In the deepest depths of the Allblack dungeon, where sunlight could not reach, where flickering torches mixed with the thick stench of rot, the sound of whips striking flesh echoed together with the shrill screams of slaves being tortured. The air was suffocated by despair, faith twisted into something deformed and pathological. Behind the iron cauldrons, emaciated children huddled in corners, their eye sockets sunken deep. They clawed their own faces to keep themselves awake, pain like a poisonous draught to quench their thirst. The lustful gazes of the prisoners did not frighten them; what they feared was the endless nightmare whenever their eyes closed.
Allblack was a place that recycled trash. Slaves who had lost the right to live, the crippled and diseased, the madmen broken by meaningless battles… all were thrown down here like useless waste to be processed. These "pieces of trash" were arranged into perfect tools, tunnel-digging machines, sand-excavating machines, flesh-and-blood transport machines. Yet this labor produced only meaninglessness; what truly held value was what they excreted from within their minds.
The machines operated at full capacity until they were gradually exhausted, and the moment the machines stopped, they became fresh sacks of food for the monster guarding this dungeon. A closed production process, an endless loop with no return.
Allblack was a notorious dungeon of the Golden kingdom. It was built as solid as fortresses, fully equipped with defensive armaments and elite guards. Its purpose was far from simple, and true to its name, it concealed secrets that had to be hidden.
"Truly a work of art. A construction of blood and bones of those who have fallen." Unknown Writer.
Exitus was an orphaned child in this hell, without hope, without light. The status of a slave was worth no more than a bag of trash. Like many children in war, Exitus was only a lost soul; he witnessed his family slaughtered like pigs, steel blades swinging and heads falling, the savage smiles of Golden soldiers and the anguished faces of the simple, kind villagers at the moment of death.
"Run, Exitus!"
The last sound his mother spoke was truly absurd. "Run where? When there is nowhere to run from the hooves of Golden's horses." Exitus chose to give up quickly, calmly, the way he always faced everything in his life.
The boy had always been a strange child. From a young age, he was very different from the other kids in the village; instead of joining in dull, tasteless games, he liked to spend time contemplating.
Contemplating the familiar feeling when facing all things and events, as if he had done and experienced them somewhere before. Perhaps all of that was merely the vagueness of a smart child's mind, but when he encountered death, it became a certainty.
When livestock were butchered, it was surely an extremely violent and bloody scene for children, yet Exitus accepted it easily, terrifyingly calm. The way he watched them die was as if it were an inevitability, a law of life. No pity, no fear, an apathy that came from a higher realm of the mind.
"We are all like livestock, imprisoned in a world full of rules, free within the mediocrity of notions."
When the massacre took place, the Golden soldiers killed almost everyone who resisted, but strangely, they spared all the children. Pity from butchers? No. It was a bizarre order. An inhuman command from the high generals.
"Let the children dream of nightmares. A death is too easy for these little beings; they have the potential to become demons."
Exitus and the others naturally became slaves of Golden. When the heated iron rod branded with the symbol "rat" burned into his flesh, unlike the other children who screamed in pain, the sensation of "pain" to him was strangely familiar, so familiar as if he had endured it tens of thousands of times before.
"You're an interesting kid. Maybe if you keep surviving, you'll become someone, huh?"
A soldier bared his teeth in a grin after savoring the boy's endurance. Not even a twitch; only those who had faced life and death possessed such strong will. The man gave the boy a trace of respect, along with a bit of information.
"Where you're going is the Allblack dungeon, a prison and a graveyard for the desperate, a place where the wretched barely live through each day in the hell of both mind and reality. I wonder whether your tough will can be broken. Ha Ha Ha."
Exitus woke again from a nightmare. Memories of the wretched past kept circling in his mind, whispers echoing by his ears. He crawled to the bars, reaching for the bowl and water bottle lying on the damp, moldy floor. Inside was a loaf of bread hard as stone. A meager meal specially reserved for children: bland and tasteless, yet it softened in the mouth, at least enough to be swallowed quickly and give a sense of fullness. Do not rush to despise it; the older ones did not even have a drop of dregs to drink. That little was already more than a day's labor of an ordinary slave. Everything here was exchanged for labor, even if it was dirt cheap and unjust.
