DaoistVe45Rh

In the fractured world of Aetheria, where Eastern cultivation collides with Western technomancy, 17-year-old Aiden Lin survives as a gutter rat in the steampunk slums of Anvil City. His life shatters when a brawl in an underground fight club awakens a forbidden inheritance: the Aetheric Crucible, a hybrid energy system fusing his mother’s spiritual meridians with his father’s quantum-alchemy research. Now hunted by both the Azure Peak Sect (who brand him a "pollution of Dao") and the Arcanum Parliament (who seek to dissect his biomechanical blood), Aiden discovers he is the living key to the Xuantian Mirror—an artifact that can rewrite reality itself.

With the help of a rogue cultivator Ling Shuang (who wields a sword forged from orbital titanium) and a disgraced techno-shaman Lily (whose AI familiar speaks in hexagrams), Aiden navigates a world where alchemy is coded in Python and demonic tribulations manifest as data corruption. As they race to recover his parents’ lost research on "Aether-Mana Fusion," they uncover a conspiracy by the Church of Singularity—a cult merging Eastern soul-refining with Western transhumanism to devour all dimensions.

From dragon-infested data centers beneath neon-lit pagodas to floating monasteries powered by stolen nuclear cores, Aiden must balance his dual heritage before the Chaos Engine erases the boundary between magic and physics. But when the Mirror reveals his future self leading the apocalypse, the ultimate battle becomes a war against destiny—and the cost of survival may require sacrificing the sister he swore to protect.

Table of Aetherbound: Symphony of Steel and Spirit

Table of contents

Volume 1