The Abyssal Forge
By @john1208
Mud, blood, and the deafening screech of a Hollow-Weaver. Varis Korveng, a fiercely proud but widely mocked bottom-tier Blacksmith, is pinned in the flooded trenches of the Ashen Caldera. His class restricts him to repairing armor; the System outright forbids him from dealing combat damage. But when a dying Vanguard shoves a severed monster core into Varis's hands for a desperate repair, the System's [Inspect Lore] skill triggers. Varis doesn't just read the core's history - he absorbs its innate magic. Suddenly, he can weaponize the horrific abilities of the beasts that hunt them. With infinite scaling at his fingertips, Varis rises from the dregs of the academy, absorbing hundreds of monstrous skills. His crowning moment arrives when a catastrophic celestial anomaly - a massive, burning meteor - plummets toward the city. Varis obliterates the sky-falling disaster with a single, devastating hammer strike. But the payoff turns sour. The media broadcasts his terrifying, shadowy aura, branding him a demonic heretic wielding forbidden arts. Worse, the System's eerie notifications change tone. The 'skills' he's absorbing are actually shards of an ancient, malevolent entity. Will Varis find a way to purge the trap hidden in his rewards, or will his pride lead him to become the ultimate calamity?
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Eclipse of the Usurper
By @john1208
The Ethereal Court has initiated the Culling - a brutal survival game meant to entertain bored deities. When a divine Envoy descends into a collapsing bunker to draft Earth’s most brilliant tactical mind as a puppet, the paralyzed and ruthless Zirul turns the tables. In a tense, dying bargain, Zirul forces a permanent identity swap, stealing the Envoy's flawless avatar and trapping the god's servant in his doomed human body. Now recognized by the System as a divine administrator, Zirul claims the forbidden power of Shadow Extraction. He doesn't raise rotting corpses; he tears the ethereal essence directly from his foes. Starting with the Envoy's own ghostly assassin - a phantom capable of phasing through solid walls - Zirul's solitary march snowballs into an unstoppable one-man army. His ultimate prize? Slaying the ocean-dwelling leviathan Abzu-Kurgal to serve as a living, sea-faring fortress for his endless shadow legion. The story alternates between Zirul's calculating conquests and the machinations of Osham, a wise human elder who knows Zirul's secret and plots to use the false god for his own ascension. Surrounded by enemies, can a usurper survive the wrath of true deities?
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