Deep in the Stacks

They rated me negligible. Placed me in the basement. Nobody ever stopped to read the fine print on the man who reads everything. I’m the night librarian at the Conservatory. Nine years in the lower stacks, head down, staying exactly the size they measured me for. I can’t throw fire. I can’t ward a door. My one trick is that I can read the truth off any page—the redactions, the buried numbers, the things they filed away where no one would look. Then I get into the reserve, the secret stacks under the stacks, and the system that’s whispered to me my whole life wakes up. The conservatory’s proudest ceremonies are a lie. It caps its strongest women—pins their power down, files them as failures, and siphons off everything it stole. I can’t break a cap. But I can read the lock down to the clause that holds it, and once a woman sees the lie for what it is, she can break through. With me. And it binds us. Makes us both stronger. The first one I read true is an A-rank they buried at the bottom of the rankings. She is furious. She is done being quiet. And she is only the first name on a very long roster. So here’s the math: go back to being no one, or start freeing the capped, one at a time, and build the one thing this school will pull the building down to stop. Deep in the Stacks is the first book in a slow-burn-to-scorching harem LitRPG academy fantasy: a competent underdog who wins by reading instead of fighting, a magic college with something buried under it, dangerous all-human heroines who choose him, and a found-family rebellion against the institution that filed them all away.