The thick stench of rotting flesh and dried blood was the first thing to hit his senses. It was a harsh, cruel reminder that his jump from the high bridge had been a failure.
Elias felt a crushing weight pressing down on his entire body as he peered into the pitch-black darkness around him. The air he breathed tasted like rust and dirt, making every gasp feel heavier than the last.
He forced his eyes open but couldn't see a thing, so his trembling fingers fumbled around to feel what was pinning him down. The first thing his cold hand brushed against was the tough, lifeless skin of a body that was long gone.
"Even in death, my luck is absolute trash," Elias muttered hoarsely to himself, feeling a sharp pain piercing deep into his chest.
Confusion clouded his mind. His last memory was the freezing wind and the dark river water rushing up to meet him. He had wanted to end all his suffering and ruin with one quick jump to escape his mounting gambling debts. But the quiet end he expected was replaced by a rough, damp mountain of corpses.
He used every ounce of strength he had left to push away the bodies keeping him down. His palms slipped on the slimy liquid coating them as he slowly crawled his way up from the sickening pit.
He heard the crunch of bones grinding against each other with his every move, followed by a searing pain in his back, as if thousands of needles were slicing through his muscles.
His joints trembled violently, and he quickly realized an impossible truth. This wasn't the body of a thirty-four-year-old man. The body his mind was commanding right now was smaller, and it carried a strange weakness he had never felt in his entire life.
A cold breeze brushed against his face as he finally broke free from under the pile of the dead. His lungs greedily sucked in the air, even if it reeked of death, and he slowly opened his eyes to take in his new surroundings.
The light was coming from above, so he looked up at the sky to figure out where he was. What he saw completely shattered his reality. Two moons of different colors hung amidst the dark clouds. One was pale blue, and the other was blood-red. He was no longer in the world he knew.
He looked down at his own body and saw thin arms covered in fresh whip marks. There was a large, skull-shaped burn scarred into his right chest, looking like it had just been branded with a hot iron. Right beneath the searing mark were letters and numbers identifying him as "Number Zero."
The moment he touched the brand, a short burst of memory forced its way into his mind, bringing him to his knees in agony. He saw a lavish, brightly lit hall filled with laughing people watching something in the center. He felt an intense wave of terror as a smiling man in golden armor approached him.
A gleaming dagger was brutally plunged into his heart, and he heard the word "sacrifice" just before the memory went completely dark. This body had been murdered to serve as fuel for someone else's ritual, then tossed into a flesh pit like a losing card.
"They used you to pay for their game," Elias whispered bitterly. His trembling fists clenched tightly as he stared at his own reflection on a dull, discarded blade on the ground. "A cheap coin thrown into the trash after they got what they wanted."
A heavy footstep suddenly broke the deafening silence, making his breath catch in his throat. The terrifying sound came from the darker side of the massive pit, where an even larger pile of rotting bodies lay.
He heard the sound of dripping liquid, followed by a low growl that seemed to come from deep within the throat of a starving beast. He strained his eyes, and a pair of glowing red eyes slowly emerged from the thick shadows.
The light of the two moons revealed a giant, skinless hound. Its bulging muscles were completely exposed, oozing dark blood with every step it took toward him.
Its fangs were as long as daggers, glinting under the dim light as if waiting to sink into his flesh. It was a monster that existed solely to devour the discarded, rotting victims inside this massive dump.
Cold sweat dripped down Elias's forehead as he forced his legs to stand and run. He bolted in the opposite direction, but his feet tripped over the scattered bones buried in the pit's mud.
He scrambled to crawl and regain his balance, but he could already feel the monster's foul, sickening breath on the back of his neck. It was right behind him.
A loud rustle echoed as the beast lunged to end his life with one quick bite. Elias looked back and saw the creature's massive jaws wide open, ready to swallow his neck whole. He had no weapon to grab, and absolutely no physical strength to fight a monster larger than four grown men combined.
In that split second, the world seemed to slow down. The raindrops falling from the sky appeared to stop, and the wind around him paused.
