Transmigration in Mordor

Before leaving the precarious safety of the ledge overlooking the underworld, Zac paused for a final mental inventory of his meager assets. The lucidity gained in the depths of the fountain had not brought him serenity, but a cold pragmatism. Facing this horizon of fire and shadow, he was but a speck of dust. Raw strength alone would not suffice. Nor would pure stealth.

Instinctively, after surviving the skeletal spider and before embarking on that dizzying descent, he had already rebalanced his strengths. It was an act of caution born from the terror of the unknown, a recognition that he could no longer afford to bet everything on a single strategy. He glanced at the interface of his soul, not to change it, but to confirm the state of his tools.

[Waterfall of Night]

[Tears of Regret: 0]

[Coward's Stealth: 18/?]

[Healing Stagnation: 17/?]

[Forge of Brutality: 18/?]

[Echo of Ungoliant: 891]

[Echo Distillation: 500%]

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

A bit of everything. A chance to hide, a chance to heal, a chance to fight. It was an admission of ignorance, and in that, it was the wisest decision he had made since his arrival. The `Echo Distillation` remained, a 500% taint that was now his disguise, his passport to these forbidden lands.

Then, he began the crossing.

It was an ordeal that surpassed the simple concept of a journey. He descended from his ledge via a natural path of sharp basalt and found himself at the level of the lava rivers. The air was so hot it seemed solid, an invisible wall pressing against his lungs with each breath. The sound was a constant rumble, the voice of an angry planet.

His journey became a deadly dance with the geology of hell. He wove between the motionless Balrogs, using their massive silhouettes as cover. His `Coward's Stealth` helped to muffle the sound of his steps, to erase his presence, but it could do nothing against the heat. Geysers of lava erupted without warning from fissures in the ground, forcing him into desperate dives onto the scorching rock that left instant blisters on his hands and knees. Each burn was a new scar mapping his passage. He would stop, motionless, waiting for `Healing Stagnation` to do its work, feeling his skin sizzle and slowly reform as he prayed that no shadow would begin to move.

He spent what felt like an eternity sheltered behind the back of a particularly immense Balrog. He was so close he could see the details of its form. The darkness that enveloped it was not an absence of light, but an active substance, a hunger for photons that devoured the glow of the surrounding magma. Veins of fire flowed beneath this skin of shadow, not like blood, but like molten galaxies trapped within a body of nothingness. The power that emanated from this creature, even in its stasis, was so overwhelming that Zac felt physically smaller, his very being compressed by the mere proximity of this fallen deity.

And yet, there was a terrible beauty in this landscape. The slow, majestic ballet of the rivers of fire, the bridges of black iron arched like the ribs of a dead titan, the heavy silence of these hundreds of nightmare sentinels. It was a diorama of the apocalypse, and he was the sole spectator.

As he contemplated the scene, his mind, freed from panic, began to work. Something was wrong. A cognitive dissonance. He thought back to the books he had read, those fragments of his former life. He remembered the Balrogs. Maiar spirits, beings of immense power, seduced by the original evil. But they were rare. Legend counted only a handful. The author had never been clear on their exact number, but the analyses he had read agreed on one point: there could be no more than seven, perhaps a dozen at the most.

He looked up. Before him, he could count a hundred without even turning his head.

What did this mean? Were they copies? Illusions? Or was the truth even more terrible? What if this was not the world he knew, but a corrupted version, an imitation where the rules of creation had been broken, where evil had been allowed to multiply like a virus? It was a bug in the code of his damnation, an anomaly that suggested the laws of this universe were even more arbitrary and terrifying than he had imagined.

This thought accompanied him as he resumed his path. He crossed strange structures, plazas paved with obsidian slabs, and colonnades that seemed too vast for human-sized beings. The architecture was ancient, eroded, and bore the marks of a civilization that had thrived and died here, in the heart of the fire.

Finally, after an eternity of heat and stealth, he arrived at the foot of his objective. A staircase.

It was carved into the black rock of a mountain that rose in the center of the immense cavern. But the word "staircase" was inadequate. Each step was a three-meter-high cliff, a smooth and perfect monolith. It was a path for giants, a monument to a race of gods. for him, it was an infinite climbing wall.

He placed his hand on the first step. The stone was cold, an anomaly in this furnace. He looked up, but he could not see the summit, which was lost in the unfathomable darkness of the vault.

Without hesitation, he began to climb. The next stage of his punishment had begun.