He only ate half, saving the other half. Half a loaf of bread, if used well, could perhaps be exchanged for countless valuable pieces of information.
"It's lived longer than we thought. Seems Enesur granted it a strong craving."
A slave observed him for a long time, staring at him as if at livestock rather than a human being. Not every child survived in the Allblack dungeon, and he did not mind the flesh of a decaying corpse.
"Enesur has abandoned us already. Did you forget?" Another replied. This one looked at his companion with greed; to him, that damned fellow would likely drop dead much sooner than the resilient child.
Exitus did not care about those fools. Worse than that, they were madmen. Perhaps this suffocating environment was kneading their small, mediocre minds into something twisted and diseased. The jailers here were no different from the slaves, discarded beings filled with filth and guilt. For some soldiers, whipping the slaves was not for duty or amusement, but simply to protect themselves from the mad beasts ready to pounce, to claw and gnaw at every piece of bone and flesh on their bodies.
"Allblack is a place of equality; anyone can die at any time." Unknown Writer
Exitus truly had a will to live within dreams. No, within prolonged nightmares. He always saw a familiar silhouette, an old man with crimson eyes. The figure always whispered of an awakening, of a strange stone that could grant its owner countless wishes. The old man stood there like a statue, distant; like a vague, flickering ghost, yet his voice always echoed in the boy's mind, so close as if pressed against his ear.
"You have a mission, Exitus. Something that must be completed."
"Within those stones, there is something that can grant you every wish. Find it. Go find it. It can help you leave this place, help you gain enough power to complete the unfinished mission."
"Exitus, find it, The Stone of Nightmares."
Exitus swung the pickaxe hard into the rocks. With his weak strength, he only made sparks fly; it took at least five or six blows to crack a stone. Yet he persisted. He was certain the stone lay somewhere within this mass of earth and rock.
"As long as I can still swing the pick, there is still hope," Exitus thought.
The boy's faith had its grounds. Since childhood he had read some books about arcane mysteries, and naturally, his "familiarity" affirmed that everything existed. When reading about ancient weapons, he felt as though he had already owned them, had touched and wielded them long ago.
That stone was likely also a kind of ancient weapon. Some of those artifacts possessed power beyond human knowledge. Even if he did not truly believe in wish-granting, at least it might hold enough authority to let him escape this place, far from the fangs of the monster guarding the gate.
"You will only find it when the moment arrives. Keep for yourself a bit of clarity, a bit of hope." The old man's voice whispered by his ear, then suddenly dissolved into the void, as if it had never existed.
"The voice has crossed out of dreams and into reality, more and more each day. I am gradually losing my sanity," Exitus sighed. The boy picked up his tool again, continuing to scrape through the filth. Perhaps tomorrow he would find it, perhaps never, but first, he had to survive.
Allblack, at intervals, received new prisoners. Today was a special day, because a special one appeared, a warrior wounded after the war. They brought him in on a stretcher, a ceremonial transport, as if he were a king of this hell. A slave carried by two soldiers instead of being dragged along the ground like livestock. They tossed him there like a lump of rotten meat. He seemed resigned to his fate. His eyes were icy, hollow as he stared at the ceiling. Around his neck was a specially designed steel collar that fixed his head, neck, and jaw to prevent suicide. There was no hope left for one who had lost everything, even becoming crippled. He sat there, fixing his gaze on a single point until his eyes blurred and images grew vague…
He was a soldier of Hesmor, a Fighter with the strength of ten men. Their bodies were as solid as boulders, capable of resisting a portion of magic. They were war machines, cleaving steel as if it were soft peanuts. Fighter was already a commander rank, leaders of ten-man squads, equipped with anti-magic weapons and auxiliary magic vials. Their heads were worth a great deal of military merit. That made capturing them alive extremely troublesome and unnecessary; only cowards who surrendered and laid down their weapons, convenient for imprisonment, could avoid the fate of losing their heads.
