In a daze, a sudden feeling of weightlessness hit him.
Anton jolted awake, his body tensing on instinct. In his panic, his right hand hooked into a crack in the ground. With that leverage he finally managed to steady himself and stopped sliding down.
"Whew—"
He let out a heavy breath, instinctively assuming he'd almost rolled off the edge of his bed again.
But all he could hear was the roaring crash of water. The damp, cold wind carried a fishy stench that clung to his skin, and his right calf felt like a chunk of flesh had been bitten off by a dog, sending waves of pain through him.
Something's wrong!
He snapped his eyes open and turned his head. The scene that greeted him made his scalp prickle.
Below his feet yawned a pitch-black abyss. He couldn't see how deep it went. His entire lower body was hanging over the edge, and his weight was supported only by a few fingers of his right hand jammed into the rock.
Fortunately, the section where his upper body lay was a gentle slope. If it hadn't been, he'd already be gone.
I…
Anton admitted he was a little scared. His mind was a mess, and his legs were jelly.
Don't panic, don't panic…
After a brief bit of mental self-coaching, he forced himself to block out the chaos in his head. He stopped looking down, pressed his chest and stomach against the rough, uneven dirt and rock, and began inching his way upward, hands groping for new holds one after another.
Four or five minutes later, after crawling several meters, he finally reached a relatively flat patch.
He sat there for a few minutes, panting and recovering a bit of strength, then sat upright and nervously surveyed his surroundings.
This was a pit. A massive pit.
Just eyeballing it, its diameter had to be several kilometers at least—and he was inside it.
An earthquake?!
Anton scrubbed a hand hard over his face, trying to calm himself down.
It was overcast, but visibility was decent.
Beneath him was a stone pillar made of packed dirt and rock, leaning at an angle against the wall of the pit. He was partway up its slope, half inside the remains of a building.
The wooden house was wrecked, only its roof left, stabbed into the ground at an angle and casting a wedge of shadow. Rotten planks were scattered all around, probably once part of that house.
Looking around, he saw many similar dirt-and-stone pillars nearby, some tall, some short, all oddly shaped. Landslides and collapses were happening here and there at any given moment.
Maybe because of geological differences, other parts of the crater were just as uneven, but most of them were comparatively smoother. The highest points almost reached the rim; the deepest dips were so dark they might as well have had no bottom.
Everywhere he looked within the visible part of the crater there were ruins, shattered buildings, piles of debris, and…more corpses and humanoid monsters than he could possibly count.
Where the hell did I get dropped this time?
Huddling in on himself, Anton shivered. Fear gnawed at him, but his mind was getting sharper by the second.
The pillar beneath him was steep, and huge torrents of water were pouring down from the edge of the crater above like countless waterfalls. Climbing it would be extremely difficult. There were no monsters near here—his side was relatively safe for the moment.
On the far side of the crater, where there was no water washing things away, the slope was gentler. The monsters surging up from the black depths of the pit all chose to climb from there, their figures flickering in and out of view.
Screams, angry shouts, beastly roars…sounds of chaos rang out without end.
Melee weapons…
Both the monsters and the humans were fighting with swords, spears, bows, and crossbows. He didn't see a single firearm. Instead, strange lights of various colors kept flashing around the battlefield.
What is that…?
The distance was too great for him to make out details, but everything about this was wrong. The more he watched, the more out of place he felt.
He lowered his head and checked himself over. The tattered gray robe he was wearing was unfamiliar. So were his hands and his body. Half-long hair, damp with sweat, hung down in front of his eyes—a tea-gray color with a faint silvery sheen.
This is clearly not my body.
He'd transmigrated.
So where am I?
No sooner had the thought formed than a strange image projected itself into his mind:
A silver twenty-sided die spun endlessly in the void. Fragmented memories constantly flew out of it, and a series of slide-show-like memories began to play back.
The body's original owner was named Ansel Holrayven, twenty-one years old, born and raised in the trading city of Baldur's Gate.
When he was little, he'd witnessed the power of arcane magic and had been obsessed with it ever since. But his parents were just ordinary folk. They ran a bakery. They never worried about food or clothing, but they couldn't afford to hire a professional caster to teach him.
When he was sixteen, the Fabian Wizard Tower in the Brampton District started publicly recruiting apprentices. Ansel's parents couldn't wear down his stubbornness, so they spent all their savings to send him in as a magic apprentice.
