Rising Web Novels

When anchored powder-barges in the fog-draped harbor of Ha'amene begin detonating without fire or smoke, leaving shattered victims embedded with fine mirror fragments, a meticulous beacon lens-grinder, a quirky powder-mill cooper, and a sharp-eyed harbor signal-officer must track down an optical sniper before the city's main magazine is ignited. As the military governor wrongfully targets civilian fishing sloops, Kiri'ata, Paora, and Teuira race against the sun to calculate the true angles of death in a fair-play mystery bound by the strict laws of focal distortion and solar geometry.

The Sunless Empire was hammered together across three centuries of naval slaughter by its living founder, the ten-foot demigod Mátyás. But gods rot like any mortal meat, and now the comatose patriarch is liquefying in his gilded berth, venting an uncontrollable biological decay that mutates living flesh into brittle, suffocating sea-coral.

Tasked with the fleet's most dreaded berth aboard the lone funeral sloop Vér-Harkály, Chief Surgeon Illyés Gyarmati wants nothing more than to lay down his saws after thirty years of colonial butchery. Instead, he must keep the decomposing demigod stable enough to reach the designated cremation star at the system's core. Behind them, the liberated outer colonies have mobilized their corsair wolfpacks, determined to shatter the sloop, desecrate the imperial corpse, and drown the five planetary rings in holy poison. Trapped between celestial broadsides and divine gangrene, Illyés must chisel, cauterize, and trepan a weeping god to keep the astral brine from turning to stone.

Welcome aboard the Sultana V, where the vintage champagne is lukewarm, the influencers are hysterical, and the port generator just blew its final gasket. I’m Basmat, head pastry chef, and currently my entire career rests on forty pounds of melting Normandy butter. The only man standing between me and culinary ruin is Danim, the vessel’s insufferably calm chief engineer, whose idea of an emergency response is telling me to bake without electricity while flexing his grease-streaked forearms. Trapped together in the sweltering utility crawlways beneath deck, we’re supposed to be saving the yacht from running aground. Instead, we’re trading biting insults, sharing smuggled popsicles in the battery bay, and making decisions that are definitely going to void my employment insurance.

The flooded marble streets of Aileanmhor belong to those who dare command the winds. As the devastating Great Surge approaches, the city's four most formidable seafarers—a daredevil sailmaker, a relentless naval lieutenant, a charming smuggler, and a fiery artillery savant—are forced into a desperate pact. The System rewards maritime mastery, but its highest tier of [Harmonic Navigation] requires total physical and emotional trust among its circle. Tangled in rigging, soaked by warm tropical rain, and intoxicated by each other's touch, these four rivals must master their growing desires before the tides drag their beloved city into the deep.

In the Luminous Shallows, massive galleons cross between oceanic worlds by plunging down sheer saltwater cataracts in the dead of the void. Celso Valdevez is a working-class sail-rigger who stitches biotic canvas from the mantles of void-beasts. He doesn't want glory; he just wants to survive his brutal enlistment without losing his fingers to frostbite or kinetic blowback.

But when the fanatical Admiral Paiva orders a ruthless scorched-sky bombardment of a crowded atoll-refuge to extract its planetary core, the extreme magnetic firing vectors awaken something ancient and colossal. Phased leviathans rise from the deep, drawn by the silence of dying worlds and the thunder of imperial guns. Trapped aboard a flagship whose own cannons are now attracting horrific cosmic predation, Celso faces a lethal choice.

If he obeys orders, the void-beasts will tear the fleet apart from below. If he secretly sabotages the firing metrics to throw the cannons off-axis, the resulting cataclysmic blowback will cripple the Armada—and leave twelve hundred stranded sailors to drown in the dark.

Drifting through the midnight mist of Lake Weiyang, the Golden Heron Pleasure Barge hosts the fragile armistice banquet between the Sun-Strike League and the Night-Heron Syndicate. Sect Marshal Song Jianan is bound by ancient martial chivalry to ensure not a single drop of blood stains the banquet floorboards. Opposite him sits Wen Qingshu, a veiled assassin who infiltrated the lower kitchens with three hidden throwing needles and an absolute vow to avenge her slaughtered master before midnight. But when an elder collapses with his meridians withered by an undetectable palm strike, panic threatens to plunge both factions into all-out slaughter. With the ship’s rudder sabotaged mid-lake, Song and Wen engage in a high-stakes duel of formal etiquette and covert parries to unmask the real instigator.