This warrior was not like a deserter. Look at that severed arm, it had taken nearly the entire shoulder with it. A fatal downward strike from behind, clean and swift, with almost no resistance. Perhaps he had truly "good" comrades. With such a wound, he would not live much longer anyway. After the nightmares he had endured, they threw him here to savor his final terrors, and then become a prime cut of meat for the monsters.
Day after day, Exitus continued to search for the stone within the dirt and sand. There was no clue for him, only whispers growing more frequent and clearer, and the strange scrutiny of a vacant gaze from a dark corner.
The warrior watched Exitus, measuring the boy who was about the same age as his son. He was both astonished and curious about the drive that made the child shoulder a pickaxe every day, risking his life to claw at the earth when he already had most of what was needed to survive.
"Why? Is it worth tormenting yourself like this?" The groaning sound leaked from the man's mouth.
"I don't know. Lying still and waiting to die is far more boring than doing something and… still waiting to die." The warrior was startled when he heard the reply. He had only muttered to himself; he had not truly "asked" the boy. Yet the boy's answer was genuinely interesting. A pointless death, or a death with at least a bit of purpose.
If his jaw had not been locked, he would surely have laughed. Instead, the sound that came from his mouth was more like a groan.
The warrior's question was far clearer than the whispers inside the boy's head. Exitus did not work merely to live, but also to find the stone. Yet before a stranger, he could not speak the truth.
"I have always believed that behind that layer of earth and rock lies hope. I am merely removing the barrier between the two," he muttered.
To the warrior, Exitus was foolish, just like his own son. The only difference was that when he looked into the boy's eyes, they were strangely calm. The boy spoke as if it were the truth, a self-evident certainty with its own foundation. The warrior did not know why, but he believed the boy's words.
"Could it be that there is some passage behind that layer of rock?"
At night, when everything sank into silence, the warrior's nightmare began again. This time it was the images of his dead child. It seemed that the morning exchange with Exitus had stirred memories that were far from pleasant.
"Dad, dad, as long as I stitch her back together, mom will be fine, right. I believe I just need a lot of glue and needle and thread."
"Dad, dad, it hurts so much. Boo hoo hoo. It hurts so much, dad. I can't stitch myself back together. Stitch me back, dad. Stitch me back… me."
"Dad, I see mom. She is calling me over there. I told her I don't want to leave you alone. You will be very lonely. But I am so sleepy, dad. I'm sorry."
The warrior jolted awake. Something was choking his throat but was restrained by the steel collars. His tears burst forth, red like blood. He wanted to roar with all his might but could not.
"It's all over. They're just nightmares."
Exitus sat there. To him, nightmares were like daily meals. He often lost sleep and woke in the night. Long ago, the haunting memories of his family were no longer the most terrifying nightmares.
"This one was intense. I bet it's far worse than being betrayed."
Exitus spoke while sipping the murky water from the rusty bowl. He drank it dry and tossed the bowl aside.
"Go to sleep. None of it is real. It only magnifies reality many times over."
The warrior panted, sweat gathering into heavy drops that streamed down his face. He wondered what this war was for. There seemed to be no real value in starting a war for either nation at all. Perhaps its only purpose was to drown the wretched in a curtain of nightmares and obsessions.
…
Dawn emerged with the jailer's shout, like a rooster crowing. His iron rod struck the bars with ringing clangs as if sounding an alarm. Sometimes some slept so deeply that even the blows of the jailer upon their heads could not wake them.
"He's dead. Carry him out and feed the dogs."
He issued the order coldly. The soldiers turned pale. Feeding the dogs was an extremely dangerous task. Sometimes the dogs craved fresh flesh far more.
As usual, Exitus shouldered his pickaxe and began the daily act of self-torment. The familiar whispers were still there, the distant gaze from the dark corner still watching. But it would not be long now. The warrior's vision was growing dim. This time it was not deliberate. He knew the moment would come, that release would come after so many days of endurance. A small flicker of joy lit up in the warrior's mind. Death had never felt so wonderful. He suddenly recalled Exitus's words and sensed the scant mana still flowing in his body. He knew what he had to do. A death with a little purpose, as someone once said.
