In a daze, a sensation of weightlessness struck without warning.
Ethan jolted violently, his body tensing by instinct as he exerted force. In his panic, his right hand hooked into a crevice. With a point to brace against, his body finally regained balance and stopped sliding downward.
"Hah—"
He let out a heavy breath, subconsciously thinking that he had almost fallen off the edge of the bed again.
But a thunderous rush of water filled his ears. The damp, cold wind carried a fishy stench, thick and cloying. His right leg felt as if a chunk of flesh had been torn off by a dog, the pain making his body spasm uncontrollably.
Something was wrong!
He snapped his eyes open and turned his head to the side. The sight before him made his scalp go numb.
Beneath his feet was a pitch-black abyss, its depth impossible to discern. His lower body was hanging out over the void, his entire weight supported only by a few fingers of his right hand anchoring him in place.
Fortunately, the surface where his upper body lay was a gentle slope—otherwise, he would have fallen for sure.
"I…"
Ethan admitted to himself that he was scared. His mind was in chaos, and his legs felt weak.
Don't panic. Don't panic…
After doing a bit of mental preparation, he forced aside the distracting thoughts. Slowly, he turned his head away, refusing to look down. Pressing his chest and abdomen tightly against the uneven dirt and stone, he alternated his hands to search for points of support, inching upward little by little.
Four or five minutes passed. After crawling several meters, he finally reached a relatively flat area.
He panted for a few minutes to recover some strength, then sat up and nervously surveyed his surroundings.
This was a pit—a gigantic pit!
By visual estimate, its diameter was at least several kilometers, and he was right inside it!
"An earthquake?!"
Ethan rubbed his face hard, forcing himself to calm down.
It was overcast now, but visibility was still acceptable.
Beneath his feet was a pillar of earth and stone, leaning diagonally against the wall of the pit. He himself was halfway up the slope, inside the remains of a half-collapsed shack.
The wooden structure was utterly ruined. Only the roof remained, slanted and stabbed into the ground, casting a patch of shadow. Large amounts of broken planks were scattered around—perhaps once parts of the house.
Looking around, there were many earth-and-stone pillars like this nearby, some tall, some short, grotesquely shaped. Landslides and collapses were happening at any moment.
Perhaps due to geological differences, although other parts of the massive pit were likewise uneven, most areas were relatively gentle—some rising close to the rim of the pit, others sinking into darkness so deep it was impossible to see the bottom.
Looking out, everywhere within the pit that the naked eye could see was filled with ruined buildings and debris, and… countless corpses and humanoid monsters you couldn't even begin to count!
"Where the hell did this drop me?"
Ethan drew his body in, panic rising in his chest, yet his mind grew clearer and clearer.
The stone pillar beneath his feet was very steep. Massive torrents of water poured down from above the gigantic pit, like waterfall after waterfall. Climbing would be extremely difficult. No monsters came to this side, so it was temporarily safe.
In the far end of the massive pit, there was no water washing through. The slope there was gentler. Those monsters that charged out from the darkness at the bottom of the pit all chose to rush up the massive pit from that side, their figures indistinct and flickering.
Screams, furious shouts, roars… came one after another without end.
"Cold steel!"
Whether monsters or humans, nearly all of them were fighting with blades, swords, bows, and crossbows. He didn't see firearms. Instead, from time to time, strange lights and shadows of various colors flashed.
"What is that?"
It was too far away to make out details, but everything was too bizarre, and a sense of unease rose in Ethan's heart.
He lowered his head to examine himself. The tattered gray robe was unfamiliar. His hands and body were the same. Half-long hair, sticky with sweat, hung in front of his eyes—it was a tea-gray color that carried a silvery sheen.
"This clearly isn't me!"
He had transmigrated!
"Where is this?"
The thought had barely arisen when a peculiar image suddenly projected into his mind:
A silver twenty-sided die spun without stopping, and fragmented memory shards were continuously thrown out from within it. Like a slideshow, memories began to flash back.
The original owner was named Anser Holrewen, 21 years old this year, and had lived since childhood in the trade city of Baldur's Gate.
After witnessing the power of arcana in his early years, he pursued magic with a near-maddened obsession. However, his parents were both ordinary people. They ran a bakery; they never lacked food or clothing, but they could not afford to hire a professional to teach him.
When he was sixteen, Fabian's Mage Tower in the Brampton District publicly recruited apprentices. Anser's parents could not argue him out of it, and they spent all their savings to send him in, where he became a magic apprentice.
But a private mage tower existed purely to rake in money. Fabian only held class once a week; after finishing, he would leave, not caring at all whether you understood it or not.
