Shattered Ghost, The

A human soul is nothing more than a stat-sheet. Until it is violently erased. In the smog-choked fringes of a brutal industrial theocracy, Caleb Russo survives by following one rule: never look deeper than the procedure requires. Cursed with an invasive empathic Ledger-Sight, the disgraced surgeon repairs the broken stat-sheets of the desperately poor while keeping his own mental barricades firmly intact. Then a woman named Echo collapses on his clinic floor, bleeding out and entirely devoid of memories. When Caleb breaches his own rules and peers into her invisible architecture, he doesn't find a damaged Ledger. He finds a terrifying void. Echo's identity hasn't just been wiped—it has been systematically detonated to hide a lethal, state-sanctioned weapon. Now, with the ruthless Licensing Board Director initiating a district-wide purge to execute unregistered anomalies, Caleb is forced to make an impossible choice: hand Echo over to the Arbiter for permanent structural erasure, or commit the ultimate heresy by forging a new soul to hide her from the gods of the system. In Book 2 of the critically acclaimed The Consent of Monsters series, author Joseph Pepe delivers a pulse-pounding plunge into a dystopian LitRPG world where empathy is a fatal flaw, and the truth is paid for in blood. Return to the dark. The surgery has already begun.