Advanced Search

A LitRPG progression fantasy where the System turns on material transformation, logistics, and supply chains—not combat. Unjustly condemned by a network that feeds on prison labor, a negotiator who has lived their life without leverage wakes in a penal foundry to discover a broken crafting class. Through precise manipulation of raw materials and the complex ledger of debts that binds the condemned, they must forge a working pathway out. As they advance, three other viewpoints—a logistics runner, a debt-collector, and an appraiser—intersect, their distinct survival strategies weaving into one fight against the corrupt monopoly that benefits from the wrongful convictions. With zero combat power, every victory demands negotiation, tactical crafting, and flipping the system’s own supply chains against it.

The System is broken. Not "needs a patch" broken—it's actively rotting, managed by an underfunded bureaucracy that couldn't care less if a localized glitch wipes out a neighborhood. For Sorosh-ran, a gig-worker scraping by on the fraying edges of the sector, this is just Tuesday. He survives by practicing Censer-craft—an ancient, analog superstition in a world practically ruled by digital stats and prompt boxes.

But when a new anomaly starts crystallizing citizens from the inside out, the official readouts label it a minor hazard. The bureaucracy looks the other way. Sorosh’s fragrant smoke tells a different story.

Armed with his heavy brass censer, sheer stubbornness, and a desperate need for credits, Sorosh dives into the failing infrastructure to hunt down the Dross-taint. He's going to use the System's own blind spots to level up his discredited craft. He'll smash corrupted mechs, strip-mine the glitches for rare loot, and outsmart arrogant middle managers who rely too much on flawed data. Because if the Overseers won't fix the world's code, Sorosh will just have to burn it back to life, one sweet-smelling stat block at a time.

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.

In the silt-choked delta of the Yaku-mayu, trade guilds enforce their sovereignty with poison and steel. Tawa-uay is a healer who knows exactly how a body fails, a skill he once used to let a powerful man die rather than save him. When a fresh death matches the exact method of his hidden crime, Tawa-uay is framed for a murder he did not commit, forcing him out of his clinic and into the cutthroat politics of the Guild of the River's Scales. Alongside a disgraced guild enforcer, an exiled poison-taster, and a river-scavenger who knows too much about the delta's currents, Tawa-uay must dismantle the conspiracy that seeks to hang him. In a city where every drop of antidote is rationed and every cure has a master, finding the truth means taking lives rather than saving them.

In the decaying capital of Ouraia, where an ancient order crumbles unacknowledged, apprentice Theronos is drawn to the exact peril he should flee. Trained under Master Eskylos—a mentor whose methods are as dangerous as his motives are opaque—Theronos chases the storms of an unraveling magic system. As he undergoes rigorous, graded trials that push his proactive nature to the brink, he uncovers the bitter truth: the rival ascendant faction he is being weaponized against is led by his own estranged brother, Alexios. Caught between a faltering empire and his own blood, Theronos must carve out his own brutal competence before the city’s slow death consumes them both.

In the prehistoric delta city of Toba, seventy muddy islets are linked by slippery log causeways, unsteady skiffs, and the quiet resignation of weavers and fishers coated in gray river muck up to their knees. Everyone accepts the mud as an unavoidable curse of the wet moons—everyone except Ranu, an unhurried stone-hauler who dislikes rushing and harbors a quiet obsession with flat, non-slip surfaces. When a luminous [Way-Maker] interface blinks to life before his eyes, Ranu discovers the system does not ask him to battle river beasts or conquer rival clans. Instead, every neighbor who crosses his hand-laid stones without twisting an ankle awards him experience, unlocking steady upgrades to friction, settlement, and sediment grip. With a heavy wooden mallet, a boatload of river cobbles, and a stubborn refusal to let the season's sweet-melon harvest sink into the quagmire, Ranu sets out to build Toba's very first permanent dry causeway, one level step at a time.

