The Cursed Ascension

Jorren Thale has known failure his whole life. Not the ordinary kind. The kind that gets stamped into your official record, that follows your family name like a shadow, that makes evaluators smirk before you even press your palm to the stone. When the Soulstone cracks at his touch and brands him with a zero grade, everyone in the chamber considers his story finished. They are wrong. A stranger with sixty years of secrets hands Jorren an ancient codex that the Evaluation system was never built to accommodate. The book does not give him power. It shows him what is already inside him, broken, hollowed, and waiting to be rebuilt from the inside out. Every ascension costs him something. Every level up is paid for in pain, sacrifice, and choices that reveal exactly who he is becoming. But Jorren is not climbing alone. There is Davan Rell, the Keeper's other student, exceptional and dangerous, who watches Jorren the way a predator watches something it has not yet decided to eat. There are enemies embedded in the institutions that condemned his family. There are allies whose loyalty has not yet been tested. And somewhere above every level he reaches, the system he is climbing has already noticed him. Jorren Thale was born to fail every trial. He is about to become something the trials were never designed to produce.