The world was rewinding before my eyes. Vast, brown, destroyed ruins were beneath me. The sun retreated and disappeared on the eastern horizon. The skies darkened and then lit up again as a great radiant moon streaked across, fast enough to become a trail of light. An instant later, it was day again, only to become night once more.
The skies shifted between light and darkness as time reversed at an unimaginable speed. Stopping my gaze at the sky, I watched the city ruins, observing how everything began to return to its former state. The enormous holes in the ground made by the Beasts were filling in, leaving a clean, polished rock floor with flagstones for transporting carriages.
The ruins reconstructed themselves, leaving intact houses made of the same material. Enormous posts with lanterns rebuilt themselves, bringing light to the nights.
I watched in astonishment as the ruins seemed to divide into two.
Huge, imposing stone pillars rose like immovable columns, connecting an upper city with a lower city. A massive bridge of white stairs connected both cities.
Looking toward the castle, it reconstructed itself, revealing a grand, imposing castle that had been carved from a single mountain, just like its counterpart below.
An enormous river descended from the mountain, crossing both the upper and lower cities.
In the middle of both cities was a large, ancient statue of a beautiful young woman. Her hair was long, falling down her back. With one hand, she held a spear; with the other, she concealed her nudity. Two long strands fell on either side of her face and torso.
Finally, I felt a powerful pull, as if my soul had been grabbed and thrown with a devastating, incomprehensible force.
When I opened my eyes, I was in a strange place.
'Where am I now?' I thought, looking around. I could feel two things: the first was pain, a lot of pain.
The second was that I couldn't feel my essence.
My body, as if it were a cruel joke of fate, was that of someone young. Barely an adolescent, maybe 13 or 14 years old.
"You've got to be kidding me, right?" I thought to myself.
What kind of bizarre situation was this?
I was thrown into the body of a child, perhaps inside a dungeon or jail cell, so I could be a criminal. The pain meant I was being tortured, and the bindings were some kind of manacles that blocked the use of essence.
I tried to invoke the runes, but nothing happened. They didn't appear anywhere.
'Did the connection to the spell break?'
No, that's not possible. Most likely, it's similar to what happened to the protagonist in his second nightmare with those fanatics of war and glory.
"Shit. I'm screwed," I whispered, feeling several drops of sweat run down my body.
'May my luck be great.... luck, my ass. If this is luck, I don't want to imagine bad luck,' I thought, gritting my teeth.
Just a few hours ago, I was happily eating meat and simply relaxing, but no. Fate threw me at a great Tyrant, then a Great Demon, and now this.
I really guess the spell is trying to kill me. But you know what, spell? I'm going to live for a long, long time.
I looked at the door in front of me. I couldn't do anything since I was literally hanging.
I heard the sound of firm footsteps from the other side, which stopped in front of the door. It opened with a metallic creak, allowing light to illuminate the shadows.
I watched curiously as someone entered. It was a muscular man with bronzed skin and bulging muscles. He wore a black suit with light stains of blood. He walked toward a table with sharp tools.
I felt the room's temperature drop several degrees.
'No... not torture,' I thought, feeling fear.
The man grabbed a rod that was glowing with an intense orange hue, then turned around with a friendly smile, but his eyes were filled with extreme madness.
"Now, scum. You will finally talk about why you tried to assassinate the king, or we will continue with this game of torture," the man said, approaching.
'An assassination attempt?' I thought to myself.
"So you won't talk," he said, touching the tip of the hot rod to my stomach, making me clench my teeth. I felt my skin and muscles burn painfully.
The torturer pushed harder, piercing through the soft flesh.
Unable to resist the pain any longer, a gut-wrenching scream erupted from the depths of my throat.
The man smiled broadly upon hearing the screams, withdrawing the hot rod and leaving a charred, bleeding hole in my stomach.
I took heavy breaths; I could still feel the pain.
"Hmm, still not talking. That's good. Today, I want to try something new," he said, placing the hot rod back into the pile of coal to reheat it.
I watched as the man extracted something from inside a bucket that resembled a centipede.
"Scum, this little friend here is called a Flesh Devourer. It likes to eat the flesh of its victims from the inside out."
The muscular man placed the insect in front of my eyes.
"No," I said weakly.
"Hmm? Did you just say no?" the man asked.
"What a shame, but we'll continue," he said, letting the centipede crawl up my skin and into the hole in my stomach.
I could feel it inside me, and then came the pain.
A scream even more harrowing than the last one escaped my mouth. I felt as if I were being devoured from the inside out, slowly.
Pain...
That was the only thought in my mind.
I don't know how long I screamed or begged for it to stop, but it didn't.
Time passed as the torturer found new ways to inflict even more pain than before.
After an immeasurable amount of time, the torturer seemed to lose interest.
"It's a shame, but our time together is over, dear Scum," he said while using a sword to pierce me, extracting the bloody centipede.
"We can't let you die so easily, can we?" he asked with a smile.
I felt my wounds begin to heal just enough to prevent me from bleeding to death but not enough to eliminate the pain.
The man soon left the torture chamber. My head fell forward, exhausted. I looked at a large pool of blood.
My blood, spilled on the floor.
'I need to do something to escape this place,' I thought, taking several painful breaths.
'But not before killing that bastard with my own hands.'