Codex of the Forgotten Scholar

In the soot-choked city of Veresk, where knowledge is power and books are chained, Vasyl is a nobody, hunted for a crime he didn't commit. His only goal is to protect his younger sister from the predatory Cinder Guild that rules their district. Fleeing through misty, gaslit alleys, he stumbles upon a forgotten book that awakens a terrifying System: [The Lexicon of Echoes]. It grants him a 10,000x multiplier on every page he reads. A simple folk tale grants him the strength of a hundred men; a dusty medical text makes him a master of anatomy and vital points. Vasyl's growth is impossibly fast, his cheeky grin hiding a mind now processing millennia of knowledge per hour. But this exponential rise doesn't go unnoticed. The shadowy Ministry of Correction, the power-hoarding Scribes of the Unblinking Eye, and other factions all want the secret to his power. As he delves deeper, he uncovers fragmented memories of a past life - a scholar who architected this very System. But why would his past self erase his own memories and leave behind such a monstrously powerful, and dangerous, legacy?