Kende Váryszegi has the best job in Gyöngyvár: running along limestone roofs, basking in the sun, and delivering parcel notes between friendly neighbors. But peace vanishes when an armada of privateer dreadnoughts chokes the canals, demanding the surrender of the entire city before twilight. Gyöngyvár’s only salvation lies in its forgotten spires—ancient relay towers fitted with sun-prisms capable of throwing impenetrable hard-light shields over the bay. The city watch is pinned down, the bridges are barricaded, and the only person nimble enough to leap across the chimney-tops with the missing focusing crystals is Kende. With nothing but his leather boots, a flask of tea, and a very grumpy falcon, he must race the clock to set the city aglow.

The volcanic ridge of Hinode is supposed to be a militarized no-man's-land between the craggy baronies of Kamome and the river clans of Shiranu. Nobody told Shoma and Minami. Shoma, an easygoing stonecutter with a brand-new [Spring-Tender] System interface, just wanted to carve a thermal basin where weary laborers could soak their aching joints. Minami, a travelling [Infusionist] from the terraced valley paddies, simply needed a quiet grotto to steep medicinal berry teas that restore depleted stamina. When their paths collide at a steaming sulfur cleft along the contested frontier, their complementary crafts trigger an unprecedented resonance in the Sanative Way System. But rival frontier governors are already marching troop columns toward the pass to fortify the springs into border garrisons. Armed only with polished cedar tubs, restorative herbal brews, and an insatiable dedication to customer hospitality, the two young bathhouse operators must level their shared sanctuary into an internationally recognized haven of peace before open warfare claims the ridge.

Across the drowned moons of the outer void, colossal aqueducts of boiling brine connect five oceanic worlds along suspended troughs of surging water. Ta'ani is an illiterate ballast-trimmer and heavy steam-harpooner aboard an iron dredging barge, accustomed only to the scald of boiler grease and the butchery of deep-canal predators. When the militarized High Fire cartel burns his vessel and slaughters his harbor-kin to seize absolute monopoly over the celestial transit locks, Ta'ani salvages a deck gun and carries the hunt into the boiling deep. Wielding volatile sulfur-iron that leaches heat to flash-freeze hulls and vent lethal steam blasts, he pursues the cartel's predatory dreadnoughts across the freezing void. Yet vengeance carries a crippling cost: every shot drains the waterways keeping his people alive, and the dreadnoughts he hunts carry the only stolen heat cores keeping the five moons from freezing solid.

Two hundred years ago, the werewolves of the Trevelloc clan closed off their island to the rest of the world. Now, they are the only ones who know what happened to Tressa’s brother.

Tressa is a cartographer, accustomed to measuring physical shores and charting visible tides. But when her brother vanishes on the banned coasts of Keresek, her instruments cannot help her. Desperate, she strikes a bargain with Kadek, the clan's formidable and insular alpha. He possesses the map she needs; she offers him one year of service in a clan that despises outsiders.

Their bargain binds them to the island's lethal terrain. Plunged into a brutal society where power is claimed by craft and physical survival, Tressa must navigate treacherous fishing politics, cliffside hazards, and a magnetic, terrifying pull toward the one man she swore to hate. Surrounded by enemies and the encroaching tide of clan warfare, she realizes too late: finding her brother means surviving the werewolves, and the price of the alpha's protection might be her freedom.

Every ten years, the shifting city of Cavenrock tears itself down and rebuilds around the champion of the Great Ascendancy. To the elite sects, it is a triumph of cultivation and progress. To those living in the outer rings, it means their homes and lives are bulldozed to feed the city's spiritual core. Dane Cutler is a blade-reader, practicing a discarded peasant craft that divines a cultivator’s health from the chips and stress lines in their weapons. Dismissed as a superstitious fraud, Dane barely scrapes by in the slums—until he examines a discarded sword that bears a unique, highly engineered stress pattern. It is the exact same sabotage mark that killed the previous champion ten years ago. Now, drawn into the violent politics of the upcoming tournament, Dane must use his dying craft to trace the conspiracy to the top of the city's hierarchy before the next rebuilding erases his world entirely.

