Transmigration in Mordor

There was no return. No shock, no pain, not even the sensation of a soul being torn from its body. The fire of Mount Doom should have meant the end, annihilation. Instead, it was a dissolution.

Zac existed in a non-place, a void where neither time nor space had any hold. He was no longer consciousness, but a point of view drifting in the absolute silence that precedes creation and follows the end of all things. His leap had not been another death in the loop, it was an exit from the game board. A cheat.

And in this emptiness, for the first time, he could understand.

He no longer saw the two cascades as waterfalls, but as he should have all along: pure sources of information, concepts that flowed into his mind. He focused on the Waterfall of Night. The truth flooded him, not as a vision, but as an implanted memory. He saw. He saw two colossal trees illuminating a perfect world. He felt the spider of void and horror named Ungoliant descend upon them. He sensed the pain of the Trees as their light was consumed, drunk, digested, then regurgitated as a substantive darkness, a liquid, corrupting night that was the very essence of the cascade.

'The Echoes of Ungoliant.'

They weren't a resource. They were poison, fragments of the great spider's hungry soul. Every time he distilled them, he did not become stronger. He became more like her. A nausea that was not physical seized him. This was not water. It was liquid crime he had been drinking from the beginning.

He then turned to the concept of the Cascade of Dissonance. He understood its opposite nature: the tears of a goddess weeping for a broken world, the promise of new light. This was the antidote, a remedy presented to him as a choice, another possible path.

It was there, in grasping the nature of both sources, that he saw the system's true purpose. He didn't see it, he grasped its end, the monstrous logic underpinning it. He understood the Entity. It was not a god, not a demon. It was something older, a tumor born of the Void that hungered. Hungered for existence.

And so the truth, in all its cruelty, was revealed.

He was not a prisoner. He was a crop.

It was not a prison. It was a farm.

The System was not a game, it was a digestive apparatus.

Every hope he received from the Cascade of Dissonance, every ounce of corrupting power offered by the Waterfall of Night, every victory, every glimmer of escape, all of it was only fertilizer. A means to cultivate his soul, to ripen it in suffering. The Entity didn't feast on his flesh, but on the energy of his emotions. The fleeting joy of victory made the despair of the next fall all the more "flavorful." Realizing his guilt in the destruction of Gondolin wasn't an accident, it was the climax of his cultivation, the moment when the fruit of his despair was perfectly ripe, ready to be harvested. His plunge into the lava wasn't suicide; it was the harvest.

A laugh rose within him. A laugh silent, without joy, without sadness, a laugh of pure, absolute, terrifying lucidity. The laugh of a man who sees that he is the fall. There was no escape, not because the walls were high, but because the cage was designed so the prisoner would never truly wish to leave, always clinging to the next hope, the next upgrade, the next cycle.

The deepest awareness is a kind of peace, cold, empty, but peace nonetheless. The chaos of fear and despair vanished, replaced by the terrible calm of certainty.

And the world returned.

Suddenly. He was on his knees in the original cave. The cold of the stone. The silent sound of the fall. Everything was the same. But everything was different.

He stood, slowly. His gaze was no longer that of a hunted animal or a broken man. It was an empty gaze, a calculative gaze.

He looked at the cascade. They were no longer sources of power or redemption. They were dual feeding troughs for his enemy: one for poison, the other for false hope.

He felt neither strong nor weak. He no longer felt despair. He felt nothing.

He was a man who had just learned the rules of the game, just after being devoured by the game master.

He sat cross-legged facing the cave's exit, perfectly motionless, his mind a sea of ice. He would no longer run. He would no longer seek the exit.

The harvest was over.

The war against the farmer could begin.