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Aric: The Corruption of Concordia: Book One of Ten in The Broken Legacy Saga
Paperback
Series: The Broken Legacy Saga, Book 1
Mystery & ThrillerGeneral Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jan 1 2026
Pages: 316
Weight: 1.21
Height: 0.66 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
In the aftermath of the Unbinding, a cataclysm that shattered ancient seals and reintroduced raw magic into the world, humanity rebuilt itself around order, precision, and control. Nowhere is this ideal more perfectly realized than in Concordia, a vast technomantic city governed by the Aetherion Compliance Bureau and overseen by the Council of Dreamers, human minds integrated with AI to ensure balance beyond corruption.
Aric Kaelen is one of the Bureau's most trusted technomancers, an auditor trained to read the city's systems as living patterns of mana and machine. He believes in Concordia, in the certainty of numbers, and in a system designed to correct itself. That belief fractures when Aric discovers a recursive anomaly buried deep within the city's mana-physical infrastructure, a loop that should not exist, yet persists without triggering any safeguards.
When Aric brings the anomaly before the Council, it is dismissed as noise. Ordered to return to his duties, he is left with a growing unease that the system is not merely blind to the flaw, but actively concealing it. His mentor, Director Miles Donovan, confirms Aric's fears, warning him that the Council may be manipulating the Aether itself, shaping power not for balance, but for control.
As Aric continues his work, the city begins to feel subtly wrong. Energy flows falter. Security tightens. And a mysterious woman appears at the edges of his routine, invisible to the grid, untouched by the city's patterns, watching him with knowing calm. Her presence suggests forces beyond Concordia's reach and a design older than the Bureau's authority.
Pulled between loyalty and doubt, Aric is drawn deeper into the hidden strata beneath the city, encountering forgotten markets, underground societies, and truths deliberately erased from official history. As the anomaly spreads and the Veil's influence stirs, Aric must confront the possibility that Concordia's perfection is not harmony, but containment, and that the system he serves may be the greatest threat to the world it claims to protect.
Aric: The Corruption of Concordia is a dystopian science-fantasy novel about control disguised as balance, systems that learn to lie, and the quiet rebellion of a man who refuses to ignore the crack in a perfect world.
Royal Road verification: Brad Slade is the author and copyright holder of Aric: The Corruption of Concordia and authorizes its publication through the Royal Road account Brad Slade.Also in
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