’This is getting repetitive’ thought Tristan wryly.
Turns out getting knocked unconscious twice in one day was somehow less dignified than getting chained to a platform in the first place.
Who knew.
He didn’t even get the courtesy of an explanation this time. One moment the guards were hauling him off the platform, chains still rattling around his wrists, and the next, something hard connected with the back of his skull.
***
Pain came first.
A dull, pulsing throb radiating out from the base of his skull, so heavy it seemed to press down on the inside of his eyes. Tristan lay still for a long moment, letting it wash over him in slow, nauseating waves before he risked opening his eyes at all.
Stone.
Cold, damp stone pressed against his back, seeping through what little padding a thin cot offered. Somewhere beyond his vision, water dripped in a slow, uneven rhythm, and the air itself tasted stale, old, recycled and thick with the smell of rust and something faintly metallic underneath it that he didn’t want to think too hard about.
He tried to sit up.
The chain caught him first.
It snapped taut the instant he shifted, yanking his ankles back down before he’d risen more than a few inches. Shackles bound both his ankles together, then looped through a second length of chain anchored into the wall behind him.
Tristan sat with that for a moment, breathing through the throb in his skull.
In front of him stood a row of vertical iron bars, the kind he’d have recognized as a jail cell back on Earth without a second thought, each one spaced only a few inches from the next, close enough that nothing bigger than a hand could slip through. Beyond them, nothing. No guards in sight. No maid, either.
’Alright,’ he thought, forcing himself upright despite the protest from both his skull and his ankles. ’Let’s figure out exactly what I’m dealing with.’
Torchlight flickered somewhere down the corridor beyond the bars, throwing long, restless shadows across the walls of his cell. The construction around him wasn’t crude. If anything, it was eerily precise, every stone fitted flush against the next, without a single crack or seam out of place.
That, more than anything, told him this wasn’t simply a holding cell for troublesome relatives.
He kept staring at the stonework, turning that thought over, and the answer came to him slowly, memory surfacing sluggish and half-formed.
’Damn headache isn’t making this any easier,’ Tristan thought, wincing as he tried to push past the throb still hammering behind his skull to chase the rest of it down.
Beneath the Verneuil estate lay a rift. A pocket of raw, wild essence that had bled into the surrounding stone over the course of centuries, seeding an entire ecosystem beneath the family’s feet, monsters that fed on the essence and grew stronger for it, and artifacts that formed in its wake, remnants soaked so thoroughly in power that they carried abilities of their own. A living vein of resources, sealed beneath land that belonged to the Verneuils and no one else.
It wasn’t an exaggeration to say the dungeon was the reason this family had any power worth speaking of. Everything else, the estate, the influence, the golden-eyed bloodline everyone whispered about, was built on what crawled and glimmered in the dark beneath it.
"And these damn sickos decided to trap their own son down here," Tristan muttered, voice flat with disbelief, the sound of it swallowed almost instantly by the surrounding stone. "If this is tough love, I really wish they’d get rid of the tough part."
Tristan’s cell sat on the second level.
The second level held the prisoners, cells carved in long rows into the stone, most of them occupied by people whose cores sat roughly where his own should have been, had he possessed one at all. Guards passed through on patrol, their footsteps and torchlight marking a rhythm Tristan didn’t know yet, but fully intended to learn.
Not exactly a fortress. But not nothing, either.
The real obstacle lay above.
To reach the surface, a person would first have to cross the first level, and the first level wasn’t lined with cells. It was populated by monsters, drawn to the rift’s essence and left to grow there, roughly matched in strength to whatever unfortunate souls happened to be locked away below. Less a defense, in truth, than a filter. Anyone weak enough to end up chained in these cells was, by design, also weak enough to struggle against what waited one floor up.
Tristan let his head fall back against the stone, the throb behind his skull flaring in dull protest at the movement.
’So. To get out of here, I’d need to survive a floor of monsters strong enough to unsettle actual prisoners, using a body that can’t touch its own core, and then somehow slip past guards stationed specifically because someone already thought of this exact plan.’
He closed his eyes, chains cold and heavy around his ankles, the darkness of the cell pressing in close.
Tristan’s mind raced, working overtime to find some way, any way, to break free. It came up empty.
"This is so stupid," he muttered, dragging both hands down his face. "I transmigrate, and this is what I get for it. Chained. In a cage. Fantastic."
He let the silence sit for a moment, listening to the slow drip of water somewhere down the corridor, the distant scrape of something moving in a cell far off to his left.
A soft, cold breeze brushed against his face. Tristan’s head jerked up, curiosity cutting through the headache as he pushed himself upright, trying to place where it had come from.
Then, all at once, the torches down the corridor guttered out.
Every single one. Simultaneously. As if something unseen had reached out and pinched each flame between invisible fingers.
Darkness swallowed the cell whole.
Tristan’s pulse spiked, some deep, wordless instinct insisting that darkness this sudden, this total, was never a good sign.
A heartbeat later, the dark split open.
Not gently. A seam of light split somewhere directly above his skull, spilling out a pale, faintly wrong light that pooled downward in a narrow column, less like it was illuminating the cell and more like it was cutting a hole straight through it.
Tristan didn’t move. Couldn’t.
Somewhere in the fog of his memory, one fact surfaced.
This was supposed to have happened a year ago. It never had.
’This... doesn’t make sense,’ was the last coherent thought he managed, before the light reached him and everything went white.