The passage of time in absolute darkness was a cruel, distorting thing. Joseph had no way to measure it. No sun rose or set. No clock ticked. No change in temperature marked the difference between day and night. There was only the steady, relentless progression of physical suffering, each stage bleeding into the next without mercy or pause.
He regained consciousness slowly, dragged back from the empty void of exhaustion by the intensifying demands of his body. The first sensation was the thirst.
It was no longer the simple, nagging desire for water that he had felt before losing consciousness. This was a profound, all-consuming biological crisis. His mouth felt like it had been packed with dry sand. The gag, which had been merely uncomfortable before, was now a torture device of exquisite cruelty. The cloth had absorbed every drop of moisture from his mouth, leaving his tongue thick, swollen, and pressing painfully against his teeth and the roof of his mouth.
He tried to swallow. The action was instinctive, automatic, but it brought only agony. His throat muscles contracted, trying to draw down saliva that simply did not exist. The dry tissues scraped against each other, producing a sensation like sandpaper being dragged across raw flesh. He gagged violently, his body convulsing in an attempt to expel the obstruction, but the tightly bound gag prevented any relief. The convulsion only made the cloth press deeper, triggering another wave of choking panic.
His lips had cracked open in multiple places. He could feel the sharp, stinging pain of the splits, and when he moved his jaw even slightly, the dried skin pulled apart further, allowing tiny beads of blood to well up and then immediately dry in the cold air. The metallic taste of his own blood mixed with the sour, stale flavor of the gag cloth, creating a nauseating combination that made his stomach churn.
The cold had not lessened. If anything, it seemed to have intensified, or perhaps his body had simply lost the ability to generate heat. He lay on his side now, having shifted position at some point during his unconsciousness. The stone floor pressed against his hip and shoulder, the rough surface digging into the soft flesh and bone. Every point of contact ached with a deep, penetrating cold that seemed to reach into his marrow.
His wrists and ankles were in worse condition than before. The chains had not loosened. Every small movement he made caused them to scrape and bite. The flesh around the iron rings was raw and bloody. He could feel the sticky wetness where the wounds wept continuously, the blood mixing with the cold metal and creating a paste that dried and pulled at his skin. The pain was constant, a burning, stinging sensation that never faded, never gave him a moment of peace.
He tried to estimate how long he had been unconscious. Based on the intensity of his thirst and the progression of his physical deterioration, it had to have been several hours. Perhaps four. Perhaps six. Perhaps more. Without any external reference, his mind could only guess, and the uncertainty itself was another form of torture.
As the minutes crawled by, the thirst became unbearable. It was no longer just a physical discomfort but a driving, desperate need that consumed his every thought. He tried again to search for moisture, pressing his face against the damp stone floor, trying to lick at the condensation. But his swollen tongue could barely protrude past his cracked lips, and the gag prevented any meaningful contact with the stone.
Frustration built inside him, a hot, burning emotion that mixed with the cold terror and created a volatile psychological state. He began to thrash weakly against his chains, not with any hope of escape, but simply as an expression of his anguish. The chains rattled and scraped, the sound echoing in the confined space. The movement caused fresh waves of pain from his lacerated wrists and ankles, but he did not stop. The pain was almost welcome—it was something to focus on besides the overwhelming thirst.
Then, driven by desperation and the last remnants of his rational mind, he tried to scream.
He drew in as deep a breath as his restricted lungs would allow, feeling his ribs expand against the cold stone. He contracted his abdominal muscles and forced the air upward through his throat, attempting to produce a loud, sustained cry for help. But the gag was too effective.
What emerged was not a scream but a muffled, pathetic whimper. The sound was weak, barely audible even to his own ears. It was the sound of a wounded animal, helpless and trapped. He tried again, forcing more air, straining his throat muscles to their limit. The result was the same—a quiet, choked noise that died instantly in the oppressive silence of the cell.
The effort of screaming, even these failed attempts, had consequences. His throat, already dry and irritated from the thirst and the gag, began to burn. It was not the clean, sharp burn of a fresh wound, but a deep, acid burn that felt like his esophagus was being eaten away from the inside. Each breath he took afterward stoked the fire, making the simple act of breathing a torturous experience.
