his hand. He left the sanctuary, not as a man going into battle, but as a worker heading to the factory.

The spider tunnels became his slaughterhouse.

It was no longer a desperate struggle. It was an industrial process. He moved with terrifying efficiency. Every motion optimized for killing. A kick to break a creature's legs, a precise stab to its nerve ganglia. No cries, no hesitation. He was a whirlwind of silent, methodical death.

The spiders threw themselves at him, and he harvested them. He no longer fought them; he processed them. Their screams of pain were no longer sounds of horror but the mere noise of his machine at work. His body was covered in their ichor, but he no longer noticed. Each death made a shimmering number appear before his eyes—an Echo absorbed, a unit of raw material added to his stock.

He died, of course. Sometimes overwhelmed by numbers, sometimes trapped in an ambush. But death was no longer defeat. It was a technical pause. A simple return to the sanctuary to get back to work. He felt neither frustration nor anger. Only a cold impatience to return to his task.

With each return, he stood before the cascade and poured his harvest into his own corruption.

[Echo Distillation: 310%] 

[Echo Distillation: 320%] 

[Echo Distillation: 330%] 

[Echo Distillation: 340%] 

[Echo Distillation: 350%] 

[Echo Distillation: 360%] 

[Echo Distillation: 370%] 

[Echo Distillation: 380%] 

[Echo Distillation: 390%] 

[Echo Distillation: 400%]

With each threshold crossed, he felt the taint sink deeper. It was no longer a foreign contaminant. It fused with him, becoming the new foundation of his being. The other spiders began to react differently. Their hesitation turned into confusion, then into a form of fearful deference. They still attacked him, out of instinct, but without the same vehemence, as if attacking an alpha predator of their own kind.

Zac ignored their changing behavior. He had only one goal. Continue. Kill. Harvest. Corrupt.

How many did he kill? Hundreds? Thousands? The corpses piled up in the tunnels, forming a crackling carpet of broken chitin. He continued until he felt the change was complete. Until the silence in his head was no longer that of emptiness, but that of a calm, absolute hunger.

He finally stopped, standing amid his charnel house. He looked at himself. He no longer felt tainted. He felt… whole. He was a chalice, filled to the brim with the poison he had distilled himself.

He was ready.

With slow, steady steps, he headed toward the entrance of the cathedral of bones. He was no longer Zac, the coward dead on a sidewalk. He was an instrument, a key of corruption forged to open a very specific lock. He was going to visit the queen. Not as an enemy, but as a prodigal son returning home.

[Waterfall of Night]

[Tears of Regret: 53]

[Coward's Stealth: 0/?] 

[Healing Stagnation: 0/?] 

[Forge of Brutality: 0/?]

[Echo of Ungoliant: 891] 

[Echo Distillation: 500%] 

[Song of the Ainur: 92 / 999,999,999]