SOUL DEBT: THE BURNING THREAD — VOLUME ONE

Every ability has a price. His is himself. Kael Ashvern arrives at the Varen Academy with no awakened ability, no family name worth speaking, and a single letter of recommendation from an instructor who saw something in him that no assessment could measure. What activates inside him is the Abyss Overdrive — a soul-debt ability that borrows power from his own identity. Memories. Emotions. Years of his life. The stronger he burns, the more of himself he spends. And the debt always collects. Beside him is Lyra Solenne, who reads the threads of fate and pays for every pull with something she will miss. Together with a group of people no cultivation ledger ever planned for, they uncover a twenty-year conspiracy built on a single question: what does a person become when everything human has been burned away? The answer is standing at the end of the road. Kael has seen what he becomes. He is trying to become something else instead. A story about the cost of power, the things worth keeping, and the people who hold what you cannot afford to burn.