Time didn't exist in the void where Jin-ho was.
It was like floating in a thick, endless sea of ink. There was no body for him to feel, no eyes to see.
For the first time in years, the crushing loneliness of Jin-Ho's life didn't hurt him.
And why would it?
After all, there Was no "Jin-Ho" left to feel it. In this space, he was just a speck of consciousness, a mere dirt, in a silent universe.
After drifting around in this emptiness for god knows how long, on one random day, the peace finally shattered on its own. Jin-Ho can't tell exactly how or why it happened.
It just happened without any pattern.
----
CRASH
He felt like being thrown out of a moving vehicle. Then all of a sudden, everything slammed back into him at once, sensory overload so great that it made his brain feel like it was melting.
The first thing he felt when he came to was the cold. It wasn't the chilly rain of Seoul; it was more like an ancient, damp cold that seemed to seep straight into his soul.
Then came the smell. It was a putrid, suffocating soup of unwashed bodies, stale urine, and the scent of sweat, all at once.
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 to back down.
It was as if he was literally in a nightmare.
The room, if you could call it that, was a cavernous, dripping cell of rough-hewn stone. The only light there was 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.
"Uh..." he tried to speak, but his voice was a ruined rasp.
He looked down at his hands. They were pale, unnaturally so, and his fingers were long and slender, which wasn't supposed to be as far as he remembers.
But they were also covered in a layer of filth, so thick it looked like a second skin. He looked down at his body. He found himself wearing nothing but a few strips of greyed, moth-eaten rags.
To his left and right, other figures were slumped in the wall, too. And calling them the walking dead wouldn't be far-fetched.
There were six of them, chained to the wall like some kind of cattle. Their skin had a strange, translucent color, a sickly light grey-blue that made them look like ghosts. One woman, barely a few feet away, was leaning against the stone; her eyes were closed. Her ragged dress had torn completely at the seams, leaving one of her breasts exposed, pale, bruised, and heaving with every shallow breath she was taking.
Nobody looked at her. Nobody moved to cover her. As if in here, simple modesty had been traded for the simple, agonizing struggle to draw the next breath.
Seeing how the absurdity of this whole situation was getting weirder as he looked more, Jin-Ho's heart hammered against his ribs. He instinctively reached up, his fingers brushing the place where the knife had supposedly entered his chest.
But to his shock, he found nothing.
His chest 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.
He had a long, tapered, elegant ear, much like the ears he had seen only in TV shows, when he used to watch western movies and stuff.
'Elves?' That was the first thought that came to him.
'Huh? So, I spent two fucking years working my ass off, just to pay off grandpa's debts,' he thought, the bitterness of his previous life mixing with the horror of the present. 'And just when I've finally tried to be a hero… this happens? This is what I get? Getting thrown into this budget LORD OF THE RINGS setting?! For real? Inside an Elf jail?'
He let his head fall back against the freezing stone wall. The spiked collar in his neck bit into his throat, like 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 he was in; it was more like a strange kind of sound that resonated inside his mind.
And with it, a flicker of blue light ignited in the air in front of him. 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, what the fuck is this?!" Jin-Ho breathed hard with shock, his eyes widened seeing the blue colored screen 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.
Just as the words left his mouth, 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.
'Oops. Maybe I shouldn't have said that out loud.' Jin-ho thought to himself while covering his mouth.
Jin-Ho stared at the figures in front of him. They stared back.
It was a silent competition of hollow eyes and ragged breaths. The tension in the cramped, stinking cell was thick enough to choke on. These weren't the graceful, ethereal beings from the movies he'd watched back in Seoul.
These were broken things. Their skin was the color of bruised fruit, their ribs jutted out like the hulls of wrecked ships, and their spirit seemed to have been ground into the dirt long ago.
After a few heartbeats of heavy silence, they all turned away. They slumped back into their corners, returning to the rhythmic, soul-crushing business of existing.
Jin-Ho didn't move. 'So they can't see these Blue words floating in front of me?' he was shocked.
He leaned his head against the cold, weeping stone and surveyed the room. The iron shackles around his wrists were heavy, not the prop metal of a film set, but cold, pitted iron that had rusted into his skin. The collar around his neck felt even worse; every time he swallowed, the spikes grazed his throat.
