In a haze, a sudden sensation of weightlessness swept over him.
An Yi jolted awake. His body instinctively tensed and strained. In a panic, his right hand clamped onto a crack, giving him a foothold. At last, he regained his balance and stopped sliding.
"Whew—"
He let out a heavy breath, instinctively thinking he'd nearly fallen off the edge of his bed again.
But the roar of rushing water filled his ears. The damp, cold wind carried a fishy stench, thick and cloying. His right leg felt as if a dog had bitten off a chunk of flesh, and the pain made him wince.
Something was wrong!
He snapped his eyes open and turned his head. The sight before him made his scalp tingle.
A pitch-black abyss yawned below his feet. He couldn't tell how deep it was. His lower body dangled over the edge, his entire weight supported by a few fingers of his right hand.
Fortunately, the slope beneath his upper body was gentle. Otherwise, he would surely have fallen.
"I..."
An Yi admitted that he was a little scared. His mind was in a jumble, and his legs felt weak.
Don't panic, don't panic...
After a little reassurance, he cleared his mind and slowly turned his head away from the drop. Pressing his chest and stomach against the uneven earth and rock, he took turns searching for handholds and slowly wriggled upward.
Four or five minutes later, he'd crawled several meters and finally reached a relatively flat area.
After catching his breath for a few minutes and regaining some strength, he sat up and nervously surveyed his surroundings.
He was in a pit—a giant pit!
It looked to be at least several kilometers across, and he was inside it!
"Was there an earthquake?!"
An Yi vigorously rubbed his face, trying to calm himself down.
The sky was overcast, but visibility was decent.
Beneath him was a pillar of earth and stone leaning against the pit wall. He was inside a partially collapsed house halfway up the slope.
The wooden house was in ruins. Only its roof remained, jutting diagonally into the ground and casting a patch of shadow. Broken planks were scattered all around, perhaps remnants of the house.
He looked around. There were many pillars of earth and stone nearby, some tall, some short, all oddly shaped. Landslides and collapses were happening constantly.
Perhaps because of differences in the terrain, other parts of the giant pit were also uneven, but most of them were relatively gentle. Some rose almost to the rim, while others descended into darkness.
As far as he could see, the pit was strewn with ruined buildings and debris, as well as... countless corpses and humanoid monsters!
"Where the hell am I?"
An Yi huddled in on himself, fear rising in his heart, yet his mind grew clearer by the moment.
The pillar beneath him was steep, and torrents of water poured down from above the giant pit, forming one waterfall after another. Climbing would be extremely difficult. No monsters had come this way, so he was safe for now.
The far end of the pit wasn't being washed by the water, and its slope was gentler. The monsters emerging from the darkness at the bottom of the pit had all chosen to charge up there. He could make out their indistinct shapes.
Screams, angry shouts, roars... One followed another without pause.
"Melee weapons!"
Nearly all the monsters and humans were fighting with swords, bows, and crossbows. He saw no firearms, but strange, multicolored lights flashed from time to time.
"What's that?"
It was too far away to make out the details, but everything was so strange that An Yi felt a growing sense of unease.
He looked down at himself. The tattered gray robe was unfamiliar. So were his hands and body. His shoulder-length hair, damp with sweat, hung in front of his eyes. It was a silvery ash-brown.
This clearly isn't me!
He'd been transported to another world!
"Where is this?"
The thought had barely crossed his mind when a strange image suddenly appeared in his mind:
A silver D20 spun endlessly, flinging out fragments of memories. His memories began to flash back like slides.
The original owner was named Anser Horleywen. He was twenty-one years old and had lived in the trade capital of Baldur's Gate since childhood.
As a child, he'd witnessed the power of the Art and become obsessed with magic. However, both his parents were ordinary people who ran a bakery. They had enough to eat, but couldn't afford to hire a Professional to teach him.
When he was sixteen, Fabian's Mage Tower in the Brampton District openly recruited apprentices. Anser's parents couldn't talk him out of it, so they spent all their savings to send him there to become a Magic Initiate.
But private Mage Towers existed to make money. Fabian only held class once a week, then left as soon as the lesson was over, without caring whether anyone understood him.
The original owner was only a little smarter than an ordinary person. He studied hard for five years, spending dozens of Gold Coins each year, and learned just two Cantrips: Light Spell and Freezing Ray. Both were Evocation spells.
