Transmigration in Mordor

Climb. Sleep. Climb. Sleep.

The rhythm of Zac's existence was reduced to this brutal cycle. Each step of the giants' staircase was a three-meter cliff of black, glacial rock. He dug his fingers into the slightest crack, hauled his aching body upward, and started over. Entire days melted into a single, grueling task. His muscles screamed, his skin was raw, and his mind, numbed by the effort, began to fray.

After what felt like a week of ascent, exhausted, he lay down on the flat surface of a step to rest. The discomfort was absolute. The stone beneath him was a biting cold that seemed to steal his body heat, while the ambient air, heated by the lava rivers a kilometer below, was suffocating. It was a hell of contrasts.

As he stared into the void, his gaze caught a mark on the stone, right next to his hand. A distinctive scratch he had made himself with the tip of his stinger two days earlier, to test a growing anxiety. His heart sank. He had been climbing relentlessly for forty-eight hours, and he was in the exact same spot.

The staircase was an illusion. A trap. A conveyor belt to nowhere.

Fatigue gave way to a cold fury. The system wasn't just killing him; it was mocking him, wasting his energy in a loop of futility. Without another thought, he stood up, stepped back to the edge of the step, and jumped.

For a terrifying second of freefall, he hung in the superheated air. He hit the sheer rock face next to the staircase with a breathtaking impact. He managed to cling to a ledge, his fingers bleeding. From there, panting, he looked back. And he saw them.

Carved into the side of each step, barely visible, runes pulsed with a faint, sickly glow. And his mind, drawing from the debris of his former life, immediately recognized the threat. He remembered the books, the hours spent reading about Tolkien's world. The runes there were symbols of ancient power. The Dwarves carved them onto their weapons and fortresses to strengthen them. Some runes served as magical protection, creating barriers against evil. Others were enchantments, capable of giving a blade the power to slice through anything. They could even be used to transmit secret messages, known only to the initiated.

Here, their power was perverted. This was not a rune of protection, but of confinement. An ancient, powerful magic used to manipulate his perception of time and space, to trap him in an endless illusion. They weren't mere decorations, but true instruments of a curse, weaving an infernal loop around him to exhaust him mentally and physically. The knowledge that once fascinated him was now the key to understanding the architecture of his own torture.

The true path was the raw cliff face. The hardest, most dangerous way. As always.

What followed was a nightmare of climbing that lasted for weeks. Bypassing the cursed staircase, he ascended the cliff, with no security other than the strength of his fingers and the endurance of his muscles. Throughout his climb, he began to feel vibrations. At first, a dull, barely perceptible pulsation. Then, day after day, it intensified, becoming a tectonic heartbeat that resonated in his bones and teeth.

When he finally reached the top, he felt no triumph. Just the infinite exhaustion of a man who had moved a mountain only to find another behind it. He continued his way through a new network of tunnels.

'Following the logic of Hades,' he thought with dark humor, 'the Balrogs probably counted as the guardians of a level.' The fiery cavern was a level, and he had passed it. He shivered. How many caverns of horrors, how many levels of this divine prison would he have to discover before finding an end, whatever it might be? He prayed he could continue his stealthy strategy, but deep down, he no longer believed it. Each new layer of this hell was more terrible than the last.

The vibrations were now so strong that the ground trembled beneath his feet. The air was thick with rock dust, and the sound had become a deafening, grinding roar. He emerged into a new cavern, and he understood.

The cavern was a chaotic hive. Grotesque creatures, immense, pale, blind worms, swarmed by the hundreds. Their segmented bodies, the size of subway cars, writhed and crawled, their gaping maws lined not with teeth, but with grinding wheels of stone and metal that chewed through the rock itself. They were devouring the foundations of the world.

Zac stood frozen, a terrible and magnificent revelation striking him with full force. He thought back to the descriptions in the books. The Nameless Things that gnaw the earth beneath the mountains. They weren't prisoners of this hell. They were its architects.

The vibrations. The rumbling. The tunnels. All these caverns, these caves, and these well-trodden paths he had followed from the beginning... It wasn't the work of the system, nor of a divine will guiding him to his punishment. It was the work of these things. He was simply walking in the galleries they had dug, like an insect in the furrows of a plow.

His journey, his quest, his punishment... It was all taking place in the bowels left behind by worms. The indifference of the universe had just taken on a new dimension. He wasn't even important enough for his prison to have been built for him. He was just borrowing the tunnels.