The False Moonlight's Scalpel
By @john1208
Ninazu Kigal spent five grueling years on Eridu Station mastering combat-surgery, all to escape the suffocating expectations of her noble house. She returns to the neon-lit ziggurats of Neo-Akkad just in time for a high-profile funeral, only to find her ex-fiancé, Lugal, clinging to her exact genetic lookalike. When Lugal whispers that he is marrying the stand-in for duty but will always love his 'white moonlight', the world-weary surgeon doesn't shed a tear. Instead, she loudly proposes a heavily publicized, purely strategic fake-courtship to his terrifying, heavily armed uncle, Marduk, to secure funding for her new weapons-grade clinic. While Lugal is predictably bankrupted and abandoned by his 'innocent' stand-in, Ninazu focuses on carving up feral bio-mutants in the lower wards alongside her platonic warlord sponsor. But High Exarch Ziusudra has been closely watching her violently efficient surgeries. Ninazu always believed she was exiled because she was too fragile for the syndicate wars, a protected prize under the city's ancient rules. What happens when she realizes she completely misunderstood the rules of her society, and the 'White Moonlight' isn't a cherished first love, but a genetically engineered apex predator meant to slaughter them all?
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Blade of the Void: The Sixty-Day Severing
By @john1208
The eerie, fog-drenched colony of Obolus is no place for a legendary swordswoman, especially not one waking up in the middle of a forced engagement ceremony. Nie Chifeng, once the unparalleled peerless blade of a forgotten era, finds herself trapped in a frail body on a world ruled by towering steel mechas. Even worse, her inner Qi detects a dormant quantum toxin in her blood - she has exactly sixty days before her nervous system melts, a ticking clock hidden from everyone. Her only hope lies within the Astral Veil, a virtual network where elite pilots battle for the galaxy’s rarest medicines. Dismissed as a feral bride wielding a primitive relic from an antique museum, Chifeng shocks the cosmos by dismantling a colossal dreadnought-class mecha with a single swing of a rusty iron sword. But as her fierce temper and lethal martial arts draw the ire of her icy rival, the supreme mecha champion Voss Karayan, she discovers she can use her Qi to purge the incurable reactor radiation plaguing the pilots. With time ticking down and her enemies multiplying, can she slice her way to survival before the toxin claims her life?
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