But a private wizard tower like that existed to make money. Fabian only held class once a week. He'd show up, give a lecture, and leave, not caring in the slightest whether anyone understood.
Ansel's intelligence was just a bit above average. He studied his heart out for five years, burning through dozens of gold coins every year, and in the end only learned two cantrips: Light and Ray of Frost, both from the School of Evocation.
No matter how he tried, he just could not master more difficult cantrips like Mage Hand or Prestidigitation.
Today, Ansel had been in his room as usual, studying arcane theory, when the ground suddenly began to shake. Buildings collapsed around him, and a violent explosion of magical energy ripped through the city. The Eastway District and most of the Brampton District vanished from the surface, leaving behind an irregularly shaped giant crater.
That crater opened straight into the Underdark. Endless underground creatures swarmed into the city to loot and slaughter, and criminals took advantage of the chaos. Baldur's Gate was completely thrown into turmoil.
The wizard tower stood on the rim of the crater, barely avoiding falling in itself. But in the face of this sudden catastrophe, dozens of apprentices panicked.
When they finally found their mentor Fabian in the meditation chamber, blood was streaming from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. He was barely clinging to life. All he managed to say was, "The Weave has collapsed," before he died on the spot.
The Weave…had collapsed. Again.
Everyone in the Realms knew the goddess of magic had always been terribly unlucky. The Weave had collapsed more than once. The Spellplague that struck terror into the hearts of spellcasters had been triggered when Midnight, the third incarnation of the goddess of magic, was assassinated by Cyric, the god of murder.
Judging from this, the fourth goddess of magic was probably gone as well.
While everyone's mentality was imploding and they scrambled in fear, two duergar burst into the tower with a pack of goblins and orc slaves.
The tower was badly damaged and its defensive wards were no longer functioning. The apprentices could only flee on their own.
And human hearts were more dangerous than monsters.
As the apprentices tried to break through the encirclement, the first assistant, Gais, used Mold Earth to shift the tower's foundation. The tower tilted, the edge broke off, and several apprentices—including Ansel—and a number of monsters tumbled into the crater.
Just before he fell, the original Ansel spotted Gais slipping away in the chaos, clutching their mentor's relics to his chest. Ansel cursed him inwardly, but there was nothing he could do.
The good news was, he didn't die from the fall. The bad news was, the duergar that had fallen with him also survived. One of them nailed him with a Mind Spike and then kicked him off the pillar.
The memories cut off there. If nothing unexpected had happened, the original had not survived.
This is…Faerûn, the world of Dungeons & Dragons!
Shock surged through Anton's heart.
It was now the year 1699 by the Dalereckoning calendar, on the 6th day of the Month of Summertide. Over two hundred years had passed since the "Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus" incident in 1492, and more than three hundred years since the Year of Blue Fire, 1385, when the Spellplague had erupted.
In Ansel's memories, one of his ancestors had been moving from Luskan to Elturel and happened to run into the fall of the holy city—Elturel being dragged into Avernus, the first of the Nine Hells.
Fortunately, that ancestor hadn't been in the city at the time and escaped with his life, fleeing along the Chionthar River to Baldur's Gate.
Your luck's a lot worse than your ancestor's, Ansel.
Still, falling into the Underdark was better than falling into the Nine Hells.
Anton muttered inwardly. Since he'd crossed over, he might as well live on properly under this new identity and name.
In his previous life he'd just been a broke office drone with no attachments and no future. Aside from some virtual online entertainment, there really wasn't much to miss.
He shifted his weight a little to ease the stiffness in his body, then looked down at his injured right calf.
The muscle was swollen and purple, but not deformed. His toes and ankle could still move a little.
Doesn't seem like a fracture.
Ansel tilted his head to listen, but the sound of the water was too loud; he couldn't make out anything happening at the top of the pillar.
With the roof blocking the view, the duergar up there probably can't see this spot.
The pillar was steep, and the duergar was injured as well. Even if he noticed Ansel, he likely wouldn't dare climb down.
Once he'd confirmed he wasn't in immediate danger, Ansel focused his attention on the depths of his mind—on that endlessly spinning silver die.
This has to be my cheat, right?
Excitement stirred in his chest. This might be the key to getting out of his current mess.
The die was a standard twenty-sided die, the most common in Dungeons & Dragons. Its entire body was silver, and each face bore a unique symbol—but every one of them was dull and dark.
Ansel tried to touch the die with his thoughts.
A vague stream of information flowed into his heart.