The cell was a tomb for nine. It was not that cramped, but just staying in this cell felt nauseating to him. The scent smelt like dried sweat, old blood, and the sweet, cloying odor of infected wounds. Instead of a solid door, a row of thick iron bars separated them from the corridor, a design identical to the maximum-security police cells he'd seen in news reports, but far more primitive.
Then, his gaze landed on their ears again.
Long. Tapered. Pointy.
'This doesn't make sense,' Jin-Ho thought, a bubble of denial rising in his chest. 'How can elves exist? This has to be some kind of high-budget psychological experiment. Or maybe I'm in a coma?! Yeah, that's it. I'm in a hospital in Seoul, and my brain is just making this up to cope with the trauma of being stabbed.'
He let out a short, dry laugh in his mind. 'It might be just prosthetics. Very realistic, very expensive prosthetics.'
His hand, moving almost of its own accord, reached up to his own head. His fingers brushed his temple and moved higher.
The skin was warm. It was soft. And it stretched out into a sharp, undeniable point. He gripped the tip of the ear and tugged.
A sharp, electric jolt of pain shot through his skull.
"What the fuck!" he shouted, the words erupting from his throat.
The sound shattered the silence of the cell once again. Every elf in the room snapped their heads toward him again. Jin-Ho froze, his hand still gripping his ear, his heart hammering against his ribs. He gave a small, panicked, innocent smile and began to scratch his ear as if he were just dealing with an itch.
When they finally looked away, his internal crisis shifted into high gear.
'It's real. It's actually real. I'm an elf. I'm a goddamn elf.'
His mind raced, a thousand questions colliding at once. 'If I'm an elf, then where am I? Earth doesn't have elves. Is this an artificial reality? No, it can't be. No technology can simulate pain this accurately. This pain in my gut feels like it's been there for weeks. Did I reincarnate? Like those manga protagonists? But don't they usually start as babies?! How can I just... woke up in a grown body? What happened to the original owner? Did I steal his life?'
The more he thought, the more the reality settled into his bones. He wasn't in a coma. The screen in front says otherwise. It says he was in Elandor. He pondered the word 'ELANDOR' for some time.
His excitement at being "isekai'd" died a swift, brutal death as he looked at the chains again. He was a prisoner.
After getting used to the hovering glowing screen in front of him, Jin-Ho took a shallow breath and crawled toward the elf beside him. It was a girl, perhaps fourteen or eighteen years old by human standards. She was so malnourished that her skin looked like translucent parchment stretched over a bird's skeleton.
"Hey," Jin-Ho whispered, his voice sounding like dry leaves skittering across pavement. "Can you tell me... where we are? Why are we chained up like this?"
The girl didn't answer at first. She just stared at him with eyes that were too large for her face. Then, slowly, they began to fill with tears. She let out a soft, broken sob that quickly escalated into a full-blown cry.
The other elves scrambled closer to her, their chains clinking like a funeral dirge. Jin-Ho backed away instantly, his hands raised in a gesture of peace, feeling the cold weight of the wall hit his back. 'What the hell?! I just asked a question! Why did she start crying on her own?'
The prisoners huddled around the girl, whispering in a language that sounded melodic even in despair. One woman, her face etched with exhaustion, looked at Jin-Ho. Her eyes weren't filled with anger, but with a pity so deep it made his skin crawl.
"He must be so traumatized," the woman murmured, her voice trembling. "The torture... Julius's torture must have broken his mind this time."
"Two days," another man whispered, nodding solemnly. "They took him for two days of 'entertainment.' Of course, it was about to happen. It's a miracle he can even speak."
Jin-Ho caught the words. Julius? Torture? "Eon," the woman said, leaning toward him. "Do you really forget everything? Do you not know who we are?"
'Eon. So that was this body's owner's name.'
"I... my head is jumbled," Jin-Ho lied, playing into their assumption. "Everything feels like it's behind a thick fog. I don't remember anything from before... I feel like I woke up just now."
Hearing that, some of the women began to cry. To them, this was the ultimate tragedy; not only was he enslaved, but he had been tortured until his very identity had shattered.
Jin-Ho felt a little bad about lying, but it was the perfect cover, so he didn't say anything while they cried.
When they calmed down a little, he pressed them to tell him the situation, "Umm, can you tell me why are we here?" he pressed. "From the beginning if possible."