"Hey, kid. What can you do with that tiny bit of strength. Don't be so harsh on yourself. Find another way to become stronger." The warrior stirred a small spark of interest in Exitus. The boy carried the pickaxe over and whispered.
"What way."
"Have you heard of the current of energy that flows through the body, making people stronger. They call us warriors. People like me only need to swing lightly and those rocks can crumble into powder."
"I have heard of it in books and have indeed seen it in reality. Not far from here, one Golden soldier who slaughtered my village was a warrior. Just as you said, heads rolled with clean cuts. Their strength is far beyond ordinary people. But how can there be mana in this place. Allblack is surrounded by runes and formations that suppress magic. Even if you teach me the techniques, I cannot learn them."
There were indeed very few warriors here, of course aside from the one before him. However, the technique of sensing mana was not particularly precious. In essence, half a loaf of bread was enough to exchange for it. Yet the absence of mana in the environment rendered such guidance hollow.
"There is still some. In my body there is still a little, enough to pass on to you. My hand is gone, the war has taken everything. There is nothing left to hold on to. But in you, I see a purpose. A reason to continue, something hidden in those rocks, as you said. Take my hand. Leave the rest to relaxation. Listen carefully to every word I say and feel it."
The warrior instructed him.
He began to teach the boy little by little. How to guide mana, how to sense the presence of the current and channel it into the body. The energy flowed from him into the boy like a small snake, mischievous and violent.
"Do not let it destroy your body. Control it. Lead it through the blood vessels, gather it at the heart. From there, disperse the flow throughout your body."
At last, Exitus succeeded. Once again, he felt an overwhelming familiarity, as if he had practiced this countless times before.
"It's quite easy, isn't it. Look, I can guide it to nourish my eyes. I can see strands of energy hopping on my fingers."
The warrior was astonished by the boy's talent. He controlled the flow with ease after only one lesson.
"Perhaps this is what fate has arranged," the warrior whispered to himself.
Exitus clearly sensed the difference in his body, even though it was very slight. More importantly, he saw a strange current of energy hidden within those rocks, a different current, slender and pitch black.
"That's it, the nightmare stone. Even if its appearance is somewhat sinister, if it can grant every wish, I accept."
In the end, the warrior breathed his last after transmitting all the remaining strength he had. When Exitus asked his name, he remained silent. He died not with a smile, but with hope, that his small effort might ignite another life.
"Thank you, old friend. I don't even know your name. Perhaps that is good as well."
Exitus gently closed the warrior's pale eyes. If he could, he would burn the corpse to ashes so it might return to the earth. Sadly, he did not have the means to do so. This body would soon become a ration for the monster outside.
Exitus continued to dig, ignoring the annoying whispers, focusing on his work. That current of energy was now closer than ever. With each strike, with each chunk of stone falling away, his hand finally touched the cold, hard stone from which the dark current surged. The stone dissolved into his body as if it had never existed.
"You have found it. But you are not worthy yet. Prove it. Overcome your nightmare." The old man's whisper echoed by his ear.
"Nightmare. I live with it every day. That's too easy for me." He curled his lips in disdain.
Exitus rested after a day of exhaustion and fell asleep, waiting for the nightmare to descend. But this time was different. No longer the sight of his family being slaughtered, no longer the tragic screams of villagers, no longer the savage smiles of armored soldiers. A very different nightmare, very real.
Before him lay a road, a passage with only a single path. Suffocating and oppressive. Around him were walls slick and viscous, trembling like flesh, and every few meters hung a burning torch. When he placed his hand upon the surface of the wall, he heard whispers, not words, but a strange, alien language, dense and restless like the rustling of leaves. But the most horrifying thing was from the depths of the darkness ahead, the dreadful hissing sounds, the wet smacking noises of some monstrous creature savoring its meal. And surely, they did not welcome an uninvited guest like him.