Now on Book Two!  Check the Volumes selector to make sure you start at the right place!

Book One: Paranoid Mage

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Callum had seen things all his life.  There are monsters and beasts living among people, but he learned very early not to admit such things, not if he didn’t want people to think him crazy.

It turns out that the supernatural is real, but at thirty Callum has no desire to be part of that secret.  Not that he has a choice when it turns out he is a mage, albeit one that hasn’t cast any spells in all his life.  There are requirements, duties, and education that the powers that be insist he be subject to.

To hell with that.

Book Two: Renegade Mage

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After escaping from the Guild of Arcane Regulation and the Bureau of Secret Enforcement, Callum has lost his greatest protection: his obscurity.  Now the powers that be know who he is, and hiding is harder than ever.  Nor is hiding a plan, just a reaction.

Now Callum is forced to decide how he wants to approach the supernatural world, and how he’s going to keep himself secure when the apparatus of government is arrayed against him.  Even if he wanted to live as a mage, that bridge has been thoroughly burned, and even if he wanted to live as a normal person, he is far too deep to close his eyes to what he’s seen.

He has to make his own terms.

Book Three: Heretic Mage

Callum is at war with the Guild of Arcane Regulation, the organization that governs mages on Earth.  He’s spent most of his time lying low and hiding out, trying to understand what he can do and how he can remain free from their meddling.  What he’s learned is that he can’t.

It’s time to move from reaction to action, and take on GAR and its evils directly.

Paranoid Mage is an urban fantasy but it goes rather sideways from the normal stuff fairly quickly. 

Chapters are Fridays, 5PM EST, with approximately 5,000 words per chapter.

Join our Discord!

This is a story of vampires as I believe they should be, with their strengths and weaknesses, with their remnants of humanity and the beast inside. Updates every Friday. Mind the tags. 

Cover by Antti Hakosaari: https://www.artstation.com/haco

Special thanks to Svensonsen for getting me started, as well as Omi Nya, Hesketh, Rhaegar, Yaksher, Selkie and Raven for proofreading my stuff. Thanks to my patrons and you dear readers, for the support. I could not do it without you.

Journey is on Amazon, both in ebooks and audio. here is a link to the first one:

https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Black-Red-Alex-Gilbert-ebook/dp/B08DK6G8Y8

The story probably exists in your local marketplace as well of I can tempt you.

An irritated Pokemon might tell you to stop what you're doing. An irritated animal will probably just attack you. Pokemon, for all their power, would be open books and a breeze to care for to any competent animal handler on Earth. After a fiery death, a professional zookeeper who never outgrew Pokemon games ends up in the world of Pokemon. The entire world is thrown onto its side.

This story TWICE Completed the Royal Road Writathon challenge! 

Successor Book to Power of Ten Book One: Sama Rantha, and Book Two: The Far Future. Chapters began 9/5/2020. Chapters are around 2000 words (4 Word Pages), the author updating daily since Dec. 26, 2018.

This story is basically completed as it stands, at 500 chapters of daily updates.

Book Four: The Power of Ten: Dynamo, is continuing with the daily updates!

Ebook: The original Power of Ten: The First Day, Part One! The First Day

And Part Two! Part Two of The First Day!

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A shard severed from a soul, full of Karma, but needing a body and life of its own.

The first true Rantha Hagbloods.

A Shrouded Earth invaded by magic, struggling to once again see the sky.

Three souls with the full knowledge of Power of Ten are on a world in need of something to break the stalemate and suppression of the Shroud of Undeath.

It's going to take gold, and Gear, and Levels, but the undead aren't the only enemies that they'll be facing as they strive to liberate a world, and guide it towards the Light of Heaven.

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Power of Ten has a Patreon for anyone who wants to read advance chapters (up to 35 ahead, and you can even pay annually!). We use a Google Docs system, sending out access emails to our Patrons once Patreon confirms things to our Patrons' gmail accounts. Help support PoT today! :)

For those who would like to support me, my Patreon Link is at: Contribute Goldweight to Save the World!

The Original Power of Ten/Sama, the Tip of the Spear, is being posted at: 

Tremble, She Comes!

Books One and Two for Sama Rantha are at: Rantha Hags Forever!

The permanent Discord Link is: Your Friendly Allegiance LInk is active!

I always have Discord up if I'm online, although I may be busy writing and not see it right away...

August 18, 2018. Earth is at peace.

Then the sun explodes, and the world changes forever.

Sen Salazar, a third year in Dubai's renowned Belmont University, is thrust into a world where only monsters are found aplenty. Resources are dwindling, survivors are scarce, and safety is nowhere to be found. And when it's combined with an otherworldly system designed to bring out humanity's hidden potential? Sen's watched enough movies to know what to do:

Survive.

