Dex imagined the dark cell awaiting him, damp and reeking of death. He imagined the faces of prisoners deformed by crime until they resembled demons of hell, and he imagined the terrifying, metallic sound of the massive iron doors slamming shut behind him, announcing the end of his life and the beginning of his eternal nightmare.
Dex felt the coldness of the hard plastic seat pierce his thin trousers to touch his skin, and a wave of nausea wrung his empty stomach. His hands were shaking violently and involuntarily. He tried desperately to hide this humiliating tremor from the eyes of the guards and the other prisoners by clenching his hands tightly and pulling on the shackles, which only increased the friction of the iron against his skin, causing thin trails of warm blood to run down his wrists. "Will I get out of there alive?" he asked himself with fatal despair. "And when those doors open after twenty long years... who will I be? I'll be a broken man, a forty-year-old ghost with a hunched back and empty eyes, with no family waiting for him, no dream to pursue, and not a single beautiful memory to comfort his loneliness."
The bus was drowned in a suffocating silence, a sticky quiet broken only by the rough sound of the diesel engine, the friction of the worn tires against the wet asphalt, and the muffled, intermittent groans of a few prisoners who had just realized the reality of their fate.
Sitting beside him on the same double seat was an old prisoner. The old man looked as though he had been carved from eroded gray stone. His massive hands were covered in a complex web of faded tattoos that told stories of violence and blood, and his hair was as gray and filthy as an old shroud exhumed from a grave. The old man slowly turned his head and looked at Dex with a gaze completely devoid of any human emotion... no pity, no malice, no anger. A gaze as cold as the eyes of a dead fish, the look of someone who had spent his life watching dozens of terrified young men like Dex enter this concrete tomb trembling like autumn leaves.
"Don't look outside, boy," the old man said suddenly, in a deep, hoarse voice that sounded like two dry stones grinding together at the bottom of a cave. "The outside... the world you see behind that glass... it doesn't belong to you anymore. That version of you is dead. Learn to love the dark walls, learn to talk to the cold stones... because they are the only things, and the only friends, that will keep you company from now on until this place spits you out as a lifeless corpse."
Dex tried to ignore the old man's harsh words and looked away, but those words buried themselves in his heart like poisoned daggers. The bus was moving further and further away from the gloomy city lights, away from the smell of fresh bread baking in the morning, away from the bustling markets, the innocent laughter of children, and the feel of dewy grass under bare feet. With every extra mile that armored bus covered in that treacherous, rainy weather, Dex physically felt a bright, beautiful part of his soul being ripped out and slowly dying.
Suddenly, the driver slammed on the brakes, and the bus stopped with a violent jolt that threw the prisoners' heads forward.
Dex raised his dizzy head to see, through the fogged windshield, the sight that would be burned into his memory forever. There, amidst the fog of the isolated hills, stood towering concrete walls, black as coal, topped with complex layers and coils of electrified barbed wire that sparked and hummed faintly beneath the raindrops. It was the fortress of absolute despair. And with terrifying slowness, the great steel doors of the prison began to open, emitting a sharp mechanical screech like the cry of a tortured soul being dragged into the abyss.
In that defining moment, beneath the gaze of that terrifying structure, something strange and radical happened deep within Dex. The paralyzing terror wringing his heart, and the chaotic anger blinding him, suddenly stopped boiling. They began to harden, turning into a kind of absolute "stillness." Burning ice.
Dex realized, in a harsh awakening of his consciousness, one indisputable truth: crying would not save him from the fangs of the rapists and murderers inside, and screaming his innocence would not make these steel doors open for him to return home. The laws of the outside world, morality, justice... all of it was worthless nonsense behind this wall. If he wanted to survive, if he wanted to live to see the sun again after twenty years to take revenge on his tormentors, he had to perform a conscious, decisive act: he had to kill the "innocent boy" crying inside him with his own hands. He had to bury his naive dreams beneath the mud of this rain, and replace them with a heart of cruel black stone, and a mind of calm, calculated fire.
"I won't let them break me," Dex whispered to himself in a low voice only he could hear, his hot tears mixing with the cold raindrops that leaked from a crack in the dilapidated bus roof to fall on his face. "I won't be the prey... I will be the monster the monsters fear. I will learn how to read their intentions in their eyes, how to fight like a cornered demon, how to deceive the most hardened criminals, and how to turn my anger from a fire that burns me into a cold blade to cut the throats of those who stand in my way."
That rainy, gloomy day in the old world, in front of those steel gates, was the true day "Dex the Prisoner" was born, the ruthless, genius persona who learned how to read shadows, how to analyze the guards' movements before they made them, and how to turn every pain and every insult into pure energy for survival. That day, with all its terrifying details, was the true beginning of everything he is now in this magical world full of monsters and gods.