The Astral Pull - Book 1 of the Unchaining

Some people are born lucky. Aster wasn't. Broke, evicted, and one psychotic episode away from embracing the freeway. He thought he was cursed… He wasn't. His luck was simply being stolen. Since before he was born, something has been quietly feeding on his Fate, consuming every future in which his life might have prospered. Days before his twenty-first birthday, a hallucination hands him a house key and teaches him how to brew a drug that tears a hole through reality. Turns out, the hallucination wasn’t a breakdown. It was an invitation and the universe had a far stranger explanation for his suffering than he ever imagined. Hidden beneath the world everyone insists on pretending is solid runs another one: the Astral Plane. A civilization built from the accumulated weight of human belief, where emotions become ecosystems, ideas become predators, and the things humanity refuses to process eventually grow teeth. Survival in the Astral Plane depends on a single anomaly drawn from the Material Realm: Faith. Prayer or profit. Devotion or debt. Worship or advertising. The universe doesn't care where belief comes from. Faith is raw power. For thousands of years the great Legacy families have built entire civilizations around harvesting, refining, and monopolizing it. They own the institutions that govern cultivation, the contracts that decide who lives and dies, and the machinery that quietly turns belief itself into political and economic power. In the Astral Plane, theology is treated like infrastructure. Born heir to two Legacy bloodlines, Aster should have inherited that world. Instead, the parasite stole his future before he ever had the chance to live it. Now the parasite has been sealed. The theft has stopped. And Aster has been enrolled at Galamad Academy. An institution that treats the soul less like something sacred and more like an engineering problem. Here, students learn to rewrite themselves through living Scriptures, harvest executable Glyphs from monsters born of humanity's collective unconscious, and cultivate bodies that function less like flesh than programmable architecture. Magic isn't learned so much as reverse-engineered. Every breakthrough rewrites the operating system of the soul. For the first time in his life, Aster's future belongs to him. But the thing that stole it may also be the greatest breakthrough in cultivation history. As he uncovers the truth behind his bloodline, the parasite inside him, and the institutions that quietly govern both worlds, Aster begins to suspect something far worse than a conspiracy. The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as it was designed. Now he faces an impossible choice. Master the machinery that profited from his suffering... ...or become the first person in a hundred thousand years to break it. The Astral Pull is the first novel in The Unchaining, an epic progression fantasy that combines cosmic horror, occult philosophy, absurdist humour, and intricate progression mechanics into a world where cultivation follows the logic of systems engineering, theology, and Western esotericism. Drawing inspiration from the philosophical interiority of Disco Elysium, the satirical wit of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, and the epic scope of Steven Erikson, The Unchaining asks a simple question: What if Fate wasn't destiny... but infrastructure? — Description from novelcodex.org