A man with a jagged scar across his cheek sat near him. He spoke in a low, hollow tone, detailing a decade of nightmares. He told Jin-Ho about the war they had lost, the burning of their forest, and the ten years they had spent in this dungeon. He spoke of the humans who bought them, sold them, and beat them as they pleased.
He looked down at his body. Fresh, purple bruises painted his arms. Long, angry red welts, lash marks from a whip, crisscrossed his chest. The original owner of this body had been through a literal hell before Jin-Ho arrived. Although the rest of the Elves didn't have any heavy wounds on them, their overall condition wasn't that great.
"Where are my parents?" Jin-Ho asked, trying to find some anchor in this world.
"We don't know," the man replied, shaking his head. "You were sold at the market ten years ago with us. We stayed in this cell together all this time."
Jin-Ho looked at the room.
'Chained like an animal? Check.
Beaten for sport? Check.
Zero chance of rescue? Check.
Great. I save one girl, but get a knife in the ribs, and my reward is eternity in an elf-flavored gulag?'
The frustration and fear began to mount. His breathing became ragged. He realized the heavy reality of this world instantly.
'I need a way out. I need a weapon. I need... anything!'
Jin-Ho wasn't a religious man. He had never believed in God. But in the depths of this dungeon, staring at the words that still hovered faintly in the periphery of his vision, Jin-Ho began to pray. He prayed to whatever authority had the power to rip a soul from Earth and dump it in this world. He prayed with the desperation of a man who had nothing left to lose.
'If you're listening... if there's anyone out there... give me something. Don't let me die like this! Please! '
The blue words suddenly flared with a blinding intensity.
{HOST'S PRAYER HAS BEEN ACCEPTED}
Jin-Ho jumped, his chains rattling violently. "Whoa, what the fuck?!"
The other elves looked at him for a second, but thinking he was mumbling on his own, they ignored him.
But Jin-Ho didn't care. He has bigger things to worry about. He was staring at a new window that was scrolling through data at a blistering speed.
{SYNCING WITH HOST: 12%... 45%... 89%....}
{SYNCING 100%..}
{SYNCING COMPLETE}
A complex, crystalline window expanded in front of him. It looked like the high-end UI of the VR games he used to watch streamers play.
[ - STATUS - ]
Race: High Elf
Age: 96 Years
Strength: 10
Stamina: 30
Agility: 12
Mana: 3,000 / 3,000
Insight: 16,000
Skill Points (SP): 0
'96 years old?' Jin-Ho's jaw dropped. 'But I look just eighteen. Does that mean I'm going to live for a millennium? That... that is a massive cheat! Isn't it?'
His eyes quickly moved to the "Mana" and "Insight" sections. '3,000 mana? Is that a lot? And what the hell is Insight?'
As if reading his thoughts, the screen flickered, opening a secondary tab on top of the existing tab.
[ - SKILLS - ]
[LOCKED] Matter Manipulation (Level 1)
(Condition to Unlock: Study magic for the first time)
[LOCKED] Heat Manipulation
(Condition: Master Matter Manipulation to Lv. 10)
[LOCKED] Alchemy
(Condition: Create a lower-grade potion)
[LOCKED] Inventory
(Condition: Hold more items than the Host can carry)
[LOCKED] Skill Shop
(Condition: Master all starting skills to Lv. 10)
Jin-Ho stared at the "Matter Manipulation" skill. Although this didn't make sense, he understood someone had listened to him and granted him this ability of some sort, which very much resembled the games he used to play back in his high school days.
His heart began to race. He was a prisoner in a stone room, held by iron chains. But if he could manipulate matter... he could turn these chains into dust instantly. He could turn the iron bars into water.
A low, bubbling laugh started in his throat. It wasn't the broken sob of Eon; it was the sharp, dangerous laugh of a man who had just been handed a loaded gun in a room full of enemies.
"Hehe... hehehe..."
The other elves didn't pay any attention to him now. But Jin-Ho didn't notice; he didn't care at all. He was just staring at the shimmering blue text, with a predatory glint entering his blue eyes.
A High Elf's body. A system of gods. And a reason to use them. What else could he ask for?
"Well, well, well," he whispered, his voice dripping with newfound malice. "Looks like I'm going to be very, very busy."
Author Note: Author: Jin-Ho found his dream cheat ability, but will he be able to use it for his rise in this world? Because a wise man once said, even the deadliest weapon becomes a cheap toy in the hands of an idiot.
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