Rain slowly poured onto the ground.
The surroundings were dark, but strangely, it wasn't nighttime; it was high noon.
Why the surroundings were dark was clear if you looked up.
An endlessly stretching grey sky.
But this wasn't caused by clouds heralding a storm.
But by a single spell cast down by an individual, a malevolent god.
It was a sky made of Ash, ashes created from destruction, with the purpose of destruction.
The Ash devoured the world's light as well as its inhabitants' hope.
This was the Abyss.
'A dream?'
Ren stared at the Embered sky and knew where this was instantly, it was a sight he would never miss, not even a drop of nostalgia welled up.
'Heh, it's not like I transmigrated that long ago. I was getting tested by Mr Hale earlier, wasn't I? I must have collapsed from the strain.'
His condition wasn't complicated.
The previous night, he ran until he couldn't, fought against a rank 3 and 2 monster, then used his mana to help Aria soften their drop, and finally used rank 5 mana out of his league to launch a devastating attack.
It was safe to say that he was out of it, whether that be his body or his mind.
'I can't move.'
It became clear that this wasn't a lucid dream due to the fact that he couldn't move.
After a while, the gaze slowly fell.
It seemed he was in a forest with tall dead trees.
Looking down, Ren spotted bare feet with cuts all over. Some were old scars, others were fresh and still bleeding.
The size of the feet indicated that it belonged to a young boy, yet the gauntness of the feet, with skin practically hugging the bones, made it hard to decipher.
At the very bottom of Ren's vision, he found rags that the boy wore; they were mudded and had holes, some patched halfhazardly.
The dust of minerals caked the rags.
The rain that poured slowly was now incessantly tapping the ground.
The boy ignored his bleeding feet; his gaze seemed to be on the rainwater hitting the ground,
As water flowed into the ground, it turned to mud, and the boy's toes wiggled in it, hugging it as if trying to find warmth that wasn't there.
After seeing all of that, it was clear to Ren what this was.
'A dream of my past.'
Ren was born at the Abyss's birth.
At the start of the bad ending.
Since the Ash God won against the hero at the [Edge of the World], they managed to cast a spell that covered the entire world in their [Ash].
The world formerly named Terra was now named the Abyss, its land covered in darkness, and monsters roamed the land in disastrous droves.
For a couple of years, Ren lived with his parents in a village until it was wiped out by a single monster.
Ren managed to escape before he was caught by opportunity seeking bandits who sold him into slavery.
'I didn't have any memories at this time.'
Ren only gained all of his memories of Earth just before he became an adult,
Although fragments came one by one, they were merely flashes of an unknown world, useless to the boy.
So Ren became a slave.
With the darkness of the Abyss, there was a requirement for energy to both grow planets as well as keep civilisation warm.
Artificial sources of light were created, but these tools need power.
Power that came not in the form of electricity like Earth but in the form of mana.
At first, people who could control mana and power the lights helped, yet even they weren't enough to satisfy the needs of the majority who couldn't use mana.
This led them to look for alternatives.
Mana crystals were gathered by killing monsters, but with the death of the hero, most humans gave up living on the surface, hiding and cowering in bastions underground.
Most of the monsters on the surface were way too strong for the average person to fight, even if they could use mana.
The second option was to use mana dense plants, but the light to grow them was gone due to the Ash sky, and the artificial lights used more mana than the plants gave.
So humanity chose the last option, mana stones.
Similar to mana crystals and plants, they held mana in them, which could power the lights in the abyss, and formed in caves that most had now lived in.
But that wasn't what made these stones special.
It was the fact that regular humans who couldn't use mana could also gather it.
It was obvious how it would go.
People who could use mana forced the weak to work for them, whether that be to fill their pockets or to fulfil the mana quota the Bastion's leader gave those with mana.
What could they do? Revolt?
Compared to the superhuman users of mana, ordinary people were just that, ordinary.
Too weak to act, only useful for their purpose of mining stones for their "betters".
Working conditions were far from good.
Inhaling too much of the mana stone's dust overloaded the body with energy it couldn't contain or release.
Although normal humans output mana naturally, most were unable to fully control this aspect of their bodies,
Mana accumulated more than it naturally exited the body, leading many to bleed out and die from Mana overload after years working in the mines.
There were also little to no breaks, just as it was common to die from Mana overload, many died from the supervisors' abuse.
Being whipped was common, but one of the easier punishments.
As the caves around the bastions were emptied of mana stones, they were forced to move to the surface to find other caves.
Humans were used as bait so the other miners could safely move around.
So at the age of 6, Ren became a mining slave whose sole purpose was to toil in the mines and collect stones.
Back in the present, Ren fell into thought while it rained.
'I would never be outside, so this must be just when I escaped.'
The areas that had mana stones were nearest to the surface, where mana was densest,
It may have looked like an easy escape, but with the monsters roaming around, ordinary humans who couldn't use mana would be slaughtered.
So sometimes the bait was used in the form of useless humans or punished ones.
It was a common occurrence for monsters to wander into the caves and massacre the miners.
But Ren survived, though it was with little purpose; he had no hatred towards his slavers, as he didn't even know who they were.
Nor was there hate for the monsters. After years of this, the boy's feelings dulled more and more; monsters were just things to avoid, not fear.
On top of that, he didn't even know his name; all he knew was that by hitting rocks he could see tomorrow, even if it was an awful one.
Maybe a lingering thread of instinct to survive held him together, yet with little knowledge of language or time for thoughts, even Ren himself didn't remember much of his feelings during this time.
But nearly 5 years after becoming a slave, a monster killed everyone in the expedition that he was in.
Could it have been Ren's smarts, small size, or outside help that saved him?
No, of course it wasn't, it was merely dumb luck.
After the monster was about to feast on him, it was attacked by another, allowing Ren to run away while it was distracted.
Step by step, a boy trekked through the mudded ground.
He had been walking for hours, the wobble of his gait an indication of his hunger, exhaustion, and life slowly being chipped away piece by piece.
Eventually, the boy fell with a plop into a muddy puddle.
Ren looked at the puddle, though muddy and murky, he could discern the features of the boy.
Brown, brittle, straw like hair and a pair of brown, lifeless, dull eyes gazed back.
So very ordinary.
The boy's hands moved as Ren spotted the cuts and bruises all over,
Calluses from arduous work were present, and all over, from under the finger nails to the gaps between the fingers, was mana stone dust that couldn't be washed off easily even in the heavy downpour.
The hands moved down cupping murky water as the boy greedily drank before coughing, having swallowed the abrasive dust.
As the boy choked on the water, a movement was heard, causing the boy to pause.
The sound of the wind was loud, and so was the splat every time this creature moved.
He turned, finding himself face to face with a bird.
But it was no ordinary bird, but a monster taller than the trees, its 6 eyes opened, 2 staring at the surroundings while the last 4 stared directly at the boy.
The boy stared back without fear.
But the bird didn't care for that, opening its beak to swallow the young boy and satiate its hunger.
But then slicing was heard, the rain paused, and branches that were swaying in the windy weather stilled.
The bird paused, as did its eyes, not from fear or from surprise.
But because it was dead, its eyes were lifeless and unmoving.