They called him trash. The System filed him as a clerical error.
Mu Cheng was supposed to die beside his wife's grave. A discarded carpenter, cast out by his clan fifteen years ago for failing to awaken a spirit root. Then a cosmic filing mistake dragged him into a Tutorial meant for someone else, and he walked out alive with a hammer, a chisel, and fifteen years of knowing exactly where things break.
Now the System wants its mistake undone. Its fix: bind him to the champion he was never meant to replace. Stray a hundred feet apart for thirty minutes, and they both die.
But no true cultivator has ever held the class the error handed him. Mu Cheng can't gather qi, so he carves it, chiseling totems of wood, bone, and water into power with his own two hands. Every dungeon drops better material. Every delve makes the "trash" his clan threw away harder to ignore, and pulls a ragtag party in to fight at his back.
The clan that exiled him is starting to notice. So is the winged arbiter beyond the sky. Because the System keeps flagging Mu Cheng as the fake champion, and no one, not even the System, knows what he becomes if it's wrong.
Totem Carver: Book 1. A dungeon-delving, crafting-class LitRPG cultivation, stacked with real stakes, found family, and a hero who builds his power one totem at a time.
Genre: GameLit
Mu Cheng was supposed to die beside his wife's grave. A discarded carpenter, cast out by his clan fifteen years ago for failing to awaken a spirit root. Then a cosmic filing mistake dragged him into a Tutorial meant for someone else, and he walked out alive with a hammer, a chisel, and fifteen years of knowing exactly where things break.
Now the System wants its mistake undone. Its fix: bind him to the champion he was never meant to replace. Stray a hundred feet apart for thirty minutes, and they both die.
But no true cultivator has ever held the class the error handed him. Mu Cheng can't gather qi, so he carves it, chiseling totems of wood, bone, and water into power with his own two hands. Every dungeon drops better material. Every delve makes the "trash" his clan threw away harder to ignore, and pulls a ragtag party in to fight at his back.
The clan that exiled him is starting to notice. So is the winged arbiter beyond the sky. Because the System keeps flagging Mu Cheng as the fake champion, and no one, not even the System, knows what he becomes if it's wrong.
Totem Carver: Book 1. A dungeon-delving, crafting-class LitRPG cultivation, stacked with real stakes, found family, and a hero who builds his power one totem at a time.
Genre: GameLit
Used availability for Patricia Jones's Totem Carver: Book 1