Through the haze of half-consciousness, a sudden plunge into weightlessness jolted him awake.

An Yi's body tensed on instinct. In his panic, the fingers of his right hand caught in a crack. The handhold steadied him, and at last he stopped sliding.

"Whew—"

He let out a heavy breath, instinctively thinking he had nearly fallen out of bed again.

But rushing water thundered in his ears. The cold, damp wind carried a clinging, fishy stench, and his right leg hurt so badly that it felt as if a dog had torn away a chunk of flesh.

Something was wrong!

His eyes snapped open. He turned his head, and the sight before him made his scalp prickle.

A pitch-black abyss yawned beneath his feet, its depth impossible to judge. His lower body hung completely over the edge, held in place by nothing but the fingers of his right hand.

Fortunately, his upper body lay on a gentle incline. Otherwise, he would already have fallen.

'I...'

An Yi could admit it: he was scared. His thoughts were a mess, and his legs had gone weak.

'Don't panic. Don't panic...'

After a moment spent forcing himself under control, he pushed the panic aside and carefully turned his head away from the drop. With his chest and stomach pressed to the uneven earth and stone, he searched for one handhold after another and inched upward.

Four or five minutes later, after crawling several meters, he finally reached a relatively level area.

He spent a few minutes catching his breath and recovering some strength, then sat up and nervously surveyed his surroundings.

This was a crater—a gigantic crater!

It looked at least several kilometers across, and he was inside it!

'An earthquake?!'

An Yi scrubbed his face hard, forcing himself to calm down.

The sky was overcast, but visibility was still decent.

Beneath him stood a pillar of earth and stone that leaned against the crater wall. He was halfway up its slope, inside the remains of a ruined house.

The wooden house was in tatters. Only part of the roof remained, jutting diagonally into the ground and sheltering a patch of shadow. Broken boards lay scattered all around, perhaps remnants of the house.

Looking around, he saw many similar pillars nearby. They rose to different heights, each twisted into a strange shape. A landslide or collapse could happen at any moment.

Perhaps because of differences in the geology, the rest of the enormous crater was just as uneven but generally more gradual. Its highest points nearly reached the rim, while its lowest hollows disappeared into lightless depths.

Everywhere he could see, the crater was strewn with ruined buildings and debris, along with... more corpses and humanoid monsters than he could count!

'Where the hell did I end up?'

An Yi hunched in on himself. Panic still churned inside him, but his thoughts were growing clearer.

The pillar beneath him was extremely steep. Great streams of water poured over the crater's rim like a series of waterfalls, making the slope extraordinarily difficult to climb. No monsters had come this way, so he was safe for the moment.

No water scoured the far end of the crater, where the slope was gentler. The monsters emerging from the darkness below were all charging up that side, their figures barely visible in the distance.

Screams, furious shouts, and roars rang out one after another.

'Cold weapons!'

Both monsters and humans were fighting almost entirely with blades, swords, bows, and crossbows. He saw no firearms. Instead, strange lights of various colors flashed from time to time.

'What was that?'

It was too far away for him to make out any details, but everything was far too strange. An uneasy feeling stirred within An Yi.

He looked down at himself. The tattered gray robe was unfamiliar, as were his hands and body. Sweat-matted, shoulder-length hair hung before his eyes, tea-gray with a silvery sheen.

'This isn't my body!'

He had transmigrated!

'Where is this place?'

No sooner had the thought arisen than a peculiar image appeared in his mind.

A silver twenty-sided die spun without end, casting out fragments of memory. Scenes from another life began to flash past like slides.

The body's original owner was Anser Holrevin, twenty-one years old and a lifelong resident of Baldur's Gate, the City of Trade.

After witnessing the power of the arcane arts as a child, he had become obsessed with magic. His parents, however, were ordinary people who ran a bakery. They lived comfortably enough, but they could not afford to hire a classed individual to teach him.

When Anser was sixteen, Fabian's wizard tower in Brampton publicly recruited apprentices. Unable to change his mind, his parents spent all their savings to send him there, making him a wizard apprentice.

But private wizard towers existed to make money. Fabian taught only once a week and left as soon as the lesson ended, without caring whether his students had understood a word.

The original Anser was only slightly more intelligent than an ordinary person. After five grueling years and dozens of gold pieces in annual expenses, he had learned just two cantrips: Light and Ray of Frost, both from the School of Evocation.

No matter how hard he tried, he could never master more difficult cantrips such as Mage Hand or Prestidigitation.

Today, Anser had been studying arcane lore in his room as usual when the earth suddenly convulsed. Buildings collapsed amid a violent explosion of magical energy, and Eastway along with most of Brampton vanished from the surface, leaving an irregular crater behind.

