I THAT NEVER WAS

Knowledge is currency. Alchemy is knowledge.

Most people don't know it exists. Those who do call it heresy. Those who practice it call it ascension.

Man wakes in the lightless depths of Tauran City Prison with no records, no past-only a vocabulary that doesn't belong to him. In a facility built to process human bodies, ignorance is a death sentence.

To survive, he bonds with a parasitic alchemical metal: a weapon that grows stronger with blood, memory, and use. But power always comes at a price he doesn't yet understand.
Guided by a man who knows too much and a girl who should not have survived this long, he descends through a system where alchemy is graded, identities fracture, and nothing is free.

You are not a prisoner.
You are a specimen.
And ascension has already begun.