Rain in Seoul had a smell.
It was like wet asphalt and Old concrete.
Jin-Ho knew it well. After all he walked through it every night.
This morning was no different, just another Tuesday for him. Fourteen hours at the warehouse had done its usual damage. His back felt like someone had replaced his spine with a bent metal rod, and his legs moved purely out of habit His hands, rough and permanently stained with shipping-label ink, stayed buried in his jacket pockets as he dragged himself home.
Home, in his case, meant a moldy one-room apartment that smelled faintly of damp walls and instant ramen. Yes, it wasn't much, but it was at least rent free..
Since his grandfather died, Jin-Ho had basically faded out of existence.
The old man had been the only one who ever gave a damn about him. The only family he had left in this world. But cancer doesn't care if the person is good or bad. When it happened all Jin-Ho could do was watch as his grandpa died slowly and painfully right in front of him. It was very creul, not just for his grandpa, but also for him. And after his death, all Jin-Ho inherited was the hospital bills and the moldy apartment.
Since then his life ran on a simple loop: work, sleep, and repeat. The minimum wage he gets barely covers his food cost after paying off the debt's. Lets not forget the loneliness. Sometimes it felt so heavy it sat on his chest like an actual weight.
"Just one more year," he muttered, as he was walking home, his breath puffing white in the cold. "One more year of this garbage, and I'm free."
Free to do what exactly? He had no clue. But it sounded hopeful enough to him to keep walking home everyday after this bonebreaking work repeatedly.
Then he heard someone scream.
The sound came from a narrow alley squeezed between two decaying office buildings. It was very sharp and panicked.
Jin-Ho stopped walking.
He stood there and thought about what should he do. He really, really didn't want to get involved.
'Not my problem', the tired part of his brain said. 'Plus what would I even do if I go there? That feels like trouble. And trouble is the last thing I need right now. Right?' He started to convince himself really hard.
He took half a step forward.
Then his grandfather's voice popped into his head, uninvited and annoying as ever.
"Being a man isn't about how much you have," the old guy used to say. "It's about what you do when someone else needs something from you."
Jin-Ho sighed.
"Yeah… figures."
He changed his mind. Just like that. He turned into the alley.
There he saw three guys and one girl.
The girl was pressed against the brick wall, her eyes wide and unfocused like a deer about to get hit by a truck. One of the guy had her arms pinned up. Another was already pulling duct tape from his pocket.
That was it. Something snapped in Jin-Ho's mind.
It wasn't bravery. It wasn't hero instincts.
It was rage.
Pure, ugly anger from years of swallowing everything life threw at him. Jin-Ho usually ignored crime stories on TV, but this, this kind of thing always hit a nerve. He hated people like this. Always had been. Men who treated women like objects felt like animals to him.
And seeing this happening right in front of him made his blood boil.
No plan. No weapon. He just charged.
The sound he made barely sounded human when he slammed into the nearest guy. The alleyway exploded into chaos, curses, fists flying. Jin-Ho caught a punch to the jaw that rattled his skull, but the adrenaline inside him didn't care.
"Run!" he shouted, shoving the girl toward the street. His voice cracked as he yelled again. "Go! Now!"
She stumbled forward almost tripping. She was sobbing, rain and tears were blurring her vision.
And that's where everything went wrong.
In the caos of fighting and shouting, soaked with rain and panic, she didn't see a rescuer when Jin-ho charged at her kidnappers. She just saw a large figure lunging at her.
When Jin-Ho reached out to steady her after he punched one of the guys, her hand flashed from her pocket.
She didn't think. Because she was stabbing whatever was in front of her.
The knife slid in clean, right between Jin-Ho's ribs.
He froze.
The knife sucked the air out of his lungs in one silent gasp. His strength vanished instantly. The girl stared at his face, her eyes finally focusing as a streetlamp illuminated his face.
She saw the blood coming out of his chest. It was too much. Like a faucet in the bathroom was opened at full speed.
She saw his expression. Which was pure confusion. Like his world has been turned upside down because of her.
"Oh my god…oh god…I'm sorry. I didn't mean..." Her voice spiraled into panic. "I'm sorry, I didn't see…"
Jin-Ho couldn't hear her properly because his hearing got muted for some reason when she stabbed him with the knife. Before he could hear her properly he saw her running. She ran away before he could say something to her.
Her footsteps splashed through puddles, getting farther and farther away leaving him behind with the three thugs.
Jin-Ho slid down the wall and collapsed. He pressed his hand to his side, but his fingers felt useless. Warm liquid leaked out of him fast, making his body cold and stiff.
