Shadowbound Read online

  Table of Contents

  Summary

  Shadow Alley Press Mailing List

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Keep up with Biz and Kai!

  Books, Mailing List, and Reviews

  Dedication

  Books by Shadow Alley Press

  Books by Black Forge

  LitRPG on Facebook

  Even More LitRPG on Facebook

  GameLit and Cultivation on Facebook

  Even more Cultivation on Facebook

  Copyright

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Summary

  KAI EVERS ONLY WANTED to give his little sister Biz an unforgettable trip to the happiest place on Earth.

  But when an augmented reality game goes off the rails, the pair find themselves whisked away to a ruined fantasy world in desperate need of heroes. Trapped in the ruins of an ancient cultivation academy, the siblings must learn to master the mysterious ghostlight to restore the broken gate that can send them home.

  This seemingly insurmountable quest will change Kai's life forever—or end it.

  Ghostlight Academy: Shadowbound is the first book in the exciting new series from the best-selling author of the School of Swords and Serpents series. Featuring cultivation, base building, quests, treasures, and monsters, this first volume is your key to an intriguing new world.

  Shadow Alley Press Mailing List

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  Chapter One

  BIZ HAD BEEN DEAD FOR two hours when I spotted her crouched on a gatehouse spire between the cargo shop and cantina, her dark hair a lacy veil blown across her face by an errant gust of summer wind. Her gray eyes glittered with mischief in the dying rays of the August sunset. That look always meant trouble.

  Usually for me.

  “Kai.” She mouthed my name, then jerked her head toward the opposite side of the building.

  I crossed my fingers and prayed no one would spot Biz crawling around up there and disqualify us from the game. The single-day tickets to the amusement park to compete in the Smuggler’s Challenge had drained my meager bank account of every dime I’d managed to save from a summer of mowing lawns, trimming hedges, walking dogs, and cleaning viruses off neighborhood computers. Biz, at thirteen, was rarely well enough to go to school, much less work, but she’d contributed to the plan by keeping up on her meds and getting plenty of rest so she’d be healthy enough that our mom would let her out of the house.

  We’d spent months planning for this event, and it was all about to pay off. Biz had been “killed” by enemy stormtroopers early in the game, but I’d racked up an impressive score so far and, according to the augmented reality app on my phone, was now tied for first place.

  If I found another cache, I’d win a pair of season passes to Anaheim’s favorite theme park. This might be Biz’s last summer, and if we won, I’d take her to the park every day. My sister didn’t have many days left, but I’d make them all awesome, no matter what it took.

  If, that is, no one spotted the little lunatic up on the rooftop and booted us out of the park. That thought curdled the bellyful of sugary green “milk” I’d downed for lunch.

  No, that couldn’t happen. All I had to do was get around the corner and I’d be safe. I kept my head down and pretended to fiddle with my phone, hoping other people would ignore me if I ignored them. I didn’t have far to go. A few more steps, and—

  A wave of paranoia swept over me, raising the hairs on the back of my neck to full attention. I’d had feelings like this my whole life. They weren’t as reliable as Spider-Man’s sixth sense, but something big always happened not long after my hunches.

  Usually something very bad.

  I scanned the crowd for any signs of trouble. A security guard, dressed as a member of a trade guild, stood at rigid attention next to the milk stand, his eyes hidden behind a pair of heavy black shades.

  He was looking toward the gatehouse. His sunglasses made it impossible to tell if his gaze was focused on the crowd on the ground or the roof where my sister was crouched.

  Stay cool, I told myself.

  Gasps of surprise from several people ahead of me drew my attention away from the security guard. A figure clad all in black, flanked on either side by shorter guys in gleaming white armor, sliced through the milling crowd around me like a hungry shark through a school of mackerel.

  The supreme leader and his fancy stormtrooper entourage.

  Though his face was covered by his iconic black mask, I felt his attention on me. Normally I’d be thrilled for any character interaction. At that moment, though, I wanted to crawl into the nearest shadow and disappear. I didn’t have time for this. The competition was winding to a close, and I needed to find another cache before the final buzzer.

