The Artificer's Stolen Luck

Tavira Morzhan wakes up suspended from the ceiling of a flooded, abandoned clocktower with gravity reversed and no memory of how she got there. Told in alternating third-person perspectives between the hot-tempered tinkerer and her arrogant academic rival, Vadim, the story follows Tavira’s gritty daily life at the Galdurast Institute of Artifice. She only cares about two things: beating Vadim in the workshop and graduating to save her family from the toxic lower-city smog. She is completely unaware she is the protagonist of a novel, or that her transmigrated cousin, Lissea, harbors a parasitic System. To steal Tavira’s 'protagonist luck,' Lissea must physically pilfer her most cherished belongings. But every time Lissea steals a prized hammer or a lucky compass, a furious Tavira simply works twice as hard to forge a better one, inadvertently impressing the academy's masters and instantly unlocking greater opportunities. As the System's failures drive Lissea to desperate, easily exposed acts of sabotage, neither girl realizes the world’s plot has a hidden, unmentioned 30-day time limit before the city collapses entirely. Will Tavira’s relentless hard work be enough to arrest her saboteur cousin and halt the unseen countdown before everyone perishes?