Foreign Thread

Owen Voss dies at his desk after another seventy-hour week and wakes in Aethel, a lethal fantasy world governed by a visible RPG System. Everyone else treats the System as divine law. Owen sees the cracks. Broken skill tags. Duplicated rewards. Hidden warnings. Logic gaps in quests, monsters, dungeons, and status screens. To the people of Aethel, they are bad omens or miracles. To Owen, they are bugs. Exploiting them is the only reason he survives. But every bug he abuses leaves a trace. Every impossible win raises his Corruption Load. Every shortcut makes him more valuable, more dangerous, and more visible to the factions trying to control the broken System. And somewhere behind the errors, something is starting to notice the foreign thread that should not exist. A crunchy LitRPG / portal fantasy about exploit-based progression, dangerous system bugs, earned power, and a protagonist who survives by reading the rules wrong.