He simply couldn't learn more difficult Cantrips like Mage Hand or Prestidigitation, no matter how hard he tried.
Today, Anser had been studying arcane knowledge in his room as usual when the earth suddenly trembled. Buildings collapsed, and a violent Eldritch Blast erupted. The East District and more than half of the Brampton District vanished beneath the ground, leaving an irregular giant pit in their place.
The giant pit connected to the Underdark. Countless subterranean creatures poured into the city, looting and killing, while lawless ruffians seized the chance to cause trouble. All of Baldur's Gate had descended into chaos.
The Mage Tower stood at the edge of the giant pit and had barely avoided falling in. But faced with the sudden disaster, dozens of apprentices panicked.
When everyone found their mentor, Fabian, in the Meditation Room, blood was pouring from his eyes, nose, and mouth, and he was on the verge of death. He said just one thing—"The Weave has collapsed"—and died on the spot.
The Weave... had collapsed again!
As everyone knew, the Goddess of Magic had always been beset by misfortune, and the Weave had collapsed more than once. The Arcane Blight, also known as the Magic Plague, which had terrified spellcasters, had been caused by the assassination of Midnight, the third Goddess of Magic, at the hands of Cyric, the God of Murder.
Judging by the situation, it seemed the fourth Goddess of Magic had probably met her end as well.
Just as everyone was losing their minds and panicking, two Gray Dwarves stormed into the Mage Tower with a group of Goblins and Orc Slaves.
The Mage Tower was badly damaged and could no longer provide any protection. The apprentices had no choice but to flee on their own.
But people's hearts could be more vicious than monsters.
As the apprentices tried to break through the encirclement, the first Assistant Teacher, Gais, used Mold Earth to destabilize the Mage Tower. The tower tilted, and its edge crumbled. Anser and several other apprentices, along with some monsters, fell into the giant pit.
Before he fell, the original owner had seen Gais take advantage of the chaos to escape, carrying their mentor's belongings in his arms. He'd seethed with hatred, but there was nothing he could do.
The good news was that he hadn't died from the fall. The bad news was that one of the Gray Dwarves who'd fallen with him had survived too. It hit him with a Mind Flayer and kicked him off the pillar.
The memories ended there. The original owner probably hadn't made it. He was dead.
"This place... is actually Faerûn, from Dungeons & Dragons!" An Yi was stunned.
It was now the sixth day of the Month of Summer Tides, in the year 1699 Dalereckoning. More than two hundred years had passed since the events of Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus in 1492, and more than three hundred years since the Year of the Blue Fire in 1385, when the Arcane Blight occurred.
In Anser's memories, one of his ancestors had moved from Luskan to Elturel and happened to be there when the Holy City fell. Elturel had been dragged into Avernus, the first layer of the Nine Hells.
Fortunately, his ancestor hadn't been in the city at the time. He'd escaped death by sheer luck, fled along the Chongsa River, and eventually reached Baldur's Gate.
"Your luck is nowhere near as good as your ancestor's, Anser."
Still, falling into the Underdark was much better than falling into the Nine Hells.
An Yi made a quiet, sardonic remark to himself. Since he'd been transported to another world, he would live on under his new identity and name.
In his previous life, he'd been nothing but a miserable wage slave, with no ties, no prospects, and no money. Apart from the virtual entertainment online, there really wasn't much he'd miss.
He shifted his body to ease its stiffness, then looked at his injured right calf.
The muscle was swollen and purple, but it wasn't deformed. He could still move his toes and ankle a little.
"It probably isn't broken."
Anser listened carefully, but the roar of the water was too loud for him to hear anything happening atop the pillar.
"With the roof covering me, the Gray Dwarf on the pillar shouldn't be able to see me here."
The pillar was steep, and the Gray Dwarf was injured too. Even if it spotted him, it probably wouldn't dare climb down.
After confirming that his life wasn't in immediate danger, he focused his attention on the depths of his mind, on the endlessly spinning Silver Die.
This is my cheat, right?
His heart lifted. This might be the key to escaping his predicament.
The die was the most common kind of D20 in the rules of Dungeons & Dragons. It was silver all over, and each face bore a special symbol, but all of them were dim and lifeless.
Anser tried to touch the die with his mind. A vague message entered his thoughts.