The rain in Seoul always smelled like wet asphalt and broken dreams.
For Jin-Ho, it was just another Tuesday night. His back felt like it had been fused into a single, aching rod of lead after a fourteen-hour shift at the warehouse. His hands, calloused and stained with the ink of shipping labels, were shoved deep into his pockets as he trudged toward his moldy one-room apartment.
He lived a life of quiet, crushing routine. Since his grandfather, the only person who had ever truly loved him, had passed away from a long, expensive battle with cancer, Jin-Ho had become a ghost. He was now a slave to the hospital bills he had inherited, a slave to the minimum wage that barely covered his ramen, and a slave to a loneliness so heavy that sometimes it felt like a physical weight in his chest.
'Just one more year of this', he told himself, his breath hitching in the cold air. 'Just one more year of double shifts, and I'll be debt-free. Maybe then I can actually start living my life'.
But the universe had a different plan for Jin-Ho.
The scream came from a narrow alleyway wedged between two crumbling office buildings. It was sharp, jagged, and filled with a terror that bypassed Jin-Ho's exhaustion. He stopped. . 'Maybe I shouldn't get involved in whatever that is happening there?', Jin-Ho thought while he considered not going toward the sound.
But then he remembered his grandfather's voice: "Jin-Ho, being a man isn't about how much you have. It's about what you do when someone else has nothing left."
He turned into the alley.
Three men were cornering a girl. She couldn't have been more than twenty, her eyes were wide and glassy with shock. One man held her arms; another was fumbling with a roll of duct tape.
Seeing this, Jin-Ho's frustration with his life transformed into rage. While most of the time he didn't care about the crime news shown on the TV, but this time was different. Not because this happening in front of him. But because he has an issue with people, who treat woman as object. And seeing it happening in front of him made his blood boiled. He instantly rushed at them.
He didn't have a weapon. Neither did he have a plan. He just had the momentum of a man who didn't care much about his own safety anymore. He roared, with a raw, guttural sound, and tackled the nearest man.
The fight was a blur of frantic limbs and heavy thuds. Jin-Ho took a punch to the jaw that made his teeth rattle, but he managed to shove the girl toward the street somehow. "Run!" he barked at her, his voice cracked at little while screaming at her. "Get out of here!"
The girl stumbled, her face was a mess with crying and fear. In the chaos of the shadows, with the rain slicking the ground and the adrenaline screaming in her ears, she didn't see a savior. She saw a large, shadowed figure lunging toward her in the dark.
As Jin-Ho reached out to help her up, her hand flashed from her pocket. She wasn't empty-handed. She had a small, tactical folding knife, a gift from a paranoid father, perhaps.
She didn't think. She just struck.
The blade went in clean. But not on the thugs who were here enemy, but in went right between Jin-Ho's ribs.
He froze. The air left his lungs in a single, silent gasp. The girl stared at him, her eyes finally focusing as the light from a distant streetlamp hit his face. She saw the blood. She saw the shock in his eyes.
"Huh…Oh my god, what did I do… Oh god… I'm sorry... I'm sorry..." she whispered, her voice rising into a shrill, rhythmic wail. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean... I didn't see, I'm sorry!"
Instead of waiting by his side, She turned and bolted, her footsteps splashing in the puddles until the sound vanished.
Jin-Ho slumped against the brick wall. He was devastated by her betrayal. Even if she accidentally stabbed him, at least she could have stayed by his side. But instead, she ran away like a coward.
He tried to press his hand against the wound, but his fingers felt like lead on the wound. The warmth was leaving his body quickly, replaced by a coldness that started in his toes and crept upward, slow and inevitable.
'What a lame way to go', he thought, a bitter, delirious smile touching his lips. 'Stabbed by the damsel I saved. No hero's reward. Not even a kiss on the cheek. It was just me, the trash, and a shitty, unfinished life'.
The darkness didn't come all at once. It was a slow fading of the world, until the rain stopped feeling wet, and the pain became a distant memory to him. He closed his eyes.
Time didn't exist in the void.
