The Crimson Reaper

Volume 1 : Year of Blood Ten tribes.Ten chosen.One year in the wild. In a world where leadership is earned through slaughter, every tribe offers one candidate to the Trial—a brutal year of survival beyond the stone gates. The rules are simple: return with the required trophies…or don’t return at all. Beast Stones. Marked pelts. Ritual claws.Steal them. Hunt them. Kill for them. And if more than one survives?Fight until only one remains. Ash is reborn into a savage world. He doesn’t have time to acclimate. The gates open, and he runs. It isn’t long before he realizes–he was an offering. A space filler. Just another corpse for the forest to swallow. They never meant for the original to win.  But he has something the original didn’t.  His shadow moves.It whispers.It hungers. A Beast Blessing. The longer he survives, the more it changes. Betrayal is expected, mercy is fatal…Ash must master the darkness. A brutal progression fantasy featuring deadly trials, rival candidates, evolving shadow powers, beast-blessed warriors, and a world where survival is only the beginning.