...He just has to figure out how to stop himself from turning into one of the monsters, first.

Discord link here.

In a world where magic is a science, Siobhan Naught is a genius.

But even geniuses need schooling.

Siobhan has just been banned from the country's only magical university.

As the unwitting accomplice to the theft of a priceless magical artifact, she has suddenly become a wanted criminal. There are fates worse than death, and if caught, she will face them. Unwilling to give up on her dream of becoming the world's most powerful sorcerer, she resolves to do whatever it takes to change her fate.

Even if it means magically disguising herself as a boy and indebting herself to a gang of criminals to pay for University tuition.

With the coppers after her, the pressure of trying to keep her spot in the devilishly competitive magic classes, and the gang calling in favors to repay her debts, Siobhan will need every drop of magic she can channel.

Why survive the apocalypse when you can become the apocalypse?

Nature is dying, but perhaps before the world is turned into an industrious machine nature itself can play one final trump card to save itself.

Summoned to a new world, a mushroom loving mycologist needs to grow up and grow stronger in order to accomplish the goal which brought them to this new place: to save nature from the system that the sentient races have created.

Stats, levels, classes and skills are all well and good, but when you’re a Child of Poverty in the slums of City Nineteen, there’s little you can do to change the world. Not unless you’re willing to think outside the box!

This story contains lots of cute stuff, but also some tragedy. If you’re expecting it to be as light and carefree as Cinnamon Bun or Heart of Dorkness, you might find yourself disappointed.

When humanity first encountered alien life, we were judged and found wanting.  

The Galactic Consensus interviewed our leaders and subjected us to a battery of psychological tests to determine our progress as a society.  They found us to be selfish, wasteful, impulsive, and boorish neighbors.  Earth was blockaded and our collective encounter with our extrasolar neighbors rapidly faded from memory.

All they left behind was a hypercomm relay and a handful of subscriptions to a massively multiplayer game that participants played in their sleep.  The Consensus said that it would let us interact with our neighbors in a controlled setting.  That it would teach us to be better members of the galactic community.

The megacorporations that controlled Earth ignored the game until they learned that the powers earned from clearing dungeons were just as real when day broke.  Magic, supernatural abilities and rumors exploded from nothing and a subscription to The Tower of Somnus became a status symbol.

Katherine ‘Kat’ Debs doesn’t have much, but it could be worse.  Born in an arcology, she was assigned a job in the megacorporation that raised her almost as soon as she could work.  Despite the stability of her corporate life, she wanted something more.  A chance to claw her way up the rigid social and financial ladder to make something of herself.

A chance that wouldn’t come naturally to someone as familiar with dark alleyways and the glint of steel as she was with office work and corporate niceties.





Book One is up on Kindle Unlimited as of 7/6/22 - https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-LitRPG-Adventure-Tower-Somnus-ebook/dp/B0B2X3L8H5

Not everyone gets a soul.  The rise of industry and mechanization has sent the world's population booming upward, striving relentlessly for the fixed handful of souls that level armies and steer the fate of nations.  The remnants of a crumbled empire fight in a grinding, bloody war against their ancient enemy.

Not everyone gets a soul, but Michael must - for he is the scion of a lord, and the soulless cannot hold such a title.  For five years he has tried to tempt one of the souls freed by its vessel's death.  Five years of pain and failure, earning only his father's contempt.  At last, one more opportunity to earn his soul has come.

But not everyone gets a soul quite like his.

Updates weekly on Wednesdays.

Cover art by Harry Rowland.

For Heather Morell, nightmares and hallucinations lurk around every corner, relics of schizophrenia and childhood bereavement.

Until she meets Raine and Evelyn, that is — self-proclaimed bodyguard and bad-tempered magician — and learns she’s not insane at all. The spirits and monsters she sees are all too real, the god-thing in her nightmares is teaching her how to surpass human limits, and her twin sister who supposedly never existed could still be alive, somewhere Outside, beyond the walls of reality.

Heather plunges into a world of eldritch magic and fanatic cultists, trying to stay alive, stay sane, and deal with her own blossoming attraction to dangerous women. But being ‘In The Know’ isn’t all terror and danger. Sometimes the monsters wear nice dresses and stick around for afternoon tea. Sometimes you find you have more in common with them than you think. Perhaps this is Heather’s chance to be something more than the defeated husk she’d grown up as, to find real friendship and meaning among things like herself - and perhaps, out there on the rim of the possible, to bring her twin sister back from the dead.

