The Phantom Artisan's Canvas
By @john1208
Fang Yanqing, a modern special effects makeup artist with a chronic inability to turn away a soul in need, wakes up in ancient Xichuan. He is now the notoriously useless son of a corrupt Minister, exiled to a barren, famine-ravaged village meant to be his grave. With ruthless tax collectors marching to slaughter the starving peasants and hoard the remaining grain, Yanqing must act fast. Using local clay, crushed insects, and tree sap, he weaponizes his trade in high-stakes, action-packed heists. He crafts hyper-realistic plague sores to repel soldiers, forges the faces of dead imperial inspectors to infiltrate heavily guarded grain silos, and weaves optical illusions to turn frail villagers into a phantom army. His reckless compassion draws the attention of Yan Jingshuang, a terrifyingly pragmatic rebel commander who views him as a naive but brilliant asset. But as Yanqing dodges arrows to decode mysterious contouring diagrams hidden in his ancestral jade, he realizes a shocking truth: his 'useless' predecessor was actually his own future self, who orchestrated this exact exile to prevent an apocalypse. Can his brush strokes rewrite a doomed history, or will his bleeding heart get them all killed?
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Bound by the Liar's Prophecy
By @john1208
Ziratu’s mentor dies with a gruesome warning, leaving behind a flesh-bound novel detailing how Vashnir, the Silent Arbiter, will soon slaughter Ziratu and her little brother, Kidin. Always cold and calculating, Ziratu immediately implements a flawless, emotionless plan to evade her fated murderer. She fakes an engagement to the cremated remains of a disgraced noble, believing this legal loophole will place her entirely outside Vashnir’s jurisdiction. Instead, her bizarre, deadpan attempts to dodge the deadly inquisitor only convince him she is a dangerous mastermind. Told in alternating third-person perspectives, the story follows their escalating cat-and-mouse game until a ritual glitch permanently binds their souls into an unbreakable, entirely non-romantic investigative partnership. Forced to hunt the city's real eldritch threats together, Ziratu discovers the horrifying truth: the novel was completely wrong. Vashnir isn't a serial killer, but the only man capable of saving Kidin. The flesh-bound book was actually penned by Ziratu's own past incarnation, an elaborate web of lies designed to force this exact partnership. But what terrifying, world-ending entity was her past self trying so desperately to defeat?
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