The original owner's intelligence was only slightly above that of an ordinary person. After studying painstakingly for five years and spending dozens of gold coins each year, he had learned only two cantrips: Light and Ray of Frost, both spells of the Evocation school.
Cantrips with higher difficulty, such as Mage Hand and Prestidigitation, he simply could not learn no matter what.
Today, Anser was staying in his room as usual, studying arcane knowledge, when suddenly the ground trembled violently. Buildings collapsed as houses crumbled, accompanied by a fierce explosion of magical energy. The Eastway District and more than half of the Brampton District vanished from the surface, leaving behind an irregular gigantic pit.
The massive pit connected to the Underdark. Countless subterranean creatures surged into the city, looting and slaughtering, while lawless elements took advantage of the chaos to wreak havoc. Baldur's Gate fell completely into disorder.
The mage tower stood at the edge of the gigantic pit, narrowly avoiding falling in. Yet faced with the sudden upheaval, dozens of apprentices panicked.
When everyone found their mentor Fabian in the meditation chamber, blood was flowing from his facial features. He was on his last breath and said only one sentence—"The Weave has collapsed"—before dying on the spot.
The Weave… had collapsed again!
As everyone knew, the Goddess of Magic had always been plagued by disasters, and the collapse of the Weave had happened more than once. The arcane catastrophe that struck terror into the hearts of spellcasters—the Spellplague—had been caused by the third-generation Goddess of Magic, Midnight, being assassinated by the god of murder, Cyric.
Now it seemed that the fourth-generation Goddess of Magic was probably gone as well.
Just as everyone's mentality shattered and panic spread, two duergar charged into the mage tower, leading a group of goblin and orc slaves.
The mage tower was badly damaged and no longer possessed defensive capability. The apprentices could only flee for their lives individually.
But the human heart was more treacherous than monsters.
When the apprentices tried to break through the encirclement, the first assistant instructor, Gais, used Mold Earth to destabilize the mage tower's center of gravity. The tower tilted, its edge collapsed, and multiple apprentices—including Anser—fell into the gigantic pit along with the monsters.
Before falling, the original owner saw Gais escape amid the chaos, clutching the mentor's relics in his arms. Hatred surged in his heart, yet there was nothing he could do.
The good news was that he did not die from the fall. The bad news was that the duergar who fell with him did not die either. It gifted him a Mind Spike and then kicked him off the stone pillar.
The memories ended abruptly there. If nothing unexpected had happened, the original owner had not made it through—he was dead.
"This place… is actually the continent of Faerûn from Dungeons & Dragons!" Ethan was shocked to the core.
It was now the 6th day of the 7th month, the Month of Summerflame, in the Year of the Valley's Cleared Lands 1699. More than two hundred years had passed since the events of Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus (1492), and more than three hundred years since the Year of Blue Fire, 1385, when the Spellplague occurred.
In Anser's memories, when one of his ancestors moved from Luskan to Elturel, he had happened to encounter the Fall of the Holy City, when Elturel was dragged into Avernus, the first layer of the Nine Hells.
Fortunately, that ancestor had not been in the city at the time and narrowly escaped death, fleeing along the Chionthar River to Baldur's Gate.
"Your luck is far worse than that of your ancestor, Anser."
Still, falling into the Underdark was far better than falling into the Nine Hells.
Ethan mocked himself silently. Since he had transmigrated, he would live properly under a new identity and a new name.
In his previous life, he had been nothing more than a miserable wage slave, with no ties and no future. Apart from virtual online entertainment, there was indeed nothing worth lingering over.
He shifted his body to ease some of the stiffness, then looked at his injured right calf.
The muscle was swollen and bruised purple, but there was no deformation. His toes and ankle could still move slightly.
"Probably not a fracture."
Anser tilted his ear to listen, but the sound of rushing water was too loud, and he could not hear any movement from the top of the stone pillar.
"With the roof providing cover, the duergar on the stone pillar probably can't see this place."
The stone pillar was very steep, and the duergar was injured as well. Even if it discovered him, it likely would not dare to come down.
After confirming that there was no immediate threat to his life, he immediately focused his attention deep within his mind—on that endlessly spinning silver die.
"This must be my cheat."
Excitement rose in his heart. This might be the key to breaking out of the current predicament.
The die was the most common twenty-sided die in Dungeons & Dragons rules. It was entirely silver, with a special symbol engraved on each face, yet all of them were dim and without light.
Anser tried to touch the die with his thoughts, and a vague stream of information was transmitted into his mind.