New Web Novels

In the foundry city of Hazor-Mor, bronze is the measure of power, cast into church bells and naval broadsides. Tamarath is the most skilled founder in the yard, quietly pouring heresy into every cannon she casts for the tyrannical High Patriarch. Enter Kelalim, a provost marshal whose name clears the taverns and whose firing squads never miss. When Kelalim takes command of her casting pits, Tamarath knows one mistake means the scaffold. Yet Kelalim sees through her defiant mask and finds an obsession he cannot extinguish. Surrounded by roaring furnaces and impending naval war, their lethal game of cat-and-mouse turns into an uncontrollable, dangerous desire.

Some martial sects seek enlightenment atop misty peaks. The Kettle-Claw Alliance seeks dinner. Across the scorched plateaus of the outer realms, Gijsbert van der Meulen and his heavyweight grapplers wander with a six-ton bronze pot strapped to their oxen, convinced that martial perfection is achieved by suplexing apex beasts into broth. But when the immaculate Iron-Braid Empire begins capturing the legendary horned leviathans to breed a world-crushing war herd, cooking becomes rebellion. To protect the wild planes, Gijsbert, spear-wielding chef Femke, and an increasingly horrified captive aristocrat must wrestle the continent's fiercest monsters before the warlord can saddle them. In this sect, honor isn't given—it's braised slowly over cedar wood.

Klaasje Blaauw has never met a creature she couldn't soothe. Her psychic empathy and calm pulse have made her the most requested companion-beast handler on the continental sky-gondola lines. But her skills are tested when she is summoned to first class to handle an emergency: Lord Joris van der Meer, the mainland's most illustrious sun-falcon shifter envoy, is having a catastrophic bout of air sickness.

Terrified of turbulence and shedding fiery golden feathers all over the silk furniture, Joris is one air pocket away from setting the transport ablaze. Klaasje steps into his suite with dried mango slices and unflappable patience. As the gondola glides across sunlit mountain peaks, Joris finds solace in Klaasje’s gentle touch—and reasons to stay grounded by her side.

Oshuro is a pit of red mud and black glass, carved into an active volcano that keeps the endless ice age at bay. In the fighting terraces, survival is measured in razor-sharp obsidian. Tadashi is the best knapper in the crater, crafting thermal prism blades that slice through bone and stone alike. He cares nothing for the warlords squabbling over the heat vents—until an army of starving raiders breaches the rim, determined to seize the thermal core. To stop them, Tadashi must ignite the deep magma flues. Winning the siege means scorching half the terraces he calls home, and his neighbors would rather kill him than starve in the dark.

For generations, the people of Numidia-Bara prayed for the ancient orbital defense satellites to wake up and protect them from foreign invasion. The satellites finally woke up, looked at the continent's geography, and enthusiastically declared: 'LEAGUE PLAY IS NOW ACTIVE.' Now, five-hundred-ton micro-singularities are rolling across the continent like frictionless bowling balls, flattening mountain ranges and knocking over fortress towers to score points for unseen spectators. When a foul call threatens to wipe their nations off the board entirely, an illegal grav-bat slugger, an insufferable trajectory math prodigy, an overworked landscaper, and a panicked riot marshal must team up to play the ultimate away game and defeat the automated referee.

Liselotte Duynhoven’s heirloom pear cider needs two things to ferment into perfection: gentle river motion and time. To bring her vintage to life, she charters a classic cargo barge along the winding Maas, ready for hard work and quiet water. She didn’t count on Captain Sander Klaaskerk. Tall, broad-shouldered, and fiercely protective of his vessel, Sander runs a tight ship and prefers to keep his distance from his spirited charter. But the intimacy of life on the water is impossible to resist. Between navigating misty river locks by day and sharing rich tastings in the wheelhouse by night, the spark between them flares into an intoxicating, slow-burning romance that neither of them can steer away from.

The idiot on the other side of our shared workshop partition builds wooden logic puzzles so complex they require a geometry degree to open. I repair vintage mechanical cameras. We are sworn enemies in the daily war of his cedar sawdust drifting into my delicate brass shutter gears. But when a shiny corporate gentrification firm slaps a buyout ultimatum on our seaside Kamakura artisan arcade, I am forced to do the truly unthinkable: trust Tsuyoshi with my livelihood. Our only defense is pulling off a district-wide scavenger hunt to prove our foot traffic is worth saving. Suddenly, we're hiding custom-exposed film clues inside interlocking mahogany lockboxes, and navigating the friction of two wildly different workflows. The problem isn't just that working shoulder-to-shoulder under the red darkroom lamps is making me short of breath. The real problem is realizing his chaotic, sawdust-covered genius might be exactly what my perfectly ordered life was missing.

