Though fatigue numbed his muscles, the pain in his back and the cold in his bones were not the worst. The worst was knowing where he was.
Knowing where they were taking him, and what he knew wasn't something pleasant or even humanly describable.
He needed no more confirmation; his suspicions had been confirmed by the words of the slave he had spoken with.
The Black Mountains were a mountain range that was covered for most of the year by an incessant and merciless cold that affected everyone without exception. The icy wind roared among the crags.
The smell of iron and blood could be detected with enormous clarity on the white desert. The caravan advanced slowly. Since it was a heavily traveled route, it was cleared of any surrounding monsters, making it a safe path.
However, this only made Elpis more nervous, which was natural in his situation. After all, he was inside his own novel: the world of The Ascension of the Blood and Iron Hero.
And he was not the protagonist, a knight, or even a normal person with no outstanding talent. He was a slave. A waste of society, another victim sent to die in a place forgotten by the gods.
Soon dawn arrived, pale and gray, and the caravan resumed its march. Elpis felt every step like knives on the soles of his feet, but he walked. The thin leather boots did nothing to protect his feet.
Elpis was sure that if he stopped or drew attention again like the day before, he would receive another lash on his back, and he was sure this time he wouldn't be able to get up.
They walked for hours, without words. The soldiers shouted orders, the horses snorted clouds of vapor, and the slaves marched with their faces down.
Only at noon, when the caravan stopped to water the animals, the corpulent slave from the previous day spoke:
"Boy..."he muttered. "Do you know anything about what awaits us?"
Elpis did not respond immediately. His eyes were fixed on the horizon.
Beyond the mountains, the sky seemed tinged with a dull gray that brought an even stronger wind. Elpis identified it as a snowstorm.
"Death Zone," he replied after looking away from the horizon.
The man let out a bitter laugh. "So you've heard stories..." he said with amusement.
Elpis smiled bitterly. He couldn't help it. After all, he was the one who had written those terrifying stories about the Death Zone.
He knew exactly what awaited them once they reached that place. He only knew when you entered; you never knew if you could ever escape.
---
Death Zones were not common places. They weren't simple forests with wolves or hills with bandits. They were entire regions where monsters multiplied, where the entire ecosystem seemed built to destroy living beings regardless of race.
There, predators had no balance. There, the rules of nature were distorted, so much so that even insects could end the bravest of warriors. There were creatures with claws that could pierce armor. Beasts that could smell fear. Beings that hunted in packs or alone. Intelligent beings. Hungry beings.
And most importantly: the more monsters died, the more arrived and multiplied. It was as if the world, like a wounded organism, reacted by creating more beasts. An endless plague.
That's why the kingdoms had stopped sending armies to deal with the Death Zones. "It was useless," naturally, that was the thought that kings or city lords had regarding the Death Zones. They only sent waste: criminals, slaves, people no one would miss. Like him, whose parents sold him as a slave for a few coins.
They were locked in walled cities, surrounded by walls of stone and iron. They were called walled city, black fortress, bastion of the damned. The names didn't matter. What mattered was that no one who entered left the same.
"Participate in campaigns," a character in his novel had once explained. "Survive long enough... and you earn freedom." That's what the law said. That's what the whole continent repeated.
After all, he was the one who had written the data, who calculated the statistics to make it realistic: Ninety percent died in the first year. Ninety. Barely ten percent survived long enough to even adapt. And of that ten percent, only a tiny fraction ever received clemency. It was the cruelest lie on the continent. The promise of freedom was a noose around the neck.
Elpis swallowed. He had thought the idea was good when he implemented it in his story to build up the world and its complexities—zones full of fear, death, and mysteries. Now, inside that world, it didn't seem so brilliant, especially when his own life depended on a small, insignificant thread that could snap at any moment.
But Elpis had a small hope in his heart: the clans that formed inside the Walled City. They were survivors who banded together, creating groups or factions that fought against the monsters. Depending on which faction you joined within a Walled City, you could survive for a longer or shorter time.
Elpis had designed several groups. In the Western Continent, where he currently was, there were only five Death Zones. One of them was the Death Zone located near the Black Mountains, where he had written a complete arc in which the main character infiltrated to obtain information about one of the antagonists who possessed a technique that affected his powers as a hero.
After infiltrating, he had to choose among the five clans he had created:
· Black Wolves.
· Red Blades.
· Steel Lance.
· Empty Hand.
· The Wanderers.
Each with its own fighting style, rules, and hierarchy that its members had to follow. Most were brutal. Almost all practiced a kind of extreme natural selection. To join, you had to prove you were worth something. Otherwise, you were used as bait.
Elpis lowered his gaze. His scrawny body, his bony hands, his ragged clothes... Who would accept him? No one. He was, like many there, cannon fodder. The most accurate term for someone like him would be a Cockroach.
As they advanced, Elpis remembered details. Death Zones arose where the world's energy overflowed. A natural phenomenon no one understood. They could be in forests, swamps, mountains, deserts. The most famous was the one in the Black Mountains. No one knew its origin. The wise spoke of dimensional rifts. The religious of divine punishments. The soldiers said it was just death.
The truth was that, day after day, the monsters reproduced, grew, evolved. The weakest died. The strongest survived. And then, they attacked. That's why the kingdoms were forced to create fortified cities. Not to conquer the zones, but to contain them. So that death would not descend upon the civilized world. If a Death Zone was not eliminated or contained, it would continually expand, covering more and more territory, until it engulfed civilization.
Every six months, caravans like this one delivered reinforcements—hundreds of slaves who would serve as cannon fodder to contain the Death Zones.
Elpis felt nauseous. When he had written it, it seemed logical. He needed a brutal element. Something to make the world a hostile, dark, and bloody place. So that the hero could shine with his strength and will. However, no one thought about the extras or the background characters who died far from the spotlight. Elpis felt a wave of guilt. He had never really stopped to think about the background characters. Now that he was one of them, he felt an uncomfortable sensation in his chest. Guilt? Maybe. He really didn't know.
The caravan made its last stop for the night. Only about two kilometers of travel remained to reach the Walled City and be welcomed into his hell.
He would have to survive and earn his freedom—if he survived long enough or found a clan outside of the five main clans of the Walled City. Each was embroiled in its own territorial dispute, and Elpis didn't want that. He was already scared enough by the idea of fighting monsters and abominable creatures, let alone fighting other humans, criminals though they may be.
When night covered the world, and after being fed another piece of moldy bread, Elpis decided to sleep a little. He hadn't been able to sleep since he had transmigrated as a slave.
Tomorrow, he would have to focus on just one thing: surviving, and nothing more. Everything else was irrelevant.