The first thing Mateus felt was cold.
Not the cold of a winter morning or a marble floor — the cold of somewhere underground, somewhere the sun had never reached. It moved through his back and up his spine before he even opened his eyes, introducing itself the way bad news does: slowly, then all at once.
He opened his eyes.
Stone ceiling. Rough-cut, not worked. Roots growing through cracks above his head, pale and dry as old thread. A smell of damp and something older than damp, something mineral and vaguely organic that he had no name for.
He sat up.
That was the second thing: the body. His hands were wrong — or not wrong, just different. Slightly longer fingers. Calluses in different places. When he pressed his palm to the stone it felt real, which meant this wasn't a dream, which meant something had happened that he didn't have a framework for yet.
He filed that away and kept moving. Panic was a luxury he couldn't afford until he knew what he was dealing with.
He stood. The room was small — four meters across, maybe five. Stone walls on three sides, a narrow archway on the fourth. Through the arch: a corridor, lightless. Beside him on the floor was a body.
Not his body. Someone else's. Male, roughly his age, dressed in rough brown cloth, already stiff. There was a gash across the throat — clean, deep, professional. Whatever killed him had done it quickly and known what it was doing.
Mateus looked at the body for a long moment.
Then he looked at the archway.
Then he looked at his hands again, and noticed for the first time that they were trembling slightly, and told them to stop, and mostly they did.
Alright, he thought. Different world. Probably. Body that isn't mine. Dead person. Underground. No weapons, no food, no information.
He patted down the dead man's clothes — not callous, just practical. The man was past caring. He found a short knife in a belt loop, flat and single-edged, the kind used for skinning or cutting rope. He took it.
He moved toward the archway.
The corridor smelled worse than the room. Whatever was rotting in the dark ahead, it had been rotting for a while. Mateus pressed his back to the wall and moved by feel, knife out, breathing through his mouth.
He got thirty meters before the light started.
Not torchlight — something biological. Faint blue-green patches on the walls, bioluminescent moss or fungus, just enough to make shapes out of. The corridor widened. Branched. He chose left because left had marginally more light and in the absence of information, marginally was everything.
He was halfway through a larger chamber when the text appeared.
Not on a wall. Not projected from anywhere. Directly in his vision, overlaid on the real world like a notification on a phone screen, except he had no phone and this was not a phone screen. The letters were white and slightly too sharp, the kind of sharp that suggests something doing its best to render in a medium it wasn't designed for.
◈ SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE ◈
Host detected. Cognitive baseline established.
Welcome, Mateus Carvalho.
You are not where you were.
[TUTORIAL QUEST — ACTIVE]Exit the Hollow. Survive.
Reward: 50 XP / System access granted.Penalty for failure: DEATH (permanent)
He stared at it.
Of course, he thought. A system. Obviously.
He'd read enough to know the shape of this. Transported to another world, mysterious power, leveling mechanics. He'd consumed thousands of hours of this genre in his old life because it was escapism, because when your actual life is managing a knee that aches in cold weather and a bank account that aches all the time, you read about people becoming powerful and you feel something adjacent to hope.
He had never once thought he would be standing in the dark, actually living it, holding a dead man's knife, looking at a floating notification.
It was considerably less exciting than he'd expected.
He dismissed the window with a mental push — that worked, which told him something about how the interface functioned — and kept moving.
He needed to get out first. He could have an existential crisis later, at ground level, in daylight, ideally with food.