"Why is it suddenly so hot, and why is the air so heavy? This cacophony of metal clashing against the wall... why do my legs feel so heavy? Calm down, is there something squeezing my ankles? Such pain in my lungs, is this how a smoker feels?"
"WAIT, where am I?" Following this thought, a piercing pain appeared at the back of his head, followed by a dump of information that shouldn't be there.
While this was happening, a small boy with visible bones fell to the ground, not attracting much attention, since scattered throughout this dimly lit cave—where a few torches flickered in the shadows—lay various bodies. Some still had a faint, barely noticeable breath, while others were in a state of decomposition or mere bones, in unpleasant positions, as if they were a warning to those who still held remnants of thoughts of freedom.
After a few hours, the overseer—a tall, muscular man with a ponytail, a sword at his waist, and a whip in his hands—arrived at Bifurcation 9, where the weakest and sickest slaves were placed to mine and perhaps die of exhaustion, to stop being a burden to the lord.
Upon smelling the rotten scent coming from the bifurcation, he became extremely stressed. Disgust and wrath appeared in his gaze, thinking about the reasons why he now had to work in this damn stinking place.
Upon entering that dimly lit place, he began to crack the whip against the walls while walking slowly. All the slaves in the bifurcation dropped their tools to the ground and began to shrink into the corners, trembling, and some even crying, as if they were hearing the sound of death speaking in their ears.
"Don't cry, he'll get even more excited if he sees you crying," said an old man to the children beside him. This old man, with little hair on his head and a scar that covered his left eye and descended to his mouth, was already used to this life of slavery; he had already seen more deaths than sunny days in his life.
The children covered their mouths in a last attempt not to let the sounds of crying escape, so that perhaps the overseer wouldn't direct his sadism at them, but rather at the bodies still breathing on the ground.
Seeing several slaves thrown across the ground, the overseer couldn't help but let out a hot huff and say: "To think that we feed these animals and give them a place to sleep, and yet you still want to rest during working hours?"
When he finished this sentence, he approached the first body and looked with a gaze of contempt at the man on the ground, who was struggling to breathe with severe signs of starvation, to the level where his ribs were more prominent than anything else on his body. A brute-force kick came in the direction of those thin ribs, and the sound of something breaking was heard.
"Ah!" A painful scream came from the body that had been kicked to the side of the mine like a stone in the path of a cart.
"To think that just a light touch could break the ribs of this lazybones," said the overseer, as if what he had done was nothing major and the slave was just being dramatic.
After that scream, which seemed to pin the souls of those around, those on the ground began to crawl to lean against the wall, so they wouldn't be the next to suffer at the hands of this devil disguised as a human being.
The young man who had previously fainted woke up with a sharp headache but with his thoughts more aligned than when he had passed out. "Damn, to think I would transmigrate precisely into the body of a slave. Couldn't it be like in the novels where the protagonist goes into the body of a young master who is treated like trash? At least I would have something to eat."
While he thought, he dragged himself as best he could to the corner, seeking to hide as much as possible. He looked at the whip of that repugnant being, and with a simple glance, he shivered, and flashes of his memory came to his mind. He had been sold as a slave at 7 years old to pay his parents' debts, and since then had been working in various jobs. When he was younger, he was only in charge of washing shoes and delivering small things, but a childish mistake made him end up in this mine.
As the child he was, he liked to play and adventure. One day he took advantage of being asked to fetch water from the creek and jumped in to swim. But, by unhappy coincidence, one of the lord's daughters was playing in the creek. What came of this was a long beating that left him with various scars and led him to stay days lying down recovering. And after that? He ended up in this mine at just 11 years old.
The already slender body of a child with a lack of food and brutal labor couldn't take it and ended up dying of exhaustion. And in that moment when the child's 'soul' left the body, the young man who was in his world ended up, who knows how, being brought into this body.
The overseer, seeing that everyone else had dragged themselves to the corners, became slightly discouraged, thinking that his moment to vent his bad energy would have to wait, since there were no more slaves lying on the floor. "Tsk, filthy worms, get up from the ground and start walking in a line. If anyone stops walking, don't blame me for striking you."
Everyone began to get up little by little and walk feebly; those who couldn't dragged themselves on the ground, not without taking a lash on the back first, to the joy of the brute who let out increasingly pleasurable laughs. Our young transmigrator got up and walked heavily; in front of him, a man with a hunchback dragged his feet, unable to even lift his legs to walk normally.
In a moment of inattention, the hunchback ended up tripping over a stone, which caused him to fall. Not even a few seconds passed, and a whistle came along with the sound of a rope hitting flesh, followed by a painful scream. The blood that came out with the lash flew onto the young man's face, who stood petrified. With the hot liquid on his face, he wiped his skin with difficulty using the back of his hand.
In that moment, he realized it was truly real. It wasn't possible to have such a sensation in a dream the heat, the viscosity of the hot blood on his skin, the screams, wails, and murmurs.
"I am fucked."