Danique Oosterkerk is the most wanted thief across the floating ziggurats of the Tri-Vault, famous for her daring roof-top escapes and complete lack of reverence for the gods. Joris van Veldt is the champion of the Dawn Shield: solemn, impossibly broad-shouldered, and sworn by sacred oath to bring her to the bronze cages. But when Danique scales the high sanctum to liberate the priceless Falcon-Aegis, Joris corners her just as traitorous cultists blow the temple’s keystone to dust. Falling together through the cloud-belts on a single kinetic grapple-stone, Joris saves her life—and Danique repays the favor by stealing his breath. Now branded fugitives together, they must dance across crumbling mountain plates, trading wicked parries and searing kisses while running from every soldier in the sky.

Tan Boyan has two rules: keep the engine running, and never let the refrigerated terrariums get above sixteen degrees Celsius. Breaking the second rule means two dozen rare, highly agitated venomous serpents wake up in the back of his van. Unfortunately, his radiator just blew on the most treacherous mountain highway in the province. Even worse, Officer Meng Qiaoling has been tailing his bumper for forty kilometers, determined to give him the ticket of a lifetime. But the illicit cargo contains a synthetic peptide worth millions to an armed cartel, and their hit squads have just blocked the only bridge down the mountain. To survive, the smuggler and the cop must drive like maniacs, dodge sniper fire, and avoid getting bitten by their own cargo.

Two paranoid dukes are about to turn the beautiful willow canals of Ifeoma into an artillery playground, all because each believes the other has built an unstoppable secret weapon. As a traveling shadow-master who makes a living projecting colorful steam illusions for tavern audiences, I realize the country doesn't need soldiers—it needs a magnificent show. Armed with *The Gilded Moth*, my clattering projection coach, an ancient box of light-bending crystals, and a mechanical terrier named Pipu, I set out to fabricate an entire legion of mythical guardians in the morning river fog. Pulling off the greatest theatrical hoax in history won't be easy, but with enough steam, clever mirrors, and dramatic flair, we just might put war out of business.

The *Sgàth-Bhràghaid* was built to conquer the primeval rivers, an eight-hundred-foot hollowed cedar behemoth powered by fifty oars and sheer nerve. But when the mooring ropes snap, the giant canoe plunges down a roaring subterranean chasm. At the helm is Donnchadh, a pilot who thrives on velocity; on the prow is Beathag, picking off blind river monsters with obsidian-tipped arrows; on the decks is Muircheartach, happily grappling amphibious predators; and in the ballast holds is Fionnghal, screaming as the water rises. The Wild-Torrent System powers their skills only as long as the boat maintains terminal speed. To survive, they must fight, row, and level up before hitting the canyon wall.

Adrift on a storm-lashed glacial sea, the eighty surviving members of the Sun-Hoof tribe cling to life aboard the Mor-Kahn—an eighty-pace coracle sewn from fifty mammoth hides. In the belly of the vessel, lashed to the main mast, stands the weeping White Stag, the last spirit of the inland forest. His breath lulls the predatory sea-beasts and keeps the leather hull from dissolving in the brine, but you cannot eat breath. Hidecombe, a blunt, middle-aged sinew-sewer whose hands are cracked from pulling frozen gut-thread, alone understands the boat's fragile anatomy. When the hunters' hunger turns into a mutinous frenzy for the stag's flesh, Hidecombe must keep her people from butchering the only thing preventing the ocean from eating them whole.

The continent of Ard-Phail was always a miracle of engineering: a manufactured shelf of stone kept buoyant above the world-ocean by the steady thrum of ancient sub-crustal engines. For fifteen thousand years, empires rose and fell across its terraced peaks, believing the solid earth beneath their boots would endure forever. But the engines have reached the end of their designated cycle. The sea is not attacking with violent typhoons; it is rising smoothly, placidly, two handspans every dawn, as the continent begins its programmed descent into the deep. As ancient rivals watch their borders vanish beneath tranquil blue water, four observers must map the final migration across the vanishing highlands, learning what remains of human worth when the ground itself says goodbye.

Directing supersonic passenger shuttles across three solar systems takes iron nerves and micro-telekinetic precision, and Marimat is the best in the terminal. But her shift goes to hell when Shadimat crashes through her control tower window. Golden-skinned, deadly, and radiating scorching heat, Shadimat is a solar-vampire on the run from corrupt security syndicates. Trapped together during a total starport lockdown, Shadimat's internal solar furnace threatens to incinerate him unless he grounds his searing bio-heat against human skin. Marimat's telekinesis can cool his burns, but every touch unleashes an intoxicating wave of psychic euphoria that blurs the line between hostage and lover. When the sun sets, staying alive means surrendering to the heat.

