Transmigration in Mordor

The roar was deafening, a fury of water and stone that filled the remodeled cavern. Zac approached, his black armor absorbing the faint ambient light, each step heavy on the drenched ground. Where his modest fountain once stood, the Falls of the Night now rose. It was no longer a waterfall, but a titanic curtain of water, a spectral deluge falling from a dizzying height, crashing into the nascent lake with a power that vibrated his bones. He passed his hand through the liquid veil, feeling that cold and spectral familiarity, but on a terrifying scale. On the other side, the skills of Dissonance still shone, a silent and inaccessible promise. He returned to the Night's side and summoned the interface. The letters of light appeared, indifferent to the surrounding chaos.

[Falls of the Night]

[Tears of Regret: 1381]

[Coward's Stealth: 0/1000]

[Healing Stagnation: 0/1000]

[Forge of Brutality: 0/1000]

[Echo of Ungoliant: 250,000,000]

[Echo Distillation: 700%]

[Song of the Ainur: 5,000,983 / 999,999,999]

Zac stood frozen, breathless, not from fear, but from a cold stupor. The numbers danced before his eyes, symbols charged with a crushing weight. 'One thousand three hundred and eighty-one tears.' He pondered their meaning. The weight of every regret, every death, every failure, every moment of terror and despair, distilled into a single number. It was the quantifiable sum of his suffering. Then his gaze slid lower. 'Two hundred and fifty million echoes.' The price of two fallen gods, the soul of a primordial monstrosity and a Maia spirit, transformed into fuel for his damnation. He felt the weight of these annihilated lives, a burden added to his own corruption. He was progressing, yes, but each step forward was a deeper descent into the abyss.

Then, a new detail caught his attention, a subtlety that changed everything. "/1000". A limit. An end. The game had just revealed one of its most fundamental rules. Every skill had a cap. And with over a thousand tears at his disposal, he now had the power to achieve perfection in the path of his choosing. Only one at a time, but absolute perfection. A new wave of potential power washed over him, mingled with an icy wariness. In this world, was perfection a reward or another form of torture?

He had to know. Every advantage was crucial to surviving this cursed quest. He spent the long following days in a rigorous cycle of experimentation. He would train, allocating all of his tears to a single skill, testing its limits, then returning to the waterfall to reset and start over with the next. It was a scientific study of his own soul, a cold dissection of his weaknesses.

[Coward's Stealth: 1000/1000]

The first transformation was subtle. By allocating the thousand tears, he didn't feel a surge of power, but an erasure. The world seemed to lose its color, the sounds becoming muffled. He left the sanctuary and entered a tunnel. He wasn't hiding. He was walking. And the creatures ignored him. A spider passed a meter away from him, its glassy eyes looking through his silhouette as if he were just air. He was literally invisible, undetectable. The absolute master of concealment. But the jubilation was short-lived. He tried to pick up a stone, and his hand passed through it. He tried to punch a wall, and his fist sank into it without a sound, without an impact. His stealth was no longer a choice. His body was beginning to "dissolve," to lose its substance, to become a ghost in his own prison. He was condemned to the eternal isolation he had so desperately sought through his cowardice. 'The punishment for my cowardice,' he understood with an icy horror, 'is not death, but oblivion. To become a shadow so perfect that nothing can touch it, and it can touch nothing in return.'

[Healing Stagnation: 1000/1000]

The second experiment was even more perverse. He allocated the thousand tears to healing. Then, he let himself be wounded by a mutant spider. The wound closed almost before it was fully open. His healing ability had become quasi-divine. The slightest moment of immobility, and his body regenerated at a blinding speed. But when he wanted to return to the fight, a searing pain shot through him. A tearing sensation, as if his muscles, his tendons, his bones, in love with stillness, were protesting against movement. Action became agony. Regeneration had become a physical addiction, a drug. The system forced him to choose: the suffering of combat, or the "peace" of stagnation. 'The punishment for my passivity,' he thought, wincing in pain, 'is to become a slave to inaction. My body, from now on, seeks the rest that my soul once desired.'

[Forge of Brutality: 1000/1000]

The final experiment was the most terrifying. He felt the power surge through him, a wave of pure rage that made his Balrog armor tremble. He went out and stood before a massive rock pillar. Without thinking, he struck. His fist went through the stone as if it were made of sand. He became an instrument of pure destruction. Every blow from Morngul had the force of a Balrog, every movement was an explosion of violence. But looking at his hands, he saw that his skin had hardened, taking on the texture of obsidian. His features, he could feel, were twisting into a bestial mask. And his mind... his mind was emptying. He no longer felt fear, or sadness, or even joy. Only a cold fury or an abyssal void. He was no longer a man who fought. He was a monster who destroyed. 'The punishment for choosing violence,' he realized, looking at his distorted reflection in a puddle of water, 'is to know nothing else. To become the incarnation of the blind rage I had to embrace to survive.'

He returned to the sanctuary, his mind clearer than ever. He took stock, standing in the midst of the ruins, clad in the armor of a demon, wielding a cursed blade. He understood now. Perfection was the ultimate trap. Each skill, pushed to its extreme, was a cage perfectly suited to his sin. It was all a question of balance. A perverse, sadistic balance, but a balance nonetheless.

Great power inflicted great suffering. And in this world, it seemed he could only choose the form of his own damnation.