The Glass Surgeon's Ninety Days
By @john1208
My first morning back in Voronya was supposed to be quiet. I had just poured a perfect cup of chicory coffee when Casimir arrived at my door with a weeping girl who shared my cheekbones. 'I am marrying Radmila for duty to the Vlas estate,' he whispered, clutching my hands. 'But I love you.' I was too exhausted to feign heartbreak. I tossed my ancestral engagement ring into the kitchen slop-bucket, kicked him out, and permanently blacklisted him from the High Sanctorum of Surgeons. Let him rot in the lower city; I don't have time for a man's bruised ego. While I was in Ostromar mastering the forbidden art of marrow-grafting, I contracted the Weeping Calcification. In exactly ninety days, my nervous system will turn to brittle ash. I need to complete my life's work - a cure - before my hands stop working entirely. To do it, I must ally with Ignat Zverev, the cold-blooded rival I have spent my life trying to outsmart. But as the fog thickens and our research brings us dangerously close, Ignat begins noticing my tremors. Will he use my secret to destroy me, or is my bitterest enemy the only one who can save my life?
3
Smiles, Scalpels, and Syndicate Takeovers
By @john1208
Zivena Korzha spent five grueling years abroad mastering the forbidden art of Arcano-Surgery to protect her sickly little brother. She finally returns to the smog-choked metropolis of Ostragrad for her mentor's funeral, only to find her fiancé Drystan clinging to a tearful girl who looks exactly like her. His excuse? 'I'm marrying her for duty, but I love you.' Zivena just giggles, pats his cheek, and immediately uses a prestigious Imperial Grant to purchase a controlling stake in Drystan’s company, effectively becoming his boss. However, the 'reward' grant is secretly a political trap laced with a Blood-Debt Hex designed to ruin her. Hiding her razor-sharp intellect behind a ditzy, cheerful persona, Zivena wields her surgical genius to excise the syndicate's corruption and turn the trap into a goldmine. Told in alternating third-person perspectives between the bubbly Zivena and the devastatingly handsome, fiercely loyal rival magnate Levon Zarya - who treats her like an absolute queen - the story follows Zivena building her empire. Will Drystan survive being miserable middle-management for the woman he threw away, or will Zivena's bubbly ruthlessness crush him for good?
3
Crying Exes and Cellular Regeneration
By @john1208
"Roshi, it's just a contract to appease my family's investors. My heart is yours!" Kavadh pleaded, striking a tragic pose that belonged in a cheap theater. I adjusted my safety goggles, mortified by his public shouting. I had just returned from a brutal five-year surgical residency in the frozen northern colonies to strike a vital funding deal for my bio-aether lab, only to find my supposed true love parading around with a weeping stand-in. Instead of throwing a dramatic tantrum like a proper scorned woman, I handed back his ring, asked him to please step off my centrifuge's power cable, and returned to my cell cultures. I don't have time for a man who treats romance like a hostage negotiation; I have the Simurgh Laureate to win. To secure my funding, I'm forced to share a laboratory with Behrouz Jahandar, my obnoxiously brilliant and infuriatingly handsome academic rival. As Kavadh spirals into obsessive regret - realizing he tossed away a diamond for a pebble - I'm too busy dodging falsified data to care. But when my sweetest, most trusted lab manager turns out to be playing all sides to steal my magnum opus, will my stubbornness be enough to survive the brutal world of peer review?
2
The Spore-Weaver's Cheeky Alibi
By @john1208
In her previous life, the haughty matriarch Nivara perished alone in a freezing sanitarium, deeply regretting her refusal to visit her estranged arranged husband, Dakarun, on his deathbed. Upon rebirth, she expects a second chance at her own life. Instead, on an otherwise ordinary morning, she awakens hovering over Dakarun’s sleeping face with a poisoned needle in hand. She has swapped bodies, waking up as Zhira - the very assassin who doomed him in the past timeline. Refusing to let history repeat itself, Nivara tosses the weapon out the window. When the estate guards burst in, she shamelessly jumps into Dakarun's bed and publicly declares she infiltrated the manor simply because she was driven mad by his breathtaking beauty. While her aggressive, cheeky flirtation severely flusters the famously stoic lord and creates a tantalizingly slow-burn romantic tension, her actual goal has nothing to do with romance. Aided by a six-legged marsh-macaque, she must covertly use her assassin mobility to hunt down the architects of the bio-plague sweeping the submerged city. Can she synthesize the cure and destroy their past enemies before Dakarun realizes this unhinged assassin is actually his cold-hearted wife?
2
The Crimson Graft Protocol
By @john1208
I ripped open the heavily armored courier package, expecting a set of titanium scalpels. Instead, I found a still-beating, iridescent beast organ and an anonymous invitation to the Zenith Conclave. Perfect timing, considering my return to the capital was instantly derailed by my ex-fiancé, Temur. Standing next to a weeping, fragile girl who looked remarkably like a softer version of me, he stammered that my endless surgical studies abroad meant he thought I was never coming back. I couldn't help but laugh - I only ever dated him because his resting heart rate was the perfect control group for my thesis on combat adrenaline. Without a second thought, I revoked his access to the Zenith Spire, permanently banning him from the only medical bays that could repair his gear. I immediately partnered with my aggressively uptight academic rival to dive headfirst into the explosive, high-speed world of live apex beast grafting. But as we slice through monsters under heavy fire to claim the Conclave's legendary Sovereign Core, a terrifying pattern emerges in the tissue samples. What if the grand prize we are risking our lives for isn't an evolution, but an assimilation?
