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7 stories found · by Last update

The Bone Courier

by N.B. Vance

  • 5 Chapters
  • 54 Pages
  • 15,108 Words

The theocracy of Ashqar does not pray for its miracles. It mines them.

Beneath the suffocating dust of the outlands, the fossilized corpse of a titan provides the church with its sacred power, and every sliver of unpurified bone belongs strictly to the state. Qadim is a long-haul courier whose heart is slowly giving out—a fatal liability in a world that burns the weak as impurities. Survival on the grueling overland routes means knowing the harsh geography, dodging the clerical checkpoints, and strictly ignoring the screams of those who dig the holy rot.

But when a bleeding priest forces a piece of absolute heresy into Qadim’s hands—a shard of true bone that is still fiercely, impossibly regenerating—he becomes the target of a perfectly rational, impeccably ruthless inquisition. Trapped by his own failing health, a lethal desert, and an inspector who will methodically burn the continent to stop him, Qadim must barter, bleed, and smuggle the ultimate contraband across the extraction zone. The penalty for failure is the pyre. The reward might just be the one surgical miracle that keeps his dying heart beating.

Load-Bearing Lies

by S.F. Stroud

  • 5 Chapters
  • 49 Pages
  • 13,739 Words

Berkan Kayabek brings buildings down for a living, and he's careful about it — reading the stress in a wall the way other people read faces, easing a century of brick down into rubble without wasting a single crack. He's gentler with people than he ever lets on. It's buildings he loves taking apart.

He's hired to gut a condemned wing of Ozentay House, the city's most trusted name in art authentication — the place collectors call when they need to know whether a painting is telling the truth. On his first structural survey he finds a wall patched to look older than it is, and behind it, a room that isn't on any blueprint the House will admit to owning.

Then the House's chief conservator turns up dead in that room, in an "accident" that doesn't match how buildings actually fall.

Ozentay House has spent three generations selling certainty. Berkan is about to find out exactly what that certainty is built on — and what it's still quietly consuming to keep standing.

The Logistical Core

by Ezra Iverson

  • 7 Chapters
  • 84 Pages
  • 23,109 Words
  • 13 Views

The Architect’s Path isn’t built on spells—it’s built on logic, alloy, and leverage. Kusiqa was expelled from the Imperial Academy for failing theory while his hands could reshape truth. Now, marked by a bloodline that powers the system from within, he finds himself exiled to the deep logistical veins of a world reliant on precise crafting and complex supply chains. In a society where resources mean survival and every margin is measured, someone is siphoning the continent’s lifeblood. Kusiqa must use his practical brilliance to expose a systemic rot, forging his own tools, exploiting overlooked mechanics, and proving that the hands of a supposed failure can dismantle the powers hunting him.

The Silt and the Scale

by Sawyer Lindqvist

  • 1 Chapter
  • 12 Pages
  • 3,561 Words
  • 2 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.

Marrow-Broken

by A.N. Pennywhistle

  • 1 Chapter
  • 11 Pages
  • 3,054 Words
  • 2 Views

Doreagh Mhoran was the best duelist the Circle of Vows ever crowned — until the day her own marriage-bond went wrong, and she should have died breaking it. She didn't. Twelve years and a stolen name later, she trains other people's champions instead of becoming one, hiding a ruined sword hand and a truth that would end her the moment anyone looked closely enough.

Then Sorlagh Bhannoch walks into her practice yard: faster, hungrier, and utterly unafraid of the blade — with ten days to win a fighting license before her family bonds her to a stranger to settle an old debt. Coaching her is the only way to keep them both safe. It's also the fastest way to be seen.

Because this year, for the first time in a decade, the Crown is watching the Circle's trials in person — and its new Warrant has a very specific rumor to chase: someone broke a completed marriage-bond and lived. He doesn't know her name yet. He's about to learn everything else.

In a court where marriages are treaties and magic enforces every vow, one duel can end a war, seal a fate, or unravel a secret twelve years buried. Doreagh has one apprentice, one ruined hand, and about eight days left to decide whether hiding was ever really keeping her safe at all.

The Qariqa Protocol

by M.D. Baxter

  • 1 Chapter
  • 11 Pages
  • 3,211 Words
  • 2 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.

Ledgers of the Foundry

by N.G. Foster

  • 1 Chapter
  • 11 Pages
  • 3,139 Words
  • 2 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.