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56 stories found · by Last update

The Drowned Registry

by N.G. Foster

  • 28 Chapters
  • 336 Pages
  • 92,573 Words
  • 15 Views

Twice a day, the tide recedes to reveal the drowned ruins of a lost empire. Below the waterline sit glass bottles filled with captive storms, fog banks, and sheer heat, waiting to be claimed. Scavenging them is a race against the incoming sea.

Nineteen-year-old Elias Crane plies this desperate trade with a bad leg and no crew, dodging the monopoly of the major salvage companies. But the ancient registry that rules the coast still functions, binding every diver who opens a live weather bottle. When Elias cracks his first, he receives a rare, misunderstood class: Pressure Reader. While other Scavengers pursue raw stats and brute-force skills to crack the glass, Elias can see the volatile forces tearing at the edges of the stable bottles. By manipulating those internal pressures with careful build choices, he discovers an entirely different way to play the registry's game.

With a superstitious pilot at his back and a retired registry clerk helping him untangle edge-case rules, Elias sets out to break the coastal monopoly. To survive, he doesn't just need a bigger blade—he needs to see the cracks in the world before the tide comes back in.

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Ledgers of the Foundry

by N.G. Foster

  • 23 Chapters
  • 233 Pages
  • 64,125 Words
  • 4 Views

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.

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Paths of Cinder and Smoke

by Mackenzie Vaughan

  • 24 Chapters
  • 170 Pages
  • 46,898 Words
  • 9 Views

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.

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The Qariqa Protocol

by M.D. Baxter

  • 16 Chapters
  • 160 Pages
  • 44,136 Words
  • 7 Views

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.

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The Gyarmaty Latency

by L. Ravenhurst

  • 16 Chapters
  • 185 Pages
  • 50,939 Words
  • 2 Views

Gáborz Rujasy is a low-tier courier whose body is failing. Born with a severe heart condition in a world governed by a glitch-prone, severely underfunded LitRPG System, he runs on borrowed time to deliver missives across decaying districts. When a catastrophic processing error results in the death of the only person he swore to protect, Gáborz is violently reset to the start of a grueling three-day delivery route—with his perfect memory intact. Trapped in a localized temporal loop caused by the System's own latency, he must exploit clerical errors, delayed consequence rendering, and bureaucratic blind spots. He doesn't need to overpower the administrators of reality; he just has to file the right exceptions before his heart gives out completely, turning the System's flaws into a lifeline.

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The Circuit of Blood and Ash

by Mackenzie Vaughan

  • 22 Chapters
  • 148 Pages
  • 40,769 Words
  • 1 Views

They call him a traitor. They say he ran when the line held. Now, marooned in the brutal arena circuits of the Arid Core, former soldier Kadan-im bleeds for the betting ledgers, hiding a skill set that was meant to protect the very people he abandoned.

In a world where specialized Stats and attributes are public, a man fighting with hidden parameters is a man marked for death. But when a lethal tournament is announced with a rigid deadline—thirty days before the arena floors are wiped clean to test a prototype extraction mechanism—Kadan is handed a choice. He can keep laying low and watch the few people he cares about get butchered, or he can show the exact martial framework he was exiled for, betraying a long-held vow to break the circuit wide open. Every bout he fights is a countdown; every win risks exposing the lethal discipline he left behind. The arena wants blood. Kadan is going to give them the one thing they never saw coming.

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Leverage in Vengskyr

by L.A. Dunn

  • 16 Chapters
  • 150 Pages
  • 41,361 Words
  • 5 Views

Bramund has always been the one making the deals, arranging the contracts, and smoothing the paths for cultivators in the cutthroat tournament city of Vengskyr. He had the brains, but they had the power. When his sister Eirund is seized as collateral by the upper strata of the decennial fighting syndicate, words are no longer enough. To climb the brutal ranks of a city that literally tears itself down and rebuilds its walls every ten years, Bramund needs leverage. He strikes a deadly bargain with Varnsk, a disgraced and exiled master, to learn the forbidden arts of Strand-binding. But Varnsk’s training is a gauntlet of lethal trials designed to hollow out the apprentice's humanity. Now, Bramund must negotiate with his own breaking point, weaponizing his sharp mind alongside his newly forged martial prowess. Every tier he ascends brings him closer to Eirund, but the price of power threatens to make him indistinguishable from the monsters he is fighting to tear down.

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The Silt and the Scale

by Sawyer Lindqvist

  • 16 Chapters
  • 148 Pages
  • 40,879 Words
  • 8 Views

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.

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Odds of Return

by Ignatius Sorrell

  • 16 Chapters
  • 125 Pages
  • 34,461 Words
  • 7 Views

In the city of Kordava, every fighter's strength is public knowledge, chalked up on the arena boards before every match—and where the numbers are known, the bets never stop. Dorvan Kesztasy doesn't fight and he doesn't bet. He steals: quick, quiet, and only long enough to put something back where it belongs, into the hands of whoever the Circuit's rich and ranked just cheated. It's a code, not a kindness, and it's kept him alive in a city that would rather see him hanged.