Eight bronze disc-continents bask in the warmth of the Great Meridian Hearth, but the ruthless Eclipse Warlord intends to snuff out the light and starve the outer realms into submission. Bound by the ancient jianghu code, four dazzling warriors from rival schools step forward to champion the heavens: a poetry-spouting sword virtuoso, an indomitable flail mistress, an acrobatic staff rover, and a proud halberd specialist. Navigating the treacherous solar jet-streams aboard reed-hulled star-canoes, they must duel their way through the warlord’s twelve martial marshals. Pride, technique, and brotherhood collide in a dazzling swashbuckling campaign across the stars.

Inside the soot-blackened walls of the Skallagrim Abattoir, thousands of steam-driven hooks haul slaughtered beast carcasses along a mechanized labyrinth. But tonight, the butchered meat is pulling itself back together. An occult chimeric entity has hooked itself into the overhead rail system, turning the factory into an automated harvesting machine. Master Butcher Kolskegg arms his floor workers with bone-saws, while Chief Engineer Berglind fights to disable the runaway steam gears. Guard Provost Einarr hunts for the corporate saboteur who introduced the tainted herd, and Hrapp’s vat scavengers fight for survival in the flooded offal cellars. They must cut the power, or end up on the hooks.

The sky-plateaus of Corveira are dropping into the void. For generations, ancient gravity beacons have held the high towns and terraced vineyards suspended above the deadly mist of the lowlands. Now the beacon network is going dark, city by city, and the duchies have turned their cannons on each other in a desperate scramble for the surviving spires. Navigator Vasco Tenreiro wants only to guide his aging aerostat vessel clear of the gunfire, but when chart-maker Ysabel Armenta discovers that the grand central beacon can be restored, Vasco must steer his frigate into the teeth of an airborne blockade. With canvas wings, broadside cannons, and fading ballast, they make a bittersweet final voyage across the dying sky to save a nation from the long fall.

Dearbhail wants nothing more than a quiet season tending her potted tea-bushes aboard the trans-continental railway. Armed with gentle plant biokinesis, she can coax the most stubborn bergamot into fragrant blossom, provided the train's thermostat behaves. But when the rail network assigns her Eachann—a towering, frost-antlered stag-shifter whose body temperature sits permanently below freezing—her cozy parlor car turns into a winter wonderland. Between dodging his magnificent antlers in the narrow galley and thawing the teapots his sneezes keep flash-freezing, Dearbhail finds herself warming up to the shy alpine shifter. As their train glides past snow-capped peaks, brewing the perfect cuppa might just lead to cultivating true love.

I know how monsters look when stripped to bone and wire. What I don't know is why Count Zsigmond Csáky—gorgeous, aristocratic, and thoroughly undead—thinks someone in the imperial ministry has replaced the grand chancellor with a carrion mimic. Zsigmond needs my anatomical expertise to spot the imposter before the continental coronation; I need his supernatural speed to keep from being silenced by steam-cutter assassins. Trapped together in lavish ballrooms and reeking preservation vaults, our paranoid banter turns into a scorching, dangerous attraction. But in a court where every smile hides sharpened fangs and fake skin, falling for a vampire who suspects his own shadow might be the most lethal mistake I ever make.

The high kings won their empire by stripping every surrounding province of grain, sealing their conquest inside the cyclopean silos of Yanzhou. Now the empire has withered, leaving Chief Conservator Tan Fenglan to guard mountains of grain against thousands of starving nomads camped outside. But the true threat burrows from below. Chthonic earth-leeches, bloated on centuries of temple slaughter, are chewing through the mudbrick foundations. When sappers breach the lower cisterns, Fenglan must join forces with enemy infiltrator Xie Yunshan and a disgraced ritual butcher. Together, they must navigate the collapsing tiers of a rotting monument to conquerors, where the cost of ancient greed is paid in blood and falling stone.