Katalepsis is a Ancient Greek word which means ‘comprehension’, or perhaps more accurately, ‘insight’. Katalepsis is a serial web novel about cosmic horror and human fragility, urban fantasy and lesbian romance, set in a sleepy English university town.

New chapters are currently posted once a week, on Saturdays.

This is a Royal Road mirror of Katalepsis' own website, located here, currently updated at the same time with a new chapter every Saturday.

Death is coming. And he wants to help.

The world of Eleg may seem like a normal enough place at first blush, but wade deeper into it, and soon the dark, the deadly, and the mad will begin to reveal themselves.

But don't worry.

They usually have a sense of humor.

((Ebook versions of the first four Volumes [138 chapters] are available on Amazon.))

There were 2 options:

Fight the same war for countless more aeons. Shatter the Betrayer's undead legions time and time again until all was ground to dust. Because the endless legions truly never end. A hair's breath of ground in a century is enough if the war takes all of eternity.

Or to choose Hope. To cast away his memories, his power, his very life. To wager everything on a chance to prevent their eventual end or to perish trying. Because if he were to return it would be with the power necessary to finally slay what remains of the Betrayer. Of the last Aspect. Only then would all things be right.

And so, he chose the latter.

Expect:
Weak to strong quick-ish.
Powerful MC reincarnates, gradually starts regaining memories.
MC that is an actual character not a plot device.
My original unique magic system discovered along with the MC.
My original setting with mythos that have both been living rent free in my head for actual years.
Opening arc will be less fast than the following story.

Good writing (I think) and grammar.

Upload schedulle: 2 chapters a week of 3-4k words each. I want to upscale to 3 in the future.

Meant to be read in RR dark mode.

For those coming here from my other stories, this is indeed a reimagining of my older story, CotM. I say reimagining because I have changed so much it cannot be called just a rewrite. Among the major changes, MC is fundamentally different in personality and background, I have actually planned the story out and changed it almost completely and I have adjusted my mythos so it no longer has as many holes as swiss cheese.

A few minutes ago, Meghan Moretti’s biggest concern was getting the kids’ athletic clothes washed in time for practice this evening. Now, it seems that Earth has been forced into participating in some high-stakes intergalactic reality television. All electrical wiring has been slagged, and most combustibles neutralized. Some kind of evil space rodents are appearing on the front lawn, too.

Like any parent, Meghan’s first instinct is to keep her young kids safely away from the monsters, but an odd stroke of luck has her coming into some advanced information about this dangerous game. She learns that her kids will have to fight too.

What’s a mom to do?

Updates Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Check out Book One, Time to Play, on Amazon! You can also sign up for my mailing list to receive a free 15,000-word short story about Vince's first day of the apocalypse.

The gods are real and incorporated. Providence is a profitable global monopoly.

But its chief executive is a corrupt authoritarian, the combined might of the divine powers is ignoring humanity’s problems, and Helpdesk service is, frankly, terrible. 

In this corporate fantasy, it’s up to history’s most maligned immortals to step up and sort things out.

---

DGW is on Discord! - https://discord.gg/fuRPFeV8Hf

Alex wakes up in the world of Pokémon. Obviously, the next step is to become a Pokémon Trainer, but not just any Pokémon Trainer.

Why should I be mediocre with every type when I can be an expert in one?

The Type Specialist is my first attempt to write a fiction. It is about traveling the world and building a strong team. The focus is on Alex taking on the Gym Challenge and dealing with problems that pop up here and there. Since this is my first fiction, the protagonist is a little rough at the start but improves as the fiction develops.

Updates Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

"He who fights with harem tropes should see to it that he himself does not become a harem protagonist. And if you gaze for long into a narrative, the narrative gazes also into you." --- Friedrich Nietzsche (probably?)

How would you react if one day you found yourself in an environment running on tropes and clichés? 

For allegedly average high-schooler Leonard Dunning, this rhetorical question became uncomfortably real on the day he woke up on a strangely pristine island country in the middle of the Atlantic. Without memories, surrounded by countless characterless placeholders, and with a classic harem protagonist and his various love interests for friends, he tries his best to fit in and figure out what's going on. 

That would be difficult enough already, yet his investigation into the rules governing the world, sabotaging the harem tropes, and his odd blend of outside-context knowledge, unique abilities, and a penchant for causing trouble wherever he goes, ends up drawing the attention of the world's nebulous narrative...

Disclaimer: This is a tongue-in-cheek, slice of life romantic comedy, with occasional sprinkles of combat and mystery to spice things up. Please do not expect a straight up deconstruction beyond some in-universe meta-commentary by the characters.

