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The saying goes that when a man is born, the Fates weave his destiny and swaddle him in it. When he dies, that swaddle becomes his shroud. Heaven moves on. To question the Fates is audacity. To transgress the line of divinity, scale Olympus Mons, and defy the threads of destiny is hubris — a mark every philosopher bears plainly on their soul.

Tucked away on a quiet street, the bookstore doesn't have an address — it magically appears to those who are meant to find it. The job ad seemed amazing: tend a remarkable bookstore with an incredible espresso machine, a cute black cat on the counter, and a room upstairs. The perfect arrangement for paying off ungodly student loans. But as soon as the paperwork is signed, the new keeper discovers the cat talks — and that magic might just be real.

Mason Curacao is a big dreamer with an even bigger legacy to uphold. After the unexpected deaths of his famous Alchemist parents, it's been a long, lonely summer for the new Alchemy Academy graduate. When it's finally time to open his very own Tonic Shop, the Brewmasters' Guild assigns him — the son of the famous Curacaos and top of his graduating class — to a shop located in the absolute last place anyone would ever want to travel: the Edge of the World. Despite wild and downright unsettling neighbors, Mason is determined to do his parents justice, defy the Brewmasters' Guild, and build the best damn Tonic Shop at the Edge of the World. Just as long as he doesn't fall off the Edge first.

The more lives you've lived, the more mana you have — and Cale has lived too many lives to count. His core is closer to the magical equivalent of a nuclear reactor. The downside: conventional spells have become impossibly difficult to cast, collapsing under the weight of his own magic. Then he finds himself summoned to a new world with a spellwork system capable of adjusting to his ridiculous reserves, creating new spells just for him. To make spells worth having, that means enrolling at a magic academy. On top of that, an old dragon has taken an interest in him, the kingdom's hunters seem intent on attacking his classmates, and at least one ancient evil appears to have followed him from a past life. With magic back on the table, Cale might finally achieve what he considers the true pinnacle of spellwork: baking.

His name is Eight. Not really, but that's what the System decided after a slip of the tongue. One moment, he was stepping out the office door on the way home, and the next waking up on a hillside below a town wall — and the gate guard drove him off, thinking he was a monster. Life's tough when you're an old man trapped in an eight-year-old body on another world. But there's sixty-four years of hard-won wisdom inside that small frame, and Eight will use every bit of it to survive.

For allegedly average high-schooler Leonard Dunning, the rhetorical question of how you'd react to finding yourself in a world running on tropes and clichés became uncomfortably real. He woke up on a strangely pristine island country in the middle of the Atlantic — without memories, surrounded by countless characterless placeholders, with a classic harem protagonist and his love interests for friends. As he investigates the rules governing the world and works to sabotage the harem tropes, his outside-context knowledge, unique abilities, and talent for causing trouble draw the attention of the world's nebulous narrative.

The Wilds relentlessly reclaim all things. Humanity shelters within ever-dying cities. Mages create the only path forward. Tala had to fight tooth and nail in the Magic Academy to forge a power path that was her own. She knows it is her duty to use that power to defend humanity against the creatures of the untamable wilds — but she skipped a few steps in her education, like apprenticing to someone who actually knows what they're doing. Now Tala must balance learning as fast as she can with paying off the veritable mountain of debt the Academy dropped on her shoulders, not to mention staying alive. Even though she should only be a Mageling, the world considers her a Mage.

The universe was a vast, empty, dark, and uncaring place — until life happened and changed it forever, even if only a teeny-tiny bit. Perspective, as it turns out, is everything. Magh'rathlak the Observer is an unfathomable cosmic being from beyond the veil of reality. Average as far as reality-warping entities go, it still struggles to keep things in perspective. To narrow its maddening vastness, it decides to compress its entire being into a single corporeal form. Magh'rathlak had never tried such a feat, but that wasn't about to stop it. After all — how hard could being human possibly be?

Post-apocalyptic Oregon Trail. Mazelton comes from a clan of radiation wizards who harvest the cores of living beings to power their magics — but he has no enthusiasm for the family trade. That hardly matters when entire armies are sent to exterminate his clan. He has to run: from mobs, cannibals, soldiers, sailors, cholera, cattle, thieving sales-monks, starvation, mechanical horrors, vengeful spirits, forced marriages, and poison of every sort. Fortunately, his not-terribly-nice family has trained him to survive apocalypses. A world still recovering from the last one should be easy.

