When the Safe Zone Starves

The System arrives at 3:17 a.m. with a blue screen over every eye and teeth in the dark. Cities become hunting grounds, highways turn into migration routes for things that used to be myths, and the only places monsters cannot enter are glowing circles called Sanctuaries. But every Sanctuary has a price: blood, labor, mana, and obedience.

Mara Venn, a burned-out paramedic with a dead phone and a younger brother trapped across the city, awakens to a class the System marks as defective: Wound-Eater. She can heal others by taking their injuries into herself—and grow stronger if she survives the pain. In a world where kindness is currency and mercy can get you killed, Mara becomes valuable to every desperate survivor, warlord, cult, and monster wearing a human face.

When her Sanctuary begins to starve and the System announces the first faction trial, Mara must choose between saving the people behind the walls or breaking every rule to reach her brother before the next monster wave drowns the city in red.