Uh?
Where am I?
Sunny opened his eyes, but there was no sense of waking up.
One moment he had been collapsing onto the cold tiled floor of the Sector 25 police precinct, and the next, a bitter, knife-like draft was ripping through his lungs.
He stood atop the jagged ridge of a towering summit.
Above him, the sky was a bruised, oppressive gray, strangled by heavy storm clouds.
Weak, sickly afternoon light filtered through the fractures in the overcast sky, casting pale silver reflections across a landscape blanketed in fresh, untouched snow.
A few paces away, a shallow pond lay completely frozen, its surface smooth as polished glass under the winter gale.
The freezing air bit into Sunny’s skin with cruel intensity, but before he could even process the sudden change in temperature, an overwhelming sense of wrongness gripped his chest.
Instinct forced him to turn around, glancing back along the narrow mountain cliff to see where the path led.
His breath caught in his throat.
Scattered across the snow behind him lay dozens of human skeletons.
They were half-buried in drift snow, their bleach-white ribs and hollow skulls peeking out like ghastly remnants of a forgotten slaughter.
Tattered, filthy rags—bleached of color by time and frost—hung loosely over their brittle frames.
Heavy, rusted iron shackles bound their wristbones together, connected in a continuous, agonizing chain that stretched down the snowy ledge until it vanished into the distance.
Were they… slaves?
Sunny thought, his heart hammering a violent rhythm against his ribs.
Is this what remains of a massacre?
Or did they simply collapse from exhaustion and freeze to death right where they stood?
Before his mind could formulate an answer, the world around him warped.
The snowflakes dusting the frozen ground suddenly stopped moving.
A heartbeat later, instead of falling from the heavens, the white flakes began to defy gravity—rising slowly off the snowdrifts, floating upward toward the sky in absolute silence.
Wait…
Time is flowing in reverse?!
Sunny screamed in his mind, his vision swimming with sudden disorientation.
He jerked his head skyward.
The sun, which had been sinking toward the western horizon, accelerated rapidly across the sky like a streaking ember.
Day blurred into night within seconds; the pale afternoon vanished, replaced by a swift, blinding arc of the moon before the sun surged back up from the horizon.
The temporal rubber-banding was nauseating.
Entire cycles of light and shadow whipped past his eyes in a dizzying frenzy, rewinding the history of the mountain peak before his very eyes.
The flesh returned to the bones.
The rust dissolved from the iron.
The snow retreated and fell again in rhythmic, reversed pulses.
And then, with the suddenness of a physical impact, the temporal storm snapped back into real-time.
The noon sun burned brightly overhead, its glare reflected blindingly off the icy trail.
Sunny stumbled as a crushing weight instantly materialized on his wrists.
Clang!
“What—?! Shackles?!” he gasped aloud.
He snapped his head down.
Heavy, coarse iron cuffs were locked tightly around his pale wrists, the metal so frigid it burned his bare skin.
A thick, rusted iron chain extended from his left shackle, leading forward to the man ahead of him, and another chain snaked backward from his right wrist, connecting him to a long, miserable line of bound figures.
Sunny looked down at his own chest.
His dirty, oversized hoodie and dark trousers were gone.
In their place, he wore nothing more than a thin, threadbare tunic made of coarse, scratchy burlap that did virtually nothing to keep out the biting alpine wind.
He glanced up and down the line.
Dozens of men and women were marching in a slow, agonizing procession, all wearing the exact same tattered rags he had just seen on the skeletons moments before.
Hmm… so it’s a slave caravan, Sunny analyzed, his cold, calculating street instincts instantly taking over the panic.
The Nightmare Spell didn’t just drop me into a random location.
It cast me into a specific historical scenario… a dream recreation of the past.
The caravan was trudging down a narrow, treacherous forest path choked with frost-laden pines and hidden ice patches.
Flanking the line of slaves were several heavily armed guards mounted on muscular, shaggy mountain horses.
The guards were encased in thick iron plate armor, their faces hidden behind dark, visored helmets that reflected the pale sunlight.
They rode in eerie, unbroken silence, their hands resting lazily on the pommels of heavy broadswords strapped to their saddles.
No one spoke.
The only sounds in the frozen pass were the crunching of boots on hard-packed snow, the rhythmic clinking of iron chains, and the ragged, shallow breathing of starving human beings.
As Sunny continued to march, adjusting to the rhythm of the chain, a translucent band of glowing golden text materialized directly in his field of vision.
[Attribute: Fated]
[Attribute Description: The threads of fate are—]
Before Sunny could read the full description, a weak, rasping moan shattered the silence from directly behind him.
“Water… please… water…”
Sunny glanced back over his shoulder.
The voice belonged to a young man chained right behind him.
Despite the dirt caked onto his face, his dark, messy hair, and his hollowed cheeks, he possessed remarkably refined features—a handsome face that looked entirely out of place among a line of dying commoners.
Before Sunny could process the young man’s condition, another voice hissed low from further down the chain.
“Don’t moan, you fool!” whispered an older slave chained behind the handsome youth.
“Keep your head down and shut your mouth, or they’ll kill you right where you stand!”
The handsome slave instantly shut his jaw, his shoulders trembling in pain.
His skin was tight, dry, and heavily wrinkled—not from age, as he looked no older than thirty or thirty-five, but from severe dehydration, malnutrition, and relentless overwork.
Sunny stared at them for a fraction of a second, his expression unreadable, before casually turning his eyes back to the icy trail ahead.
Not my problem, Sunny thought coldly.
In a place like this, sympathy is a luxury that gets you buried in the snow.
They marched for hours as afternoon arrived.
The harsh sunlight shifted, melting into a deep, blood-orange glow that painted the snow-covered pines in shades of rust and fire.
By now, Sunny’s throat felt like sandpaper.
His lungs burned with every breath, and a deep, agonizing thirst was clawing at his insides.
Up ahead, one of the armored guards riding alongside the line pulled a heavy leather water skin from his saddle, unstoppered it, and took a long, greedy gulp, letting a few precious drops spill down his iron chin-guard.
Driven by pure survival instinct and an utter lack of shame, Sunny spoke up.
“Hey! Give me some water!” Sunny demanded, his voice raspy but surprisingly direct as he addressed the mounted guard.
The guard jolted slightly, mid-swallow.
Slowly, still clutching the leather water sack in his gauntleted hand, the guard turned his head toward Sunny.
Behind the narrow slits of his dark iron visor, a pair of cold, dark, and utterly merciless eyes locked onto the small, ragged boy.
A heavy, suffocation-inducing pressure filled the air as the guard lowered the water skin.
“What did you say?” the guard asked, his voice dripping with lethal disdain.