Crown of Ashes: The Shattered Veil

The gods have gone silent, but their judgment lingers in the whispers of a dying world. When the Veil—the ancient boundary between mortal realms and the divine—splinters, death pours into the land like a plague. Crops rot in moments, skies bleed black rain, and madness consumes entire villages. Amid the chaos, a tormented scholar named Kael Veyra uncovers fragments of a forbidden text: the Echoes of the Godclimb, a xianxia-inspired treatise promising power to bend fate itself. Desperate to save his sister from a wasting curse born of the Veil’s corruption, Kael gambles his soul to wield its teachings. But the path to godhood is paved with lies, and his first taste of celestial power shatters not only the Veil further… but his mind. Haunted by visions of a grinning, half-mad deity who calls himself the Thrice-Drowned King, Kael is branded a heretic by the crumbling Church of the Seven Thrones. Hunted by fanatics and stalked by spectral horrors from beyond the Veil, he allies with a rogue inquisitor, Lira of the Hollow Sword, whose blade drinks memories, and a nihilistic alchemist, Veyis, who claims the apocalypse is a song “best danced to.” Together, they race to seal the fractures in reality—but Kael’s newfound power grows volatile, warping his body and erasing his mercy. When his sister becomes a vessel for the Thrice-Drowned King’s laughter, Kael must choose: surrender his power and condemn the world to rot… or ascend as a monster to burn the Veil entirely. But the crown of ashes, they say, fits only those who have forgotten how to weep.