

Modern-day gamer Leo Kane dies suddenly after an all-night gaming session and wakes up in another world as Grecan's most feared assassin, Cipher. Upon awakening, he's hired by Imperial Guard officer Hugo Spence to kill a woman named Lady Brooks. Intending to take the money and slack off, Leo's plan collapses when he's captured by his target, Poppy Brooks, who discovers his assassination mission. After Leo bravely drives off a group of bandits, Poppy's view of him changes. When she later learns that Leo once saved her life, their relationship begins to thaw, sparking a bond neither expected in a world built on blades and secrets...

At eighteen, Nancy Green earns the highest college entrance score in the entire county, and her parents respond by spending ten times her tuition on a motorized tricycle for her brother. With her dream about to die in a mountain village, it is her uncle who quietly sells the family’s last three sheep and presses the money into her hands without ceremony. Nancy carries that sacrifice like a weight and a wing, into a cutthroat corporate world where she battles betrayal and manipulation until she has built a billion-dollar empire from nothing. She confronts the parents who bled her dry with cold, clear-eyed finality. Then her uncle falls gravely ill, and on his deathbed whispers: hate will drag you down. It cracks open something she has armored for twenty years. In the end, Nancy founds a scholarship fund bearing his memory and gives other mountain girls the door someone once opened for her.