On the razor-thin glass plates of the Prismatic Shards, steam-powered beacons guide void-skiffs through the dark. Ealasaid keeps the lenses polished, ignoring the urban legends about what lives behind the silvering. But when her reflection begins whispering to her in the boiler room, she meets Tighearnan—a haunting fae shifter whose body reshapes itself according to the desires and fears of those who look upon him. Tighearnan was sent to smash the beacons and plunge the human colonies into ruin, but Ealasaid’s sharp mind and unyielding gaze pierce straight through his illusions. In a world of steam, light, and deadly reflections, trusting a monster might be her only way home.

The Great Span of Ozu-Eke was never made of stone. For three hundred years, armies and merchants have crossed the chasm on the petrified spine of an ancient sky-beast, slain in its sleep by the grandfathers of the realm. Now, the bones are groaning. Ebele-oma hangs between sky and abyss, desperately patching the splintering ribs with mortar, while Constable Ifeanyichukwu-eke demands the span bear his lord’s heavy siege engines. Far below in the canyon mud, Tobechi-adu watches parasitic bone-fiends wake from the marrow. If the bridge falls, two kingdoms will bleed—but the beast's ancient ghost is tired of carrying the weight of men.

When armies butcher each other in the valleys of Jebel-Assani, the sky weeps monsters. Mounir al-Ghabara makes his living scraping them off the rocks. Armed with a cleaver and climbing hooks, he harvests the shimmering plumage and cold-burning fat of lesser gods that crash into the mountain passes. The garrison warlord needs those feathers to shatter the enemy's siege lines, but every celestial carcass brought behind the walls brings an uncanny plague. The dead gods' cries infect the soldiers with waking nightmares, and their rotting marrow breeds parasitic horrors in the drinking water. Mounir must harvest the greatest fallen titan on the peaks before the garrison tears itself apart from the inside out, driven by his stubborn desire to hoard enough god-down to weave a pair of wings and abandon the doomed war entirely.

Dar-e-Karkheh is a prehistoric marvel: a sprawling fortress-city built entirely within the intertwined, fossilized skeletons of thirty colossal leviathans. Farhad-dar is a nimble bone-carver and rogue who races across the spinal catwalks, carving live runes into his daggers to farm the System’s kinetic skill trees while dodging patrols. Niloufar-shah is the elite captain of the Ivory Guard, armed with a mammoth-tusk shield and sworn to crush any infiltrator who threatens the city’s skeletal foundations.

When a seismic tremor activates the System’s Leviathan Siege, the entire metropolis divides into a high-stakes territory war for the central Marrow Heart. Forced onto opposite sides of a deadly factional conflict, Farhad-dar and Niloufar-shah must duel across swinging bone-bridges and hollow vertebrae. Magic in this world demands constant motion; standing still means losing the charge. To survive the factional siege, both champions must carve their way to victory before the ancestral bones collapse beneath them.

Mateiro Alavez is a soot-blinded chimney sweep navigating the claustrophobic, wrought-iron flues of Cadernera—a sprawling industrial metropolis trapped under a massive artificial smog canopy. Armed with hand-pumped brine-canisters and extreme agility, Mateiro fights to protect his young apprentice from Ash-Weavers, chitinous fire-feeding arachnids infesting the coal-gas pipelines. But when he discovers a monstrous nest inside a boardinghouse, he realizes the arachnid plague is no natural disaster. The city's oligarchs are actively chaining open the gas valves and seeding the monsters to incinerate the slum wards. Outmatched and suffocating in the dark, Mateiro must weaponize his brutal profession to tear down an empire of iron and gas, turning the masters' deadly exhaust network against them.

As a rogue, unstoppable wave of architectural nanites silently crystallizes the Jovian habitats into inert light-sculptures, humanity's time in the outer solar system comes to an end. Amidst the slow, beautiful apocalypse, three orbital caretakers—an structural architect, a deep-trench haul pilot, and an ecological curator—must race against the encroaching tide. Bound by duty and their own deadpan domestic banter, they desperately ferry the last remnants of human culture and botanical life ahead of the transformation. But as the crystalline infection leaps from station to station, they face the agonizing choice of what to save, what to leave behind, and what it truly means to preserve a legacy in a dying system.

Across the blooming, far-future continent of Pangaea Regalis, status is measured by skill tiers, physical grace, and the art of sensory war. Orson Lindell is a master of atmospheric biotics, cultivating intoxicating spores that can soothe an invading army or send an assassin sprawling. When the continent’s geo-domes begin to fail, he is tasked with crafting a stabilizing pheromone array—guarded by Vespera Corvo, a deadly cybernetic duelist whose cyberware responds to the heat of his skin. To level up and survive the beast-haunted silk valleys and aristocratic blood-courts, they must synchronize their System stats. But as mutual proximity unlocks forbidden combat bonuses, their mission becomes an exquisite dance where every duel feels like a confession.