The crater opened into the Underdark. Countless subterranean creatures flooded into the city to pillage and kill, while criminals took advantage of the chaos. All of Baldur's Gate was in turmoil.

The wizard tower stood at the crater's edge and had narrowly avoided falling in, but the sudden disaster sent its dozens of apprentices into a panic.

They found their master, Fabian, in the meditation chamber, bleeding from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth and already at death's door. He managed to say only, "The Weave collapsed," before dropping dead on the spot.

The Weave... had collapsed again!

As everyone knew, the Goddess of Magic had always been plagued by disaster, and this was not the first time the Weave had collapsed. The Spellplague—a name that made every spellcaster shudder—had begun when Cyric, the God of Murder, assassinated Midnight, the third Goddess of Magic.

Judging by the current situation, the fourth Goddess of Magic was probably gone too.

Just as everyone was losing their heads, two duergar stormed the wizard tower with a group of goblin and orc slaves.

The badly damaged tower had lost its defenses, leaving the apprentices no choice but to flee for their lives.

But human hearts could be more treacherous than monsters.

As the apprentices tried to break through the encirclement, Gass, the first assistant, used Mold Earth to destabilize the wizard tower. The tower tilted and its outer edge collapsed, sending several apprentices—Anser among them—and a number of monsters tumbling into the crater.

Before he fell, the original Anser saw Gass escape amid the chaos with their master's belongings clutched to his chest. Anser hated him for it, but there was nothing he could do.

The good news was that the fall had not killed him. The bad news was that a duergar who fell with him had also survived, hit him with a Mind Spike, and kicked him off the pillar.

The memories ended abruptly there. Unless something unexpected had happened, the original owner had failed to hold on and croaked.

'This is actually Faerûn from Dungeons & Dragons!' An Yi thought in shock.

It was now July 6 in the month of Flamerule, 1699 DR—more than two hundred years after the events of Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus in 1492, and more than three centuries after the Spellplague began in the Year of Blue Fire, 1385 DR.

According to Anser's memories, one of his ancestors had moved from Luskan to Elturel just as the holy city fell and was dragged into Avernus, the first layer of the Nine Hells.

Fortunately, his ancestor had not been inside the city at the time. He narrowly escaped death and fled along the River Chionthar to Baldur's Gate.

'Your luck was much worse than your ancestor's, Anser.'

Still, falling into the Underdark was better than falling into the Nine Hells.

An Yi couldn't resist the thought. Since he had transmigrated, he would make the most of his new identity and name—and build a good life for himself.

In his previous life, he had been nothing more than a miserable wage slave with no ties, no money, and no future. Apart from all that virtual entertainment online, there truly was nothing he missed.

He shifted to loosen his stiff body, then examined his injured right calf.

The muscles were swollen and purple but not deformed, and he could still move his toes and ankle slightly.

'Probably not broken.'

Anser listened carefully, but the water was too loud for him to hear anything happening at the top of the pillar.

'With the roof hiding me, the duergar up there probably can't see this spot.'

The pillar was steep, and the duergar was injured as well. Even if it discovered him, it probably would not dare climb down.

After confirming that his life was not in immediate danger, Anser focused his attention deep within his mind, on the endlessly spinning silver die.

'This must be my cheat ability.'

Excitement surged through him. This might be his way out of the current predicament.

The die was the most common kind used in Dungeons & Dragons: a twenty-sided die. It was silver throughout, and each of its faces bore a unique symbol, though every symbol was gray and unlit.

Anser tried touching the die with his mind. A vague piece of information entered his awareness.

Additional Notes:

1. This story takes place on the continent of Faerûn. By the time the protagonist arrives, the timeline has advanced two hundred years. Much has changed with the passage of time, so the setting can be regarded as partially alternate.

2. This book primarily uses D&D 5R lore while incorporating some elements from 5E and 3R. Rulebooks are designed to serve tabletop play, so a small amount of original material has been added for realism and logical consistency.

You do not need to understand D&D to read this book. Necessary lore will be introduced when needed; please consult the supplementary material for detailed explanations.

3. In Dungeons & Dragons, "mage" and "wizard" are equivalent. In Common, they are the same word, referring to arcane spellcasters who acquire their spellcasting ability through study.

4. In D&D, the Chinese term used here means "goblin." Goblins comprise many different groups; the alternative Chinese name is simply a transliteration of the English word Goblin.

Hobgoblins and bugbears are cousins of goblins, and all of them are goblinoids.

5. Baldur's Gate 3 takes place in 1492 DR. In 1494 DR, Elturel fell into the Nine Hells and was forced to take part in the Blood War.

This book will occasionally mention that event, but the early story will not involve Outer Planes such as the Nine Hells, the Abyss, or Mount Celestia.

(End of Chapter)