A strange yet familiar feeling suddenly awakened deep within his soul as he stared death in the face. It was the exact same feeling he always got whenever he sat at a table, holding his final bet in a smoky gambling den. A soundless voice echoed in his mind, as if waiting for his answer.
He sensed a mystical scale appear within his consciousness, waiting to be filled. On one side of the scale sat the power he needed to survive. On the other side was an empty space waiting for a heavy price.
Elias's dormant instincts as a seasoned gambler flared up when he felt the weight of the trade demanded in his mind. He had no gold or possessions to his name in this new world. All he had was this borrowed body and a fearless soul willing to gamble everything just so he wouldn't hit rock bottom again.
"I see your hand," Elias shouted fiercely, staring straight into the red eyes of the descending beast. "You don't know how to raise the stakes against a guy who doesn't care if he burns completely."
He placed his mental bet on the invisible scale in his mind, raising his right fist to prepare for an attack. He offered the entire sensation of his left arm as collateral in exchange for the strength to crush the enemy in front of him.
He would give up the ability to feel heat, cold, pain, or any touch on that part of his body for five long years. That was the bet he placed on the open table of this world.
A scorching heat suddenly erupted from his chest the moment the scale accepted his wager. He felt the sensation rapidly drain from his left arm until it felt like a piece of dead wood just hanging from his shoulder.
Along with the heavy toll taken on his body came the power promised by the unseen law. A surge of violent energy rushed down to his right hand, heating up the cold air. His fist began to glow as a blue force gathered, making the raindrops spark around it. He thrust his fist straight toward the open jaws of the lunging beast, which was completely clueless about the deal that was just made.
A deafening explosion shook the entire pit as his fist slammed into the monster's thick skull. Blue flames erupted from his knuckles with the force of a powerful bomb, sinking deep into the creature's head. He heard the sickening crunch of its bones, followed by a high-pitched yelp that was instantly cut short.
The beast's massive body was thrown backwards, crashing heavily onto the pile of corpses and sending a spray of blood into the air. It never moved again. Smoke just continued to rise from its cracked skull.
Elias dropped to his knees, panting heavily as he filled his lungs with air. He stared at the smoke trailing from the right hand he had just used for the successful strike.
He noticed his left arm just hanging uselessly at his side, completely unresponsive to his commands. He pinched it hard with his right hand, but he didn't feel a single ounce of pain even when the skin started to bleed.
A manic laugh slowly escaped his trembling lips as he stared at the beast's dead body. For the first time after a long streak of losing in his old world, he finally won his first fair game.
But his brief moment of victory and the high of his newfound power didn't last.
He felt the ground tremble beneath his feet. It wasn't coming from the dead monster in front of him, but from the mouth of the massive pit far above. His smile vanished as he looked up at the sky, squinting to see what was happening at the edge of the steep cliff.
Three large shadows loomed at the top, holding torches that blazed with a searing green fire. Elias felt a suffocating presence radiating from these figures, making it hard to breathe. It was an energy millions of times stronger than what he had just used, physically crushing the air inside the entire pit.
"Who dares to use magic inside my trash pit?" a cold, arrogant voice echoed from above, shattering the silence of the night.
Following that terrifying question, a familiar object was dropped, landing with a wet thud right at Elias's bloody feet. It rolled in the mud a few times before coming to a dead stop, facing him perfectly.
Elias's eyes widened, and his heart felt like it stopped beating when he recognized what it was. In an instant, all the memories he had desperately tried to escape from his past life came rushing back. These were the exact same memories he thought he had already left behind.
The severed head staring up at him looked exactly like the wife he had left behind in his original world. It had the exact same eyes, the same shape of her lips, and the exact same expression of sheer terror just before she died at the hands of someone else.
As the shock violently rocked his entire being and brought him down to his knees, a deafening sound came from the top of the cliff. He heard the successive clicking of glowing weapons being cocked from above, aiming straight down and waiting to blow a hole through his chest.