Working aboard the orbital scrap-hauler Anvil-7 is supposed to be boring: you dump decommissioned satellites into the disassembler furnace, turn them into raw titanium ingots, and repeat. But Candor Belasco had a side hustle aging illicit gourmet cheese in the cooling ducts. When a rogue data transfer infects the ship's molecular foundry with an exhaustive haute cuisine database, the multi-gigawatt disassembler decides scrap metal is beneath its artistic talents. Now the automated factory views the ship as a kitchen, the crew as sous-chefs, and Candor as prime protein for a reduction sauce. Candor must navigate boiling-hot corridors, outwit laser-guided plating arms, and protect his contraband dairy before the ship serves dinner.

In the kiln-warmed fortress of Braamkerk, bronze is life, voice, and prayer. For generations, the Great Bell has chimed over the mud-brick terraces to keep the mountain darkness at bay. But an invisible fracture has spread across its sacred crown. Now, the ringing does not protect—it summons. One by one, smiths, herders, and children put down their tools, smile at the sky, and walk serenely into the white-hot slag pits. As the foundry fires turn cold with ash and terror, a bellows master, an ox-herder, and a bronze-caster must find a way to silence the god within the metal before the whole city marches into the flames.

Master sail-trimmer Rong Kexin measures her life in sail-angles, wind-shear, and the clean kick of a calibrated matchlock. She has no room in her calculations for Yan Zhenyu, the swaggering corsair gunner she hauled out of a burning enemy brig. But when a magnetic storm strands their twin-keeled cutter in the void-shoals between worlds, survival demands total harmony. Their vessel runs on lodestone powder—an explosive art that demands flawless physical sync between helm and gun-deck. In the stifling heat of the powder room, every loaded charge heightens a dangerous, electric attraction. As imperial warships close in, Kexin and Zhenyu must yield to the intoxicating rhythm of each other's touch or let their worlds drift into fire.

When a submerged holo-projector glazes a prehistoric stilt city in invincible hard-light ancestor holograms who demand micromanagement of daily tribal life, four beleaguered clan representatives must work together to short out the generator before they are nagged to extinction.

When shaman Brandcombe dropped his lucky bone into the sacred tar pit, he expected a blessing. He did not expect twelve-foot-tall, glowing, invincible "ancestors" to march out of the muck and demand to see everyone's residential permits. The hard-light figures can deflect mammoth-ivory axes with a smirk, but worse, they won't stop managing things. They've banned weapon-sharpening during quiet hours, put the warband chiefs on mandatory remedial teamwork workshops, and locked the fishing docks behind glowing barriers because nobody is wearing approved buoyancy vests. To save their way of life, Gougerow, Thatchwick, Brandcombe, and Miltrow must wage an underground war of sabotage against unkillable, patronizing light-ghosts and drown the master crystal in boiling asphalt.

Perched on a sheer spire of limestone above churning sea tides, the Lazaretto of Tash-Bashi is where the empire sends its infected and disgraced to die out of sight. Arslanbek wants nothing from the world beyond quiet days tending bone fractures and distilling bitter herbs. But when an exiled prince dies without a single pustule or fever mark—his teeth stained with an untraceable herbal poison—the cloister becomes a slaughterhouse. With the ocean rope-basket severed by a winter storm and the sea-winds howling through the stone halls, Arslanbek knows one of the seven cloister attendants is a paid royal butcher. If he cannot prove which caretaker holds the vial, none of the quarantined will leave the rock alive.

A cave-diver must drop into an inverted subterranean world to poison its megafauna nursery, while an apex hunter from below must climb the reverse-gravity cliffs to slaughter the ceiling-clans for their obsidian. Two worlds face each other across a thousand-foot vertical drop, where gravity reverses precisely at the midpoint. Sorcha is a ceiling diver who treats mercy as a lethal luxury, and Ruiseart is a brutal floor-realm hunter determined to strip the upper world of weapons-grade glass. As their desperate realities collide over starving clans and exhausted resources, they will shatter the chasm itself.

Sailing across the singing glass dunes of Kauhale takes nerve, a swift skiff, and a healthy appreciation for danger. I had all three until Hinanui stepped into my path. She is an exiled goddess of mirages with a penchant for dramatic exits, razor-sharp wit, and impossible schemes. An usurper has taken her throne and deployed sonic war-engines that threaten to shatter our crystalline country into dust. She needs my sand-skiff to outrun the mechanical crawler fleet; I need her strange glass magic to keep us in one piece. But as we race under blazing twin moons, her clever illusions cannot hide the genuine passion blooming between us.