root-book

In a world where AI does the work and humans rent the right to exist, the only thing worth owning is time. The neural-link game Altar of Omnia offers a 24:1 time dilation — ten hours of sleep becomes ten days of living. But for the "Unbound," there are no respawns. One death, and your avatar is gone forever.Kenji is a sarcastic ex-service-desk survivor with real-world kendo training and an 80% pain sensitivity setting he''''s already regretting. Lyra is a fearless, sharp-tongued would-be druid who made the forest nervous the moment she touched it. Together, they gamble their last $190 on a wild spawn in the lethal Whispering Taiga — no gear, no safety net, no Citadel protection.What they find is worse than monsters.The blight spreading through the Taiga isn''''t natural. It''''s engineered — a corruption with a human signature, repeating like code, rewriting every living thing it touches. The legendary Druid Grove is real, but its leadership has vanished, and the something shaping the rot is getting stronger.Now marked as Claimants — tracked by the Grove''''s enemies, hunted by rival factions, and tethered to a sanctuary that could fall — Kenji and Lyra must master a Skill Creation system that rewards character over stats, forge weapons from living wood, and trace the corruption to its source before it consumes everything the Grove protects.The system doesn''''t care about their level. It cares about their choices.And the choices are about to get harder. Statistics Overall Score This fiction has not received enough ratings yet to have a score. Total Views : 87 Average Views : 22 Followers : 1 Favorites : 0 Ratings : 0 Pages : 52 Advertisement Go to Table of Contents Mark as Not Interested Follow Favorite Read Later Fiction breaking rules? Report Advertisement Author