M.D. Baxter

Auden Rourke is a localized healer struggling to survive in a metropolis on the brink. When a sudden, system-enacted catastrophe obliterates his district and claims the life of Mavis—the one person he swore an oath to protect—Auden is fundamentally transformed. Reawakening to a harsh new LitRPG reality, he discovers that death is no longer the end, but a transaction: every respawn strips away a piece of his memory. Bound by his final promise to Mavis and haunted by a profound failure in his past, Auden refuses to stall. Forced to navigate a collapsed, brutal urban wasteland where rival survivors hoard territory, he must creatively weaponize his healing abilities to turn exhaustion and recovery into lethal tools. With every dangerous confrontation and calculated death, he trades his own history for the power to forge a safe haven. But as the system’s memory toll chips away at who he is, Auden must race to fulfill his broken oath before he forgets why he ever cared in the first place.

The System isn't a god. It's a bleeding, broken piece of code left to rot in the ruins of an old empire, and right now, it’s scheduling the entire city for a catastrophic purge.

Sayruqa doesn't have a flashy combat class or an over-tuned stat sheet. In a crumbling metropolis where everyone else relies on brute-force System menus to survive, he’s a Knot-Crafter—an interpreter of physical string-data that modern users dismiss as illiterate superstition. But when a fourteen-day countdown to a zone-wide incineration sparks to life in the sky, brute force isn't going to cut it.

To survive the impending collapse, Sayruqa has to drag his archaic craft out of the shadows. He’ll need to physically break the city's ancient ciphers, hijack permissions from heavily augmented enforcers, and level up not by grinding monsters, but by finding the lethal backdoors the original architects left behind. It’s a race against a ticking clock to claim the foundational tiers of a broken world, before the System inevitably crashes with him still inside it.