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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.

Becoming a knockoff Dracula in tight leather pants was never part of Vincent's plans. Neither was being summoned to another world by a cult of vampire wannabes. But both happened. Now Vincent's left picking up the tattered pieces of his humanity as he tries to grow strong enough to keep his family safe. There's a world filled with nightmares, and the looming threat of losing his soul standing between his goal and his reality. A good man is going to war.

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.

Once, Shen Bu destroyed everything his father had ever worked for — burning the new home to ashes, consuming his mother's cultivation, and slaying the unborn daughter within her. Three hundred years later, Shen Yu is still searching for anything to save that daughter's life, crippled and hidden in a realm where time is slowed to preserve her. No progress has been made. Feeling the weight of his quest, he returns to the city of his birth to drown his sorrows — and meets a boy who finally gives him hope. Waking up in the body of an eight-year-old kid dying of plague in a xianxia setting was not anyone's idea of a good time. The new inhabitant lacks a cheat or a system, but a chance meeting with an unremarkable middle-aged man who likes talking about medicine may prove more valuable than it seems.

Tanya Degurechaff is back — this time reincarnated as a Chansey, a Pokémon known for its kind soul, healing ability, monstrous durability, and a born career pipeline to a life of helping others in Pokémon Centers. Determined to finally get an easy life away from all the battling nonsense, Tanya figures a starting position like this will make things simple. She is wrong.

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.

Ash just wanted to clear his family's debts in the frontier town of Dawnwatch. A dungeon run gone wrong turned up a Soul Gem worth a kingdom — and instead of selling it, he forged it into a sentient, armor-crushing warhammer who demands blood sacrifices, won't sleep on anything less than satin, and firmly believes he is the main character. Now Ash has to slay enough monsters to keep his weapon fed, protect the people he cares about, and survive the impending monster waves — all while arguing with a tool who has strong opinions about everything.

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?

It's just a game — isn't it? Twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell is about to set the high score on Only You Can Save Mankind when the alien fleet sends an unexpected message: they wish to surrender. But the aliens aren't supposed to surrender — they're supposed to die.

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.

By cruel trick of the fates — or just the apathy of an uncaring universe — a modern soul awakens as Orochimaru shortly after he has possessed a woman as his new host. Now they must find a way to turn a hoard of sycophants and psychopaths into something that will not only keep them from an early grave, but reshape it into a genuine force for change in a messed-up world.

A wise man once said all roads lead to Rome. He didn't know how right he was. Ripped away from the battlefield, Tiberius and his six thousand Roman Legionnaires find themselves stranded in a foreign land of magic and witchcraft. With no way home, their path forward is obvious: conquer everything in sight — much to the chagrin of Marcus, the poor, unsuspecting bard who summoned them. Taking over the world is not so easy. The Legion must learn to navigate the strange magics and abilities this new world has granted them. Meanwhile Marcus must figure out how to mitigate the force of nature he's unleashed upon his woefully unprepared world — or simply enjoy the front-row seat to an epic in the making.

Vrax should be dead by now, and he damn well knows it. Yet he's still here — delving into the eldritch unknown of the Forsaken Lands at level zero, being an overtly picky asshole, and praying for the System to give him the perfect class. Until then, he'll just have to outwit or outrun the horrors most sane adventurers avoid. Everything changes when he gets offered a class with twisted but limitless potential: one that lets him fight the horrors he's been running from his whole life using even worse creatures of his own making. Steady progression from level zero, with a unique power set that lets him craft and twist monsters into deadly horrors.

Erind Hartwell is a dutiful daughter, law student, film enthusiast — and psychopath. She's relatively normal, even in a world where superhumans battle eldritch horrors that transform people into monsters. Viewing life as a movie, she has always wanted to be the main character. That wish is granted unexpectedly: on the brink of death, impaled by a spike, an otherworldly entity offers her powers. Becoming a monster isn't exactly the heroic origin she imagined — but she didn't have much choice, and she can probably make it work. Follow an endearing psychopath through the chaos of a battle between superhumans, hi-tech government agents, monsters, mutants, and wannabe heroes for Earth and the future of humanity.

What happens when a reincarnation goes horribly wrong? Oran Farrow is not who he used to be. The soul inhabiting his body was once a sick man on earth, suffering from chronic pain and despair. He prayed for an end to his torment, and death answered. Now in a different world, with a body and name that are not his own, he must learn to navigate a world of monsters and magic. Dealing with demon cultists, a lovesick necromancer, and worst of all, being a shambling corpse, would be hard for most people. But after the life he's had, Oran couldn't be happier. Nobody has it as good as the dead.

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.

Eliza Scaggs is tired of the rumors — that she's an old witch who made a pact with darkness, that her pet monster stalks children. She's been working herself to the bone on a secret government project, trying to prove that she, the only woman in the wizard's guild, actually belongs there. When she takes on a teenage apprentice named Oliver, she's determined to show that mentoring a kid is not something a twisted hell spawn would do. But Oliver is quiet in a way that worries her, and when he asks if she can "fix" people, she fears he means himself. Set in a world where magic drives the industrial revolution, the story follows a witch and her apprentice as they are thrust into a dangerous faction war.

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.

A collection of what-if scenarios set in the world of Mother of Learning — alternate timelines exploring the fascinating concepts that time-loop stories make possible. Mother of Learning is a story of a magic-using teenager stuck in a time loop, set in a fantasy world in the midst of a technological and magical revolution. These AU chapters are non-canonical and made purely for fun. If you aren't familiar with the main story, these may not make much sense.