1
The Resonance Surgeon's Gentle Buyout
By @john1208
Fiyali spent five grueling years at the Ocularis Institute, mastering cellular surgery to save her fragile world. Her only comfort was the beautiful, encouraging letters from her fiancé, Jadhen. But an ordinary morning of surprising him with fresh pastries goes horribly wrong when she walks into his office to find him marrying her identical stand-in. His frantic excuse? 'It's just a contract, my heart is yours.' Shy but fiercely stubborn, Fiyali refuses to fight for a man's divided heart. She leaves her engagement ring beside the pastry box and uses her groundbreaking surgical patents to launch a hostile takeover of his guild, officially becoming his boss. As she demotes him and dismantles his ego, Fiyali uncovers a shocking identity swap: Jadhen never wrote those letters. The true author was Azhak, Jadhen's quiet, fiercely loyal business partner who has loved Fiyali from the shadows for years. With their floating world on the verge of collapsing due to Jadhen's corporate greed, can Fiyali and Azhak synthesize their research to save their home, and will Jadhen survive the agony of watching his former white moonlight marry the man who truly treats her like a queen?
1
Night of the Brass Coin
By @john1208
The story opens with a breakneck chase through the neon-drenched slums of Kravathek, as underground doctor Dacha Zoria narrowly escapes a pack of cybernetic bloodhounds. Dacha never wanted romance; she just needed a quick burst of somatic energy to survive an experimental toxin. Breaking into a red-light district suite, she mistook the terrifying Spire Enforcer, Vorek Yastov, for a hired resonance escort. After extracting what she needed, she left a mocking thank-you note and three rusty brass tokens on his nightstand. Now, Vorek is furiously tearing the subterranean city apart to find and obliterate the woman who humiliated him. By day, Dacha hides in plain sight as the only physician capable of soothing his cursed insomnia, gritting her teeth as he vents about the 'street rat' he plans to skin. It’s a high-stakes, action-packed game of survival where one wrong glance means death. But as an unseen plague threatens the slums, Dacha discovers the mastermind behind Vorek's curse is her own mentor - whose terrifying actions are the only thing holding back a worse apocalypse. When a sudden bio-warfare attack forces Dacha to use her stolen resonance technique in triage, Vorek corners her. Will this desperate medical maneuver expose her as his elusive prey?
1
I Refuse to Let My Doomed Husband Die
By @john1208
I was supposed to marry the rising star of the Imperial Armada. Instead, my cousin Bianca hijacked my engagement at the grand Solstice Gala, declaring they were destined soulmates. Her real reason? In her previous life, she suffered horribly at the hands of a monster, and desperately stole the only 'safe' military man she knew. I almost feel bad for her, but to protect my little brother from our uncle's wrath, I quietly accepted the public humiliation and the consolation prize: Commander Niccolo Dandolo, a disabled, brooding war hero dying of Abyssal Rot. Bianca thinks she secured a glorious future. She doesn't realize her new husband is a lazy man-child who only succeeded because I secretly wrote all his naval strategies! While Tiziano's career rapidly implodes without me, I'm busy force-feeding foul-tasting alchemical smoothies to my dangerously depressed new husband. Niccolo just wants to brood in his wheelchair and await death, but I am entirely too stubborn to let my patient expire. Now he's fully cured, ridiculously wealthy, and glaring at anyone who breathes in my direction. Can a painfully shy apothecary survive high society with a lethal, overly-attached war hero on her arm?
1
The Poisoned Pedestal
By @john1208
At the grand engagement banquet of the Fashar estate, Nisari springs her trap. Armed with memories of her past life, she publicly seduces Omariyan, the brilliant scholar destined to become Prime Minister, leaving her cousin Tazien to be wed to Kadaar - a penniless, disgraced farmer dying of a notorious blood-rot. What Nisari doesn’t realize is that Tazien possesses a sharp, ruthless mind. Tazien knows the Prime Minister's seat is a gilded cage designed by a paranoid Emperor to eventually scapegoat and execute his most powerful scholars. Unbothered by the humiliation, Tazien ships off to the barren steppes with her new husband. Told in alternating perspectives between the coldly calculating Tazien and the fiercely untamed Kadaar, the story follows a bitter rivalry of wills. Kadaar loathes nobles and fights her at every turn in their dilapidated farmhouse. But as Tazien uses her forbidden medical arts to purge the terminal rot from his veins, their enmity turns into a dangerous, unstoppable alliance. Kadaar's agricultural empire soon chokes the capital's supply lines, while Nisari's stolen marriage crumbles when Omariyan realizes her manipulative deceit and divorces her. As the Emperor prepares his execution block for the capital's elite, who will truly hold the empire's throat?
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