He collapsed back onto the stone, his body trembling from the exertion and the pain. Tears leaked from his eyes, hot against his cold cheeks, but they brought no relief. They only added to his dehydration, wasting precious moisture that his body desperately needed.
As he lay there, defeated and broken, his mind began to slip away from the present reality. The combination of dehydration, pain, exhaustion, and sensory deprivation created the perfect conditions for hallucinations.
At first, they were simple auditory distortions. He heard footsteps in the darkness, approaching slowly, the sound of boots on stone. His heart rate spiked, hope and fear mixing together. Was someone coming? Would they bring water? Or would they bring more pain? But the footsteps never arrived. They faded away, revealed as nothing more than the sound of his own blood rushing through his ears, distorted by his damaged mind into something external.
Then came the voices.
The first voice was female, low and rich, carrying an edge of cruel amusement. It seemed to come from directly above him, as if someone was standing over his prone form, looking down with satisfaction. The voice spoke in a language he did not recognize, yet somehow he understood the meaning. It was mocking him. Laughing at his weakness. Enjoying his suffering.
"Look at you," the voice seemed to say, though the words were more felt than heard. "So weak. So pathetic. You wanted to be powerful, didn't you? You wanted to be a demon. Well, here you are. How does it feel?"
He tried to respond, to scream defiance at the hallucinated tormentor, but only the same muffled whimpers emerged. The voice laughed, a sound like broken glass, and continued its psychological assault.
"Did you really think it would be different? Did you think you would wake up with power, with respect, with control? No. You wake up as property. As a slave. As nothing."
The words cut deeper than any physical wound. They struck at the core of his identity, the remnants of Joseph's personality that still clung to existence within this foreign body. He had fantasized about demonic rebirth, about cunning and strength and dark power. But the reality was chains and cold and helpless suffering.
The female voice faded, but it was immediately replaced by another hallucination, this one more emotionally devastating.
He heard his mother's voice, distant and faint, as if she was calling from another room. "Joseph? Joseph, where are you? Please, answer me. We're looking for you. Your father and I, we're searching everywhere. Why won't you come home?"
The guilt and sadness that crashed over him was overwhelming. In his mind's eye, he could see his parents—his real, human parents from his old life—searching through the house, calling his name, finding his empty room with the computer still glowing and the novel still open on the chair. They would think he had run away. Or been kidnapped. They would never know the truth. They would search and worry and grieve, and he would never be able to tell them what had happened.
"I'm sorry," he tried to say, but the gag turned it into meaningless noise. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to leave. I didn't choose this."
His mother's voice grew more desperate, more frightened. "Joseph, please! We need you! Don't leave us like this!"
He began to sob, his body shaking with silent, convulsive grief. The tears flowed freely now, soaking the gag and running down into his hair. The emotional pain was worse than the physical torture. The knowledge that he would never see them again, never explain, never apologize, was a weight that crushed his chest and made breathing even more difficult.
The hallucination slowly faded, leaving him alone again in the darkness. But the damage was done. The psychological wound was deep and raw, a new source of suffering to add to the growing collection.
As his mind continued to deteriorate, another biological crisis began to unfold. The pressure in his lower abdomen had been building for some time, a dull, growing discomfort that he had tried to ignore. But now it had reached a critical point. His bladder was full, painfully so, and his body's need for release was becoming impossible to deny.
He tried to hold it. Despite everything else, despite the chains and the thirst and the pain, some part of him still clung to the basic human dignity of bladder control. He clenched his muscles, fighting against the biological imperative, trying to maintain this one last shred of autonomy over his own body.
But he was too weak. Too exhausted. Too broken. His body, pushed past its limits by dehydration and stress, simply stopped obeying his will.
The release happened involuntarily. He felt the warm liquid spreading beneath him, soaking into the rough stone and the tender skin of his thighs. The warmth was briefly, shamefully pleasant against the pervasive cold, but that fleeting comfort was immediately overwhelmed by a crushing wave of humiliation.
This was the final indignity. This was the moment when whatever remained of Joseph's pride and self-respect was completely destroyed. He was not just chained. Not just gagged. Not just transformed into a foreign body. He was now lying in his own waste, unable even to control the most basic bodily functions.
