Category Zero

A Siberian Post-Apocalyptic LitRPG. They gave the whole planet a status bar. Alexey Naydenov got a barcode. BIOSPECIMEN 4412. CATEGORY: SCRAP. SURVIVAL CHANCE: 12.8%. Fourteen years in supply taught him one thing: nothing is real until it's on paper. Then the sky filled with text, the towns started filtering people the way a warehouse filters freight, and the System looked at a discharged warrant officer with bad knees and filed him under the only category that fit. Two years later the scrap is still walking. He logs anomalous objects for a living — things that came out of the zones and stopped being ordinary. Most of them are junk. Some of them are weapons. And one shipment arrives that no scanner will read, carrying a message that never went through the System at all, because what the System sees is not a secret from anyone. Somewhere past the perimeter, a hunter is baiting a trap with his own partner. A woman with no status line at all is walking away from the last city that wanted her. And something is moving in the taiga that the System cannot classify. Naydenov can't fight any of it. But he can do what he's always done — count it, log it, and work out who signs for it. Multiple POV. Chapter releases daily.