Then his sister steps into the ring for the biggest match of her life, the odds get quietly rigged against her, and Dorvan runs out of small crimes to fix it in time. The night she dies is the night the world resets—dawn of the same week, same boards, same odds, and only Dorvan remembers what's coming.

He gets good at losing her. Loop after loop, he learns the size and shape of the trap closing around her match, and starts closing it back. But the power that lets him try again was never free, and what it wants paid isn't coin. Someone is going to ask Dorvan to use everything he's learned about the people he loves against them—and in a city where the whole crowd is always watching the odds, there's no version of that choice he can steal his way out of.

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System of the Rusted Crown

by Anders Orrin

  • 16 Chapters
  • 76 Pages
  • 21,058 Words
  • 2 Views

They say the dead Old Empire swallowed the System whole. Step past the rusted border pylons of the Skornaya Ruins, and reality shatters into stat blocks, brutal skill trees, and lethal anomalies. Step out, and you’re just another mundane mortal bleeding in the mud. Watch Captain Brono Kraznik just bought a bankrupt command on that exact border, inheriting a squad of unpaid cutthroats and a sector crawling with mutants. Why? Because his brilliant, obsessive sister walked into the grid a year ago and never came out. Now, to survive the lethal physics of the ruins and fund his own godforsaken precinct, Brono has to apprentice himself to a cynical veteran who uses him as live bait to test spawn rates. Yevzkov's lessons are measured in broken bones and essence costs, but Brono doesn't care. He's going to learn the rules, crack the System, out-stat the horrors in the dark, and drag his sister back—even if he has to tear the old grid down to do it.

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The Ledger of Blackcombe

by Sawyer Garrison

  • 20 Chapters
  • 226 Pages
  • 62,156 Words
  • 18 Views

The Blackcombe Ore-Works didn’t just collapse—it was buried to hide the truth. When a deliberately triggered marrow-stone blowout entombs hundreds of diggers in a single night, the merchant guilds expect the comforting silence of the grave. They didn't count on Falkner Penman.

A junior archivist choking on chalk-dust and toxic spiritual pressure, Falkner holds the one thing Blackcombe’s overseers are bleeding to find: Master Assayer Weaver’s final, unsanitized ledger. In a ruthless martial society where true cultivation is bought, hoarded, and refined on the broken backs of the lower classes, the truth is a fatal commodity. But Falkner isn't a chosen son with a divine sword. He’s a meticulous, fiercely competent tallyman counting the cost of survival.

Armed with unyielding memory and a precise map of Blackcombe’s most unstable deep-seams, Falkner plunges straight into a cutthroat cultivation economy. To honor a dying man's promise, he must claw his way up an uncompromising ladder of power, turning rival enforcers, corrupt refiners, and deadly spiritual hazards into his own stepping stones. He will leverage every ounce of raw primal ore and balance every drop of spilled blood to ensure the authentic record outlives them all. The guilds thought they were just burying a quiet bookkeeper; they're about to face the ultimate auditor of their sins.

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The Hollow Harvest

by Rowan Garner

  • 24 Chapters
  • 156 Pages
  • 43,000 Words
  • 5 Views

Beneath the farming town of Krasnoy lies the Hollow—a sprawling, living dungeon whose roots, beasts, and rare soil are the town’s only economy. Harvesting it takes a light touch. Pull too much, and the ecosystem fights back. The town’s most famous Warden built a fortune on those rules. Then he vanished.

His kid, Volya, wants precisely zero pieces of the family legacy. No name, no money, no expectations. What Volya wants is a quiet, independent living relying on a fragile, untested class that bends the Hollow’s ambient rot into combat fuel. But out in the upper margins, things are getting ugly. Tunnels are unexpectedly collapsing. The rot is thickening. Someone is aggressively strip-mining the Hollow, and they’re destroying the farm to do it.

To survive the cave-ins and carve out their own standing, Volya forms a shaky partnership with Levskor, a fast-talking veteran of the local guilds who mysteriously drops out of a restricted vent at just the right time. But as Volya levels up by harvesting the very decay destroying the Dungeon, it becomes terrifyingly clear that Levskor isn't just a mentor. He's using Volya's unique build as a skeleton key to crack the Hollow's deepest wards.

The farm is dying. The harvest is failing. And the one guy helping Volya get stronger is the one pulling the trigger.

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The Glass Tide

by Sawyer Lindqvist

  • 16 Chapters
  • 124 Pages
  • 34,271 Words
  • 7 Views

On the island of Messaoura, the landscape does not stay still. Every year, the Mawsim—an aggressive, volatile tide of magic—sweeps across the island, burying old terrain and carving new paths. In its wake, it leaves behind Ruwani Glass, a crystallized energy source that powers everything on the island. The Hakmani Cartel maintains an iron grip on its collection.

Zineb Alaoui does not run from the Mawsim. She is a storm-chaser, diving into the most dangerous, actively shifting zones to harvest virgin Ruwani Glass before the Cartel can lay claim to it. Brilliant, risk-seeking, and dangerously competent, Zineb uses the island's chaos to fund her steady, calculated subversion of Cartel control.

