IT'S LIVE. Tenebrist: The Cut is up on Royal Road.
His magic charges him for every cast, and only half of it shows up on the sheet.
Corin Hale is a Tenebrist, which isn't a rare gift so much as a filing problem. His darkness reaches, closes, and drinks whatever it finds: warmth, light, and then the rest of it. Other mages watch him work once and afterward stand a little further away. The guild pays him eight silver a day to kill vermin in stairwells and doesn't pretend that's a career.
He'd take it forever if the job were the problem. It isn't. The man who raised him and taught him to cast is on record at floor fifty-one, and fifty-one sits behind a rank he won't legally hold for sixty years of the only work anyone will hire him for.
So he grinds. Contracts by depth, not by pay. Costs down, level up, one number at a time, with three people who should know better walking beside him.
The numbers are going up. Something else is going down, and nobody's counting it.
Floor-based mega dungeon, crunchy LitRPG systems, a found family that actually earns its dynamics, and a slow burn queer romance simmering underneath a story that owes more to Frieren and Dungeon Meshi than to your average tower climb. Not isekai. Just a guy trying to grind his way to the one place that might have answers, in a world that keeps telling him no.
Read it here:
His magic charges him for every cast, and only half of it shows up on the sheet. Corin Hale is a Tenebrist, which isn't a rare gift so much