Kyogo is hired to protect a naive heir in a clan war fueled by a succession crisis. Given away as part of an arranged marriage designed to stall the violence between two militant factions, Kyogo soon discovers his new situation is anything but a truce. He is thrust into a dangerous apprenticeship under a mentor with a hidden agenda. His survival and the uneasy peace depend on his ability to outmaneuver assassins, navigate treacherous politics, and master the deadly arts his mysterious mentor demands he learn. Every lesson comes with a price, and loyalty is a liability when the person you guard is the bait in a trap. In a world where blades are always drawn and treaties are mere formalities, Kyogo must chart his own path or become a pawn in a game of blood and succession.

Stranded upon the baking mudflats of the Great Zuider oxbow during an unprecedented summer drought, the royal river-barge Goudsbloem sits helpless. Each scorching afternoon, the river recedes another inch, threatening to rot the seventy-cubit cedar hull and drive three hundred thirsty passengers and soldiers into murderous mutiny. The only escape lies in waking the dormant bronze keel-oars embedded deep within the vessel's spine—an ancient mechanism keyed to an intimate LitRPG System of glowing skin-borne glyphs, fueled not by sacrifice or blood, but by genuine emotional vulnerability and physical attunement. Baarn van Rhee, a taciturn sweep-rower with iron endurance and an unvoiced yearning, finds himself summoned by Swaantje Rozendaal, a high-born ceremonial priestess versed in cooling unguents and melodic scent-weaving. As their tentative evening touch ignites shared resonance notifications that chime through paper-thin rush mats for the entire sweltering vessel to overhear, guard captain Kars Vanhuis watches his own martial discipline crumble into suspicion and raw envy. To lift sixty tons of cedar and bronze through the suffocating silt, Baarn and Swaantje must strip away every layer of pride and social distance before the last pool of fresh water turns to poison.

Across seven shattered volcanic worlds suspended in an orbital void, war is fought straight downward through the Gate-Wells: colossal basalt shafts where massive bronze bells ring open pathways between the stars. Keldrund is the vanguard's chief founder, an ear-trained artisan whose knuckles can detect a hairline fracture in molten alloy before the pour even cools. His task is to cast the harmonic bronze instruments that keep the pathways open for Warlord Ravnsk's bronze-clad chariots and spearmen. But when Ravnsk launches a ruthless campaign to ring open all seven wells simultaneously, Keldrund hears what the bloodthirsty warlords ignore. The wells are not divine portals left by benevolent gods; they are exhaust valves and automated terraforming regulators for an ancient orbital machine. Striking all seven bells at once will not forge an empire across the void—it will activate a planetary purge that incinerates every fragment in ash. To protect his apprentice and prevent the extinction of seven worlds, Keldrund must wage a silent, paranoid war of sabotage from inside the vanguard's forge, turning his craft into a weapon while surrounded by fanatical killers.

Callow Arch was raised to outlast empires and winter spates: a five-story limestone fortress seated on a sheer rock needle in the throat of an impassable river gorge. But when twin flash floods smash both timber approach spans into splinters in a single afternoon, the surviving garrison finds itself marooned above sixty feet of boiling cataract. Winch-tender Garret Vane watches the churning brown torrent turn milky and fever-warm, while mason Norris Claver discovers that the ancient mortar between the foundation blocks is weeping sweet water and softening into living silt. The river goddess has revoked her pact of stone. As damp river-reeds take root in salted grain barrels and sentries wake with cold river stones wedged beneath their tongues, the water begins to mount the spiral staircases, claiming the living as suitors for the depths below.

