Commanding Wind and Cloud - Chapter 3: Working with Metals

What would you do if you could restart your life?

I am currently re-writing the first chapters of this story. They are quite rough and bounce around a lot and I can do better. At some point, I will replace these with the better chapters.Sometime in 2024 Aethon Books will publish the first volume of this story on Amazon, KU, and audible. This will mean the story will be stubbed. I will notify people far in advance of that.In the dystopian world of the future, life is rough when you live at the bottom. Jobs are non-existent. Far too many people live in poverty, crammed into huge buildings called Habitats. With no jobs in the real world, many people can only find work online in VR worlds as servants to the very rich. And it's getting worse. The old internet is unusable and hacked to pieces. The new system needs AI to run things, but all but one of them were destroyed. The last sentient AI is ordered to create a new game world so the rich can have a playground, and the corporations that rule the world can have a new global market place. Everyone wants a piece of the new game. The guilds are competing to be the first to find the dungeons and kill the biggest monster. The corporations are claiming land and putting in their online market places. Ozzy and his friends just want a paycheck.Four friends sign five year contracts as virtual serfs in a small village, and can't go adventuring at all to gain money. They don't have many choices. They can work as a blacksmith, barmaid and shepherd for all those years....or they can cheat and find ways to take advantage of the system and carve out a section of the game world for themselves, and earn a fortune in the real world.When they give you a mop and not a sword, you have to find the loopholes and change the rules.

Luke is a half-beast who grew up in the twisty streets of a large city called Oukiwa. Abandoned by his parents as a child, he soon had to learn the arts of thievery to survive.

Even on the fringes of a super-powered society, he has followed a single rule all his life: never get involved with the Adventurers.

However, this rule is broken when his gang begins to hatch a plan to rob the most powerful family in town.

And so begins the chronicles of Luke Lange, a thief with no ancestors who in the future becomes one of the strongest men in history, with powers that are rivaling even the gods.

In 2040, The Earth was bathed in powerful radiation when a star went supernova, this radiation granted 50% of humans superhuman abilities but also created a nightmare for them as animals, insects, and carnivorous plants were mutated and became overpowered with intelligence, human started teetering on the brink of survival, a boy with no powers and no father, with a mother in a coma, seems destined for obscurity, but one night changed his life, with a new found hope to cure his mum from the everlasting sleep—Gene Elixir— he went on on a journey that would reshape his destiny...~Voracious Sovereign... Gene Devourer...Pray you won't be devoured by this power you wield which hunger is insatiable~~You call yourself an opportunist... But... you aren't free. A hungry man is not a free man...~