False Gold: A LitRPG Progression Fantasy
Owen Pike has stood on the Assay Stone three times in his life. Every time, it has named him Copper.
He is thirty-one years old, has spent nine years behind a pawnbroker's counter, and is back in the queue because Greyward puts everyone there sooner or later.
This time, the stone returns nothing.
Not Copper. Not a lower rank. Nothing.
There is no procedure for that. The official roll has no place for a blank.
Owen leaves the hall able to see the number hidden inside every person's rank. Whole, exact, and impossible to mistake. The first thing he discovers is that the woman everyone was bowing to is six levels weaker than they believe.
The second is that Greyward is wrong about almost everyone.
The Assay Stone sorts every soul into five bands, each ten levels wide. Nobody can see the number inside the band. Two men marked Copper can stand in the same doorway eight levels apart, yet receive the same wages and the same rights. Licences depend on the word. So do bonds, guild membership, and permission to sign a contract worth more than two gold.
Owen begins to notice the people trapped beneath the wrong word.
A hauler who has carried a yard for twenty-two years on a paper that was already wrong when he received it. An archer condemned by one story attached to her name, with no way into the room where it is repeated. A woman who has mended pans for fourpence since she was sixteen because nobody has ever trusted her with anything harder.
Owen cannot fight. He does not learn to. What he can do is find the people Greyward has priced too low and spend everything he has getting them papers that tell the truth.
But correcting one rank means proving the Assay Stone was wrong. Proving that means threatening every wage, licence, debt, and title built upon its judgement.
Isolde Varn holds her house together through rank, credit, and careful control. Within a week, she has worked out exactly what Owen is.
Neither of them can afford to let the other speak.
About the seriesA progression fantasy about worth rather than power. A protagonist who cannot fight and never pretends otherwise. A full party, four paths, and equal shares. A walled guild town governed by rank, debt, licences, and contracts. A progression system that measures what a person has done, with numbers that remain consistent from the first level to the end of the seventh book.
No chosen one. No sudden transformation into a swordsman.
For readers who enjoy the structured progression and long-form character growth of He Who Fights with Monsters and The Primal Hunter.
Book one of seven.
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