The Kveldsk Delta is drowning under black tides that rise higher with every spring moon. For three centuries, master turf-cutters have raised monumental sod barrows across the brackish ridges, bedding kings in damp peat alongside cold bronze blades to keep the subterranean earth-spirits sleeping and the tidal surges predictable. Now Queen Astridr lies dead in her reed pavilion, and the water is lapping at the outer dykes. Torbrand, the oldest mound-builder alive, has only twenty days of falling moon to build her resting place before the saltwater claims the final dry ridge. But inland refugees displaced by the encroaching ocean demand the sacred high ground for barley crops, and the queen's kin will spill blood before leaving their royal line unentombed. Torbrand must carve a grave out of the very ground the living need to survive, caught between ancient ancestral honor, starving families, and a sea that cannot be turned by bronze spears.

In the sundrenched courtyards of near-future Old Damascus, Marwanim listens to stone. As the municipal craftsman caring for centuries-old subterranean conduits, he trusts gravity, porous earthenware cooling jars, and the unhurried wisdom of neighborhood elders to keep the city cool without electric air conditioning. But when city climate researcher Rimmon arrives armed with floating digital sensors, rapid-fire calculations, and a mandate to automate his beloved basins before the summer heatwave peaks, Marwanim's quiet routine is turned upside down. Between unsolicited advice from balcony uncles and Rimmon accidentally sending waterproof telemetry probes bobbing among ornamental carp, their exasperated clashes soften into shared courtyard lunches under leafy grape arbors. As the asphalt softens in blistering summer afternoons, Marwanim discovers that pairing ancient passive hydraulics with Rimmon’s eager diagnostics might save the neighborhood's most vulnerable residents—and that letting down his own carefully maintained defenses might be the most refreshing discovery of his life.

In the northern coastal city of Lowell, the sun sets early, and the long night belongs to the Noctis—a supernatural syndicate of predators bound by ancient pacts. Tierney refuses her father’s legendary surname and his high seat in the Guild of Silverers, the elite crafters who forge the protective mercury-glass that keeps the monsters out of human homes. Working under an alias, she barely scrapes by repairing fractured wards for the desperate.

But when a lethal Noctis enforcer named Kellum Reed stalks into her shop with an impossible job—a heist to breach the Guild's impenetrable central vault and steal the First Mirror—Tierney is pulled into a deadly game. She must assemble a crew of rogues, outsmart her father's ironclad security, and work side-by-side with the very predator she was raised to hunt. As they plan the break-in, the magnetic, dangerous bond between Tierney and Kellum escalates. Soon, her duty to the city's safety and her loyalty to her lethal partner are on a collision course, forcing her to choose between the world she left behind and the monster pulling her into the dark.

Orsolyzsa Kenderesy deserted her military unit rather than abandon her commanding officer in a cave-in—a choice the army branded as cowardice. Now, she makes her living as a freelance guide in the treacherous Hasadék mountain zone. When a distress call comes from the deepest, most dangerous underground research station on the Hasadék Route, Orsolyzsa is hired to get a rescue team there. The catch: the team is co-led by Dr. Lórágy Folyosy, a brilliant but rigid botanist whose team must share a shoestring budget with a rival geology division. Every step deeper into the cavern system forces Orsolyzsa and Lórágy closer together as they navigate falling rocks, failing stations, and toxic spores. The subterranean journey will strip away their defenses, but the hardest hurdle isn't surviving the depths—it's trusting each other enough to make it out alive.

In the walled city of Awapu, divided by a fragile truce between two rival factions, a rot is spreading. It starts as a subtle contamination, turning its victims savage from the inside out, eating away memories before consuming morality. Inti-qa is a street healer who moves across the city's bitter dividing line. She knows how to keep her head down and her mouth shut—a survival skill she honed the night she purposely let a murderous patient bleed out in an alley.

When Inti-qa is coerced into treating an infected soldier from the powerful Upper City ward, she crosses paths with Runa-uay, the ruthless enforcer enforcing the quarantine. Runa-uay doesn't just want a cure; he wants control of the contagion, and he believes Inti-qa holds the key. Brought into his brutal world as a reluctant captive, Inti-qa has to use every ounce of her cunning to survive both the spreading disease and his obsessive oversight. But as the internal rot threatens to destroy Awapu, the real danger might be what happens when Inti-qa decides to stop running and start fighting back.