Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Hollow Tier: LitRPG System Evolution and System Apocalypse: A Progression Fantasy

The Hollow Tier: LitRPG System Evolution and System Apocalypse: A Progression Fantasy

Calder, Rhys

Paperback

Series: Inheritor of the Lapse, Book 1

Fantasy

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798182126496
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 326
Weight: 0.87
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The System reads every soul in Vaeholt and hands it a Class. It looked at Theo Marsh and saw nothing at all.

Vaeholt is built into the ribs of something that died before anyone could write down its name, a vast cage of stone the city climbs rung over rung over rung. Where you live is decided by the glyph the System burns into your skin at Assessment. The Classed live high, where the floodwater never reaches and the air tastes of lamp oil. The Unclassed live down in the wet, in the drowned undercity, scraping the silt for salvage the System forgot to log.

A Courier's Class would let Theo run packets between the tiers. A Salvor's Class would read the dead-zones and show him where the good metal lay. Every Classed citizen hums with the low note of their power, a whole hall of them braiding into a chord of belonging. Theo's collarbone is silent. His wrist is silent. Born three rungs from the bottom and marked Unread, he has kept a single brass re-test token clenched in his fist for eight months, telling himself the world simply missed him in the sorting the way a tired clerk misses a name.

It did not miss him. It cannot see him. And in a city that runs on being seen, that is the most dangerous thing a person can be.

When Theo binds a strange core buried in the undercity silt, something that should not exist begins to grow inside him. He is Hollow, a soul the System cannot parse, cannot Class, and cannot erase. Every rung he climbs, he evolves. And with every evolution a fragment of a hidden message surfaces, left behind by a woman named Calla who climbed nearly to the top of the world and then, on purpose, stopped.

Because the climb is the trap.

The summit is not a prize. It is a Lapse, a reset that scrubs the board clean. Stone, paper, memory, every living name wiped so the cycle can run again from the bottom. Calla saw it coming and tried to warn the others, but truth weighs, and a warning drags your climb, and no one drunk on the high rungs wanted to hear that the prize was a slaughter. So she built the one thing a reset cannot erase: a seed, Hollow by design, unreadable, with her warning and her memories poured in after. She set it to grow a person back up out of the dark across whatever empty age came next.

The seed found Theo. The seed is building Theo. And it has handed him the single truth no warning has ever survived to deliver.

Now the only Unclassed boy in Vaeholt must do what no Classed climber ever could: reach the highest tier not to win it, but to break it, and find the one locked door in the whole city that leads out of it entirely, before the System finishes its count and the world starts over without him in it.

The Hollow Tier is book one of Inheritor of the Lapse.

If you love hard-rule progression systems, an underdog who levels up from absolute nothing, a layered world thick with buried lore, and a mystery that rewires everything you thought the climb was for, start the ascent here.

Perfect for fans of Cradle, Dungeon Crawler Carl, He Who Fights with Monsters, and The Wandering Inn.

One-click, and begin the climb.

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