Starving artist Angelica Hallow is hit on the head by a mysterious book while dumpster diving. Compelled by its illustrations, she recreates one of the intricate circles on her apartment floor — and accidentally triggers a Summoning. But rather than a Demon or other supernatural creature, she summons herself. With a new voice in her head blathering about Skills and Contracts, and an inexplicable ability to give herself Orders she is compelled to obey, Angelica must figure out whether she can secure the peaceful life of artistry she craves — or whether she will come to embrace the Demon within.

The world called out for a hero to purge it of great evil. It received Broccoli Bunch — explorer, expert cleaner, occasional ghost-buster, and full-time Cinnamon Bun. Broccoli's approach to adventure is unconventional: talk enemies into becoming friends, hug menu boxes, and wield overpowered skills like Cleaning and Gardening. Her personal quest is simple — make all the friends. All of them.

An average guy wakes up in a forest with no idea how he got there. He wasn't summoned to defeat a demon lord or save the world — as far as he can tell. He can't speak the local language, and not everybody immediately trusts a pajama-wearing stranger they found in the wilderness. Things generally go downhill from there, at least until the blue boxes start appearing. Delve is a story about finding your way in a new, strange, and dangerous world. It's about avoiding death, figuring out what's going on, and making friends along the way. The main character takes an unconventional path as a support mage focused entirely on mana regeneration — a build most adventurers consider foolish. The numbers in this story actually mean something, and progression is measured not just in personal power but in allies, connections, and hard-won knowledge.

The world of Pokémon is synonymous with young boys and girls going on a journey and facing many challenges. This story is not like that. This is a story about a self-insert coming into one of the most prominent companions of the Pokémon world. Unlike other stories, Brock is already established and has gone on his journey — he's faced challenges and returned home to be other people's challenges. Explore an alternate Pokémon universe with an expanded cast and more mature ideals through the eyes of Brock, Gym Leader of Pewter City Gym, and family man.

Cynthia doesn't quite get him. He knows things he shouldn't, doesn't know things he should, and is definitely not somebody she thought she'd end up journeying with. Really, it was just his Buneary that was way too cute to leave behind. An OC-insert fic told from a young Cynthia's point of view.

What happens when a man with knowledge of hardware technology is transported into a foreign world filled with magic — and discovers a deep correlation between his expertise and the words of power? As the lowly fourth son of a noble house, he must find his footing in a world where skills and stats equal power and status. A crafting-focused progression story about knowledge, adaptation, and carving out a place in a world built around strength.

Trevor has been training since he was a child for a life of combat and adventure — ten years of gruelling preparation. On the year of his 15th birthday, the day of choosing arrives only to have his entire world crushed as he is assigned the class 'Arcane Chef', an unknown rare class with no known history or levelling path. Being a cooking class, he's relegated to the Servant class of society. The journey travels through his struggles to come to terms with this class, trying to keep his friendships intact and make new ones. Unbeknownst to all, Arcane Chef will have a drastic impact on the world as a whole. Join Trevor as he discovers his class, travels the world, and seeks the glory, adventure, and friendship he thought he had lost — all while cooking amazing food.

Forty-year-old project manager Tori Felix was scrolling through a wiki article about a dating sim on the bullet train when everything went wrong. She woke up in the bruised teenage body of Victoria de Guevera — the villainess of the popular game "The Romance of Soleil" — with a splitting headache and a very bad prognosis: according to the wiki, Victoria dies violently at the hands of sex slavers. With only weeks before the heroine and villainess collide, there is no time for an existential crisis. Tori's personal mantra has always been "assess the situation, then make a plan of action" — and she intends to use it.

Luri is dead again. Which means it is once more time to meet old friends, share new stories, and drink things that are likely lethal to anyone who isn't already deceased. In between life and death, in between earning accolades and honing skills, there is nothing to do except wait for the next try, and share moments with the only people who can be important to you. Luri is dead again. But even this won't last forever.

British plumber Aldrich Isengrund donates his body to science only to wake up in the far future as the last survivor of a Federation experiment. Stuffed with archeotech, he has been given a chance to live long and prosper — so long as he reaps the great tithe of xenos required to unlock his implanted machines. How much destruction will one man incite with a battered plasteel pipe?

There are a lot of things wrong with Liv Brodbeck. She's too small — working in the castle kitchens with her mother, she can't carry a sack of flour or roll a keg of ale. The chirurgeon says she has brittle bones, barring her from the rough play other children enjoy. Everyone says she ruined her mother's life when she was born. A child like Liv doesn't have much hope. But when she accidentally unleashes a surge of wild magic, she takes her first step on a journey that will lead her from the kitchens of Castle Whitehill, to the cold palaces of the Eld, and beyond — to the graves of gods.