[This fiction is on indefinite hiatus. I'm currently acting as a 24-hour caregiver for my step-father who had a massive heart attack. I apologize for disappearing so quickly, but sometimes that's just life. I'll return as soon as possible. Sorry everyone!]

Zhao Gang, after hundreds of thousands of years cultivating, has finally reached the penultimate threshold. He is ready to ascend to the level of True Immortal. 

Driven by the need for a place his enemies won't find him, Zhao Gang puts together an audacious plan. He has developed a revolutionary new formation which will allow him to ascend while on even the lowest planes. To avoid drawing attention, he has to choose a plane that is relatively desolate, however.

He chooses Earth. Fast forward three thousand years.  Zhao Gang discovers what his work has wrought - a cultivation-free culture that has delved the deep mysteries of creation - he can't help but think how this tiny little planet devoid of natural energy could affect the course of all creation.

There's only one problem. For that to happen, he has to succeed in cultivating Earth.

Notes: Chinese names should be ignored in the social context - they don't mean anything. Sorry for slaughtering such a beautiful tradition.

This novel starts off slower than most. If the slow-roll isn't your thing, you might want to give this a pass. If it's not for you, I understand. Also, releases may be broken up into smaller chunks. The goal is 5k words, but definitely more than 4k. If you see a short release, be aware that more is probably coming.

 I'll be honest and say that I'm struggling with each new scene, if only because I want to balance the scope of vision with good pacing. I hope the work I put into it is worthwhile.

Ian Dunai is trapped in the only maze an arch-decemancer can't escape.

Time.

Only 1% of the population is blessed with magic affinity at birth. Fewer still have high enough affinities to rule. Ian’s decemancy eclipses all, granting him ultimate control over Death. He conquers cities with a thought and turns them into ruins with a gesture. But overwhelming power isn’t enough to escape the time loop or reveal its purpose.

When Ian discovers a critical clue that he missed years ago, escape is finally at his fingertips.

Little does he know, it's only the first realm.

Release schedule: 2 chapters/week (Mon/Fri at 11:30 AM EST).

Book 1, The Menocht Loop, is complete at ~100k words (~370 pages; chapters 1-41).

Book 2, The False Ascendant, is complete at ~110k words (chapters 42-83)

After being on Royal Road for nearly 20 months, Book 1 came down from Royal Road on Nov 17th, 2021, and Book 2 came down on Feb 8th 2022. Please consider buying the books on Amazon. The first 10% of book 1 and book 2, respectively, are still available to read on Royal Road so you can try before you buy. DM me if you want to read the books but do not have the financial means to purchase them.

Book 3, The Eldemari's Wrath, is complete at ~145k words (chapters 84-143)

Book 4, The Samsara Crucible, is complete at ~165k words (chapters 144-211).

Book 5, The Seed of Chaos, is ongoing (chapters 212 and on).

Constructive criticism welcome.

Join the discord.

Vote on Top Web Fiction!

View the wiki.

Cover art by the very talented Jeff Brown. (Higher res version here; 3840 x 2400 ultra high res wallpaper version here)

In a dark alley of the ancient desert metropolis of Wellspring City, a man is quietly vaporized by something he will never understand. Magic is to blame, and the technocratic Dynamic Brotherhood will hold the entire city’s arcane community accountable with a broken-door inquisition if the culprit is not found. Baffled by the blackened body, the Wellspring City Watch calls the Beast of Sector Sixteen - the notorious (and broke) mutant mercenary Baulric Featherlight. With time running out, no other choice, and the lives of his friends against the wall, it falls to the half-ton manhunter to leverage his magic, cybernetics, instincts, and wits to plumb the depths of the Thousandfold Polis and unearth the perpetrator, before the Brotherhood cuts its own justice from the hides of thousands.

(Cover art by SLAVIIIK. You can find more of his beautiful works here.)

(obligatory extra note: im an internet busker who subsists on the generosity of readers like you. if you haven't done your good deed for the day and you think my work is worth paying for, why not tip some spare change into my hat? i'd be awful appreciative ♥)

[premium game of the year DLC edition edit: if you've read the whole thing for free and want to buy a copy for yourself, this dang ol' story is available for purchase on amazon now. showing your support by buying it would make writing new ones a lot easier. thanks a million billion for reading either way ♥]

Mana Artists rule the world, and the path to power is a well-kept secret, restricted to state-approved programs and universities.

Akari Zeller will never be a Mana Artist. Not if society has its way. She's a Bronze with no money, no family, and no connections. But technology is advancing too. And to a skilled hacker like Akari, no secret is safe forever. The dark web holds the keys to true power, advancement, and her only chance of survival.

Web of Secrets on davidmusk.com