Gravelord Monopoly - The Heretic's Ledger

Magic is a rich man’s game. But death is entirely free. Rennic Galt is a certified failure. With a mana reservoir too pathetic to light a candle, he’s been denied his mage credentials for the third and final time. Condemned to a life of grueling manual labor, he digs graves for the Mage Authority in the freezing mud of the poorest districts. But when a frustrated strike of his spade cracks a warded coffin, Rennic accidentally absorbs the residual energy of a dead mage—and discovers a terrifying loophole in the establishment’s monopoly. He can harvest Animus, the dark, lingering power of the dead. It’s highly heretical, agonizing to wield, and utterly invisible to the Authority’s mana-detecting instruments. More importantly, it’s an infinite resource in a world choking on magical scarcity. But Rennic isn't just looking to cast a few forbidden spells. He wants to corner the market.  By engineering depleted, worthless mana crystals into hyper-charged, bone-white batteries, Rennic enters the criminal underworld to sell the ultimate contraband. But building an empire in the shadows comes with a brutal cost. The sheer kinetic recoil of Animus threatens to tear his body apart, and his sudden black-market success has triggered a massive Inquisition manhunt.  With a relentless Orthodoxy investigator scrutinizing his every move at the cemetery, Rennic must hide his growing operation beneath the mask of an exhausted, unremarkable laborer. He is one slip away from the executioner’s block, but he refuses to stop producing.  The Mage Authority has ruled for centuries through artificial scarcity. Now, they are about to find out what happens when a lowly gravedigger introduces them to the laws of supply and demand.