It felt like floating in a thick, endless sea of ink. There was no body to feel, no eyes to see. For the first time in years, the crushing loneliness of Jin-Ho's life didn't hurt him.
Why would it? There was no "Jin-Ho" left to feel it. He was just a speck of consciousness in a silent universe.
After this drifting around in this emptiness for god knows for how long, the peace shattered all of sudden. Jin-Ho can't tell exactly how or why. It just happened.
CRASH.
It felt like being thrown out of a moving vehicle. Everything slammed back into him at once, sensory overload that made his brain feel like it was melting.
The first thing he felt was the cold. It wasn't the chilly rain of Seoul; it was an ancient, damp cold that seemed to seep straight into his marrow. Then came the smell. It was a putrid, suffocating soup of unwashed bodies, stale urine, and the scent of sweat.
CLANK.
A sudden, violent jerk at his throat made him gag.
Jin-Ho's eyes snapped open. He immediately tried to sit up, but a sharp, biting pain in his neck forced him back down.
He was in a nightmare.
The room, if you could call it that, was a cavernous, dripping cell of rough-hewn stone. The only light came from a single, flickering torch mounted far down a damp corridor. He was chained to a wall, his wrists held by rusted iron shackles that looked like they hadn't been unlocked in decades.
"Ugh..." he tried to speak, but his voice was a ruined rasp.
He looked at his hands. They were pale, unnaturally so, and his fingers were long and slender. But they were covered in a layer of filth so thick it looked like a second skin. He looked down at his body. He was wearing nothing but a few strips of greyed, moth-eaten rags.
To his left and right, other figures were slumped in the shadows. They were the walking dead. Six of them, chained like cattle. Their skin had a strange, translucent quality, a sickly grey-blue that made them look like ghosts. One woman, barely a few feet away, was leaning against the stone, her eyes closed. Her ragged shirt had torn completely at the seams, leaving her breasts exposed, pale, bruised, and heaving with every shallow breath.
Nobody looked at her. Nobody moved to cover her. In this pit, modesty had been traded for the simple, agonizing struggle to draw the next breath.
Jin-Ho's heart hammered against his ribs. He reached up, his fingers brushing the place where the knife had entered his chest.
Nothing.
The skin was smooth. Not even a scar remained.
His breath hitched. He looked at the prisoner to his right. The man's head was bowed, but as he shifted, Jin-Ho saw it.
A long, tapered, elegant ear, much like the ears he had seen only in TV's.
Jin-Ho's hand flew to his own head. His fingers traced upward, feeling the sharp, pointed tips of his own ears.
Elves?
'I spent two years jerking off in a moldy apartment because I had nobody,' he thought, the bitterness of his previous life mixing with the horror of the present. 'I finally tried to be a hero… and the girl I saved killed me. And this, this is what I get? Getting reincarnated to some budget LORD OF THE RINGS setting?! For real? Inside an Elf jail?'
He let his head fall back against the freezing stone. The spiked collar bit into his throat, a constant reminder of his status.
"You're not even being creative, you bastard Universe," he whispered to the dark. "You're just being mean."
The moment the words left his lips, a chime rang out. It wasn't a sound from the dungeon, it was a sound that resonated inside his mind.
A flicker of blue light ignited in the air. Transparent words, shimmering with a faint hum, materialized in front of his vision.
{WELCOME TO ELANDOR}
{RACE: HIGH ELF (BLOODLINE TRAIT ACTIVATED)}
{STATUS: ENSLAVED / MANA SUPPRESSION}
"Whoa. Whoahhh," Jin-Ho breathed, his eyes widened seeing what was in front of him.
The screen stayed there, tethered to his field of vision. It wasn't a hallucination. It felt more real than the stone wall behind him. He reached out a hand, but his fingers passed straight through the light.
"What the fuck is this Elandor?"he muttered, his voice echoing slightly in the damp cell.
The silence of the cell was shattered. Every head in the room snapped toward him. The prisoners, who had looked like corpses only moments ago, were now staring at him with a mixture of shock and pure, unadulterated terror.
'Opps. Maybe I shouldn't have said that out loud.' Jin-ho thought to while covering his mouth.
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