The shame burned hotter than any physical sensation. It was a deep, visceral self-loathing that radiated from his core and seemed to set every nerve ending on fire. He wanted to disappear. To cease existing. To escape not just the physical prison but the psychological hell of his own degradation.
He tried to shift away from the wet stone, to move his body to a dry area, but the chains prevented any meaningful movement. All he succeeded in doing was spreading the liquid further, ensuring that a larger area of his skin was now in contact with the urine. The smell, sharp and acrid, filled his nostrils, adding another layer of misery to his already overwhelming sensory nightmare.
The wet stone quickly became cold again as the liquid lost its body heat. Now he was lying in a cold, damp puddle that seemed to draw even more warmth from his body. He shivered violently, his teeth chattering behind the gag, his entire frame wracked with uncontrollable tremors.
Time continued its merciless advance. He lay there in the darkness, in the cold, in the waste, his mind cycling through the same desperate thoughts over and over. Would anyone come? Was this torture deliberate, or had he simply been forgotten? How long could a body survive without water? Days? He had read somewhere that three days was the limit, but that was for someone in normal conditions, not someone chained in a freezing dungeon, bleeding from multiple wounds, and suffering from profound psychological trauma.
He tried to pray, though he had never been religious. He tried to bargain with whatever force had brought him to this world. He tried to access the hate that had sustained him in the void, to transform his suffering into anger and determination. But he was too broken. The hate was still there, buried deep, but it was buried under layers of pain and shame and despair so thick that he could not reach it.
His consciousness began to slip again. Not into sleep or unconsciousness, but into a kind of dissociative state where his mind separated from his body. He could still feel the pain, but it seemed distant, happening to someone else. He could still smell the urine and the cold stone and the blood, but the sensations were muted, processed through a thick mental fog.
In this dissociative state, he began to think about the novels he had loved. The demon protagonists who conquered kingdoms, who commanded armies, who bent reality to their will through sheer force of personality and power. Those stories had seemed so appealing, so exciting. But they had never shown this part. They had never described the breaking. The humiliation. The absolute powerlessness that came before the rise.
Maybe this was the price. Maybe every demon had to start here, in the darkness, in the chains, stripped of everything, before they could become something more. Or maybe he was special in his suffering. Maybe his reincarnation had gone wrong, and he would simply die here, forgotten and alone, his existence erased from both worlds.
He did not know. He could not know. All he could do was continue to exist, to endure, to survive moment by agonizing moment, hoping that eventually, somehow, something would change.
His breathing had become shallow and rapid, the acid burn in his throat making each inhalation a struggle. His heart continued its steady, working rhythm in his chest, stubbornly keeping his body alive despite the overwhelming desire to simply stop. His swollen tongue pressed against his teeth, a constant reminder of the thirst that dominated his awareness.
The hallucinations continued to come and go. Sometimes he saw lights—bright, colorful flashes that his oxygen-starved brain conjured from nothing. Sometimes he heard music, faint and distorted, playing melodies he did not recognize. Sometimes he felt hands touching him, though whether they were friendly or hostile, he could not tell.
Through it all, the chains remained. The cold remained. The darkness remained. And Joseph—or Velrith, or whatever he was now—remained, enduring the breaking hour that seemed to stretch into infinity, his body and mind pushed to the very edge of survival, waiting for whatever came next in this brutal, merciless new existence.
The dampness beneath him had grown cold and sticky. The blood from his wrists had mixed with the urine, creating a foul paste that clung to his skin. His entire body ached with a deep, penetrating pain that had no single source but seemed to radiate from everywhere at once. He was cold. He was thirsty. He was hungry, though the hunger was still a distant concern compared to the other sufferings. He was broken.
And yet, somewhere deep inside, beneath all the pain and shame and despair, the core of hate remained. It was small, barely glowing, like an ember buried under ash. But it was there. Waiting. Growing. Fed by every moment of suffering, every humiliation, every second of helpless agony.
When the time came—if the time came—that hate would be the foundation of whatever he would become. Not heroism. Not justice. Not mercy. Just hate, pure and cold and absolutely unforgiving, directed at the world that had done this to him, at the forces that had orchestrated his rebirth, and at anyone who dared to stand in the way of his survival.
But for now, in this moment, he was nothing. He was meat and bone and suffering, chained in darkness, waiting for the next phase of his breaking to begin.