'Wow', he thought hazily as he watched the thugs starting to stand up again. 'So, This is how I go? No heroic ending? No reward? Not even a thank-you? '
Jin-Ho looked up at the guy, who just stood up and was staring at his chest with a fear in his face unlike before.
Then his senses started to stop working one by one before he could ask for help. First his vision got blurry, then his feeling of touch got dulled. Finally everything went quiet.
He closed his eyes. As if he could just take a nap and wake up in his bed as usual. But that didn't happen. He really died, just like that.
**********
Time didn't exist in the void, where he was in.
It was like floating in a thick, endless sea of ink. There was no body for him to feel, no eyes to see. For the first time in years, the crushing loneliness of Jin-Ho's life didn't hurt him.
Why would it? There was no "Jin-Ho" left to feel it. In here he was just a speck of consciousness in a silent universe.
After drifting around in this emptiness for god knows how long, the peace finally shattered all of sudden. Jin-Ho can't tell exactly how or why. It just happened on it's own.
CRASH.
He felt like being thrown out of a moving vehicle. Everything slammed back into him at once, sensory overload so great that made his brain feel like it was melting.
The first thing he felt was the cold. It wasn't the chilly rain of Seoul; it was an ancient, damp cold that seemed to seep straight into his soul. Then came the smell. It was a putrid, suffocating soup of unwashed bodies, stale urine, and the scent of sweat, all at once.
CLANK.
A sudden, violent jerk at his throat made him gag.
Jin-Ho's eyes snapped open. He immediately tried to sit up, but a sharp, biting pain in his neck forced him to back down.
He was in a nightmare.
The room, if you could call it that, was a cavernous, dripping cell of rough-hewn stone. The only light came from a single, flickering torch mounted far down a damp corridor. He was chained to a wall, his wrists held by rusted iron shackles that looked like they hadn't been unlocked in decades.
"Ugh..." he tried to speak, but his voice was a ruined rasp.
He looked at his hands. They were pale, unnaturally so, and his fingers were long and slender, which wasn't supposed to be. But they were covered in a layer of filth so thick it looked like a second skin. He looked down at his body. He was wearing nothing but a few strips of greyed, moth-eaten rags.
To his left and right, other figures were slumped in the wall. They were the walking dead. Six of them, chained to the wall like some kind of cattle. Their skin had a strange, translucent quality, a sickly grey-blue that made them look like ghosts. One woman, barely a few feet away, was leaning against the stone, her eyes were closed. Her ragged shirt had torn completely at the seams, leaving one of her breasts exposed, pale, bruised, and heaving with every shallow breath.
Nobody looked at her. Nobody moved to cover her. As if in here modesty had been traded for the simple, agonizing struggle to draw the next breath.
Jin-Ho's heart hammered against his ribs. He reached up, his fingers brushing the place where the knife had entered his chest.
There was Nothing.
His chest skin was smooth. Not even a scar remained.
His breath hitched. He looked at the prisoner to his right. The man's head was bowed, but as he shifted, Jin-Ho saw it.
A long, tapered, elegant ear, much like the ears he had seen only in TV's.
'Elves?'
'I spent two years jerking off in a moldy apartment because I had nobody,' he thought, the bitterness of his previous life mixing with the horror of the present. 'I finally tried to be a hero… and the girl I saved killed me? And this, this is what I get? Getting reincarnated to some kind of budget LORD OF THE RINGS setting?! For real? Inside an Elf jail?'
He let his head fall back against the freezing stone wall. The spiked collar bit into his throat, like a constant reminder of his status.
"You're not even being creative, you bastard Universe," he whispered to the dark. "You're just being mean."
The moment the words left his lips, a chime rang out. It wasn't a sound from the dungeon he was in, it was a strange kind of sound that resonated inside his mind.
A flicker of blue light ignited in the air in front of him. Transparent words, shimmering with a faint hum, materialized in front of his vision.
{WELCOME TO ELANDOR}
{RACE: HIGH ELF (BLOODLINE TRAIT ACTIVATED)}
{STATUS: ENSLAVED / MANA SUPPRESSION}
"Whoa. Whoahhh, what the fuck is this?!" Jin-Ho breathed hard with shock, his eyes widened seeing the blue colored screen in front of him.
The screen stayed there, tethered to his field of vision. It wasn't a hallucination. It felt more real than the stone wall behind him. He reached out a hand, but his fingers passed straight through the light.
"What the fuck is this Elandor?"he muttered, his voice echoing slightly in the damp cell.
The silence of the cell was shattered. Every head in the room snapped toward him. The prisoners, who had looked like corpses only moments ago, were now staring at him with a mixture of shock and pure, unadulterated terror.
'Opps.'
'Maybe I shouldn't have said that out loud.' Jin-ho thought while covering his mouth.
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