The Bad Apothecary

[Pre-release ARC readers needed. Contact me for information to be one of the first to read it!]

Release plans:

• As a serial on Royal Road – November 2025
• In print and ebook – Dec 27th 2025

Blurb:

Diwu stumbles into the capital half-dead—wounded by something no healer can cure. Nestled in her flesh is a strange pathogen carrying corruption, the antithesis of the Natural Order.

Desperate, she trades freedom for survival and falls into the grip of the Hierarchy—a ruthless organization that keeps power in check by any means necessary. Their offer: treatment in exchange for loyalty. Service. Obedience.

Her first assignment entangles her with Nex Teres, a battle-hardened cultivator with no interest in playing agent. But the Hierarchy doesn’t ask—it coerces. Bound by duty and circumstance, they’re sent to a lawless outpost where Diwu was first infected—and where whispers swirl around a long-dead legend: the Bad Apothecary.

As bodies drop and corruption spreads, the two find themselves caught between mad cultists, power-hungry extraordinaries, and beings who’ve transcended their humanity—or lost it. A blade whispers. Old enemies stir. And Diwu must navigate forces she barely understands… before they decide what she’s meant to become.

Book 2

Preliminary Blurb:

Diwu and Nex return to Central City, where life under the Hierarchy is as merciless as the enemies outside it. While Diwu conceals the dangerous changes stirring within her—fearing the Hierarchy would purge her if they knew—new horrors surface in the streets.

Bodies begin to appear, echoing the ruptured cultivators from Stone Sky City. Then a devastating strike tears through one of Quy’s most powerful Houses, using an extraordinary weapon unlike anything the agents ever faced. The attack drags the Hierarchy into a conflict it would rather avoid, and every thread the agents follow leads deeper into a trap without a name.

But these deaths trace back to someone from Diwu and Nex’s past. The weapon bears the mark of the path she must keep hidden. And the attack strikes at the heart of Nex’s oldest wound.

Enemies are closing in. Secrets are tightening. And when the truth surfaces, it will bind Diwu and Nex to the chaos—or tear them apart.

[Cover to be revealed]