When a salvage job in a collapsing ruin unearths evidence that the Mawsim is not a natural weather pattern but a triggered event, Zineb finds herself holding undeniable leverage. To break the Cartel's chokehold on the island's lifeblood, she must navigate volatile magics, form uneasy alliances, and outrun an enemy that controls the very ground she walks on.

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Kaba Ward

by Terry L. Mace

  • 16 Chapters
  • 65 Pages
  • 17,954 Words

Pima washed out of the prestigious Lanu Academy because she trusted what her hands felt over what the textbooks claimed. Now, she takes a night-shift position at the Kaba hospice—an isolated facility on the coastal cliffs where the staff never transfer out, and the patients slowly transform into something else. Her brother, Tano, was last seen on the other side of Kaba's locked basement doors, working for the very forces the hospice is meant to contain. With only seven shifts before the ward permanently seals for the season, Pima must navigate a grueling routine of physical care, oppressive humidity, and escalating uncanny events to reach the basement. Surviving Kaba requires following the strictest of rules, relying on her practical instincts, and preparing to face whatever her brother has become.

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The Pavilion of Rolling Gunpowder

by D. Wolcott

  • 8 Chapters
  • 40 Pages
  • 11,122 Words

The Morovian Pleasure-Rotunda is legendary across the eastern gulf for exquisite spiced wine, death-defying aerial displays, and sweeping harbor views. Built atop sixty lashed pontoon hulls, the sprawling three-tier pagoda serves as the floating crown jewel of maritime trade. But when mutinous privateers seize its heavy defensive battery and train sixty stolen carronades on the waterfront to extort the shoreline, the grand banquet turns into a slaughterhouse. Trapped aboard the drifting palace as harbor warships prepare to incinerate the structure, the only patrons capable of resistance are three bickering martial artists from rival traditions: Boleslav Krikunov, an insufferable sabre grandstander who weaponizes spilled vintage and refuses to strike unless someone is cheering; Danika Mravik, a sharp-tongued assassin whose rotational footwork redirects bullets into her flintlocks' line of fire; and Rostislav Benov, an aerial socialite who fences while swinging from chandelier chains. With the pontoons leaking, the powder magazines ticking down, and imperial galleasses closing in, the unlikely trio must dance through grapeshot and banquet wreckage to retake the artillery deck before the entire pavilion goes to the bottom.

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Dry Steps Across Toba

by N.E. Hendricks

  • 8 Chapters
  • 42 Pages
  • 11,723 Words

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.

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The Prism Lanterns of Gyöngyvár

by Eden Underhill

  • 8 Chapters
  • 42 Pages
  • 11,773 Words

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.

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Soak and Simmer

by N.E. Hendricks

  • 8 Chapters
  • 41 Pages
  • 11,280 Words

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.

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Lanterns on the Misty Loch

by Finley Bowman

  • 8 Chapters
  • 43 Pages
  • 11,894 Words
  • 1 Views

No one leaves the jianghu easily, but at the timber tavern of Loch-na-Cailleach, an ancient custom offers an escape. A warrior wishing to put down their blade must travel to the water's edge and fight one last, bloodless farewell duel against a worthy foe before crossing the misty loch to peace. Lorcan-Rhu has fought for twenty bloody winters; he wants only to return to his neglected highland apple orchard. To grant his honorable release, the rival Storm-Petrel School sends Caoimhe, a prodigy spear-cultivator whose elder brother Lorcan once disarmed. Under the sharp, tea-scented gaze of Maolain, a legendary strike-master turned tavern keeper who values his ceramic teacups far more than martial reputations, they prepare for their solemn parting bout. But when an unyielding vendetta brigade arrives at the water's edge vowing that blood debts can never be washed clean, Lorcan-Rhu and his companions discover that walking away from violence demands their fiercest stand yet.

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Banners of the Cometary Tail

by D. Wolcott

  • 8 Chapters
  • 41 Pages
  • 11,426 Words

Across the fractured bronze-age moonlets of the Ringed Realm, cultivators do not fly on swords or command ethereal beasts—they surf the roaring ether on giant bronze-threaded war banners, catching the kinetic friction of passing comets. When the legendary Golden Comet hurtles through the void carrying the primordial steles of the Nine Heavenly Katas frozen in its crystalline heart, an ancient martial decree is reawakened: whichever warrior keeps their colors staked to the stele's apex through the gauntlet of three moon-realms shall inherit the celestial legacy. Three irreconcilable banner-masters plunge into the comet's glittering wake: Mengubek, the vainglorious spear-skimmer of the Sky-Javelin League; Torgantay, the unbending halberd champion of the Nine-Cauldron Citadel; and Chormaqanoglu, an irreverent flag-fencer whose gossamer banner can snare any weapon. But as rival void-corsairs and an expansionist warlord move to shatter the stele and smelt its primordial bronze into realm-conquering siege engines, the three rivals must balance fierce mutual combat with desperate survival across the burning copper trails.

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