The Echo Eater

He devours the memories of the dead to grow stronger. Every Echo he takes erases a piece of himself. Five hundred years after the Great Sundering, the world runs on Echoes — the lingering memories of the dead, which the living learn to wield as power. Cael Ashborne woke in the ash with no name, no past, and a hunger the world has no word for. He does not borrow the dead's Echoes like everyone else. He eats them whole — and the Archive in his mind charges him for each one in his own memories. Every kill makes him stronger. Every kill makes him less. He has already lost his mother's face, the home he grew up in, the reason he set out at all — traded, one black night at a time, for the strength to survive the next. The world's laws have no name for what he is. The Archive does: an anomaly. A hole. A Devouring Void that unmakes the very magic everyone else is built upon. Ahead lies Bastion Ironveil, the last great fortress-city of light — and Cael has begun to suspect its brilliance is fed on something, and that the people who keep it are monsters of a cleaner kind. Behind him, hunters have already caught his scent. And beneath it all, in the ruins of a broken world, something far older than the Sundering is stirring — and it remembers what men chose to forget. To reach the light, he must become a vessel for the dead. The only question is whether anything of Cael will be left by the time he arrives. Expect: a morally grey MC who only grows colder, a hard magic system with a brutal price, cosmic horror under the progression, a slow-burn tragedy, and mysteries that pay off across the long haul. Tags: Progression · LitRPG · Dark · Anti-Hero Lead · Magic · Male Lead · Mystery · Tragedy