  My eyes stayed fixed to my phone screen, and I jabbed clumsily at the app. I flicked through help screens to look busy, all the while thinking, Leave me alone. Please don’t look up.

  I even tried some meditation exercises our mom had taught Biz to help her get through her treatments. One deep breath in, hold it, one deep breath out. Bring in hope and luck, push out fear and confusion. I didn’t think the breathing helped Biz much, but I’d found it really did calm my nerves.

  “What are you doing on that datapad?” A heavily filtered voice oozed into my ears.

  My heart rate shot through the roof at the sound of the supreme leader’s accusing tone.

  So much for the calming powers of meditation.

  “Just playing—” I started, only to be cut off by a stormtrooper’s harshly modulated voice.

  “We’d really rather not waste our time searching your datapad,” he said. “Why don’t you put it away before we confiscate it?”

  “Uh, sure.” My fingers flew to the power switch on the side of my phone, and the screen went black. “It’s off, see?”

  “Scan the surroundings,” the black-masked figure snapped at the stormtroopers. “There are smugglers loose in this outpost. I want them found.”

  Another wave of anxiety washed over me. The nearest stormtrooper looked up toward the rooftop suddenly, and my heart jumped into my mouth. He’d seen Biz. Everything I’d squirreled away for this trip, all the time we’d spent making sure she was ready, and all the effort we’d put into this one big push for something nice was gone. I might as well have taken the money I’d spent on our tickets and set it on fire outside the park’s gates.

  The stormtrooper looked away from the gate just as suddenly as it had caught his attention. The leader and his escort brushed past me on their hunt to delight some other fan. I hoped whoever it was would enjoy the experience more than I had.

  I finally reached the other side of the gatehou
se. My heart was racing and my knees were so wobbly I had to lean back against the fake stone wall to pull myself together.

  “Hey,” Biz whispered down to me from her hiding place on the roof. “You want to win this thing or what?”

  “You were supposed to scout for caches,” I whispered up to my little sister. “Not climb around like a monkey.”

  I tried to be stern with Biz, but it was hard to stay mad at her when she had that goofy, infectious grin plastered across her face.

  “You can step up right there.” Biz pointed at a metal grill that jutted an inch from the weathered stone wall. “Then grab hold of the light fixture over there, put your foot on that little nubbin, and jump up to grab the roof’s edge.”

  “Get down,” I demanded in a stage whisper that I hoped sounded very serious while still being quiet enough to avoid attracting attention from the hordes of tourists crammed into this replica of a galaxy far, far away or, worse, a cast member pretending to be a resident of said galaxy far, far away. “Hurry, before someone sees us.”

  “No one can see me, but they’ll notice you if you don’t get up here,” Biz insisted. She wiggled her eyebrows at me. “I found another cache.”

  “Seriously?” According to the app, only one more cache remained to be found.

  And if there was a cache on the roof, that had to mean it was okay to climb up there. I decided to go for it.

  The climb was every bit as easy as my sister had claimed. It was almost like they meant for people to scramble up the side of the building. I reached the lip that surrounded the rooftop in a handful of seconds and dragged myself over it.

  “It’s right over here,” Biz said. “Those season passes are as good as ours, bro.”

  At thirteen, my little sister was so short and skinny she could have easily passed for a ten-year-old. Despite her size, she scrambled across the flat gatehouse rooftop with so much energy and enthusiasm it was hard to believe she had a terminal disease.

  I shoved those dark thoughts away and followed Biz to the back corner of the roof.

  The cache was set into the fake stone wall that surrounded this section of the park. Unlike the others we’d found, which had all looked brand new, this one was streaked with rust and dotted with clusters of golden lichen. It looked like it had been there for years.

  That was impossible, of course. This section of the park wasn’t even a year old yet.

  “Open it,” Biz said. Her eyes were fever bright, and her cheeks were flushed with red blotches.

  She’d need her medicine soon. We’d planned our visit to the park to make sure she could get back to the room with plenty of time to spare for her before-dinner shot, but maybe all the running around had worn her out faster than usual.

  “On it.” I’d already pulled up the app and started the scanning process. A simulated radar arm swept around a dot in the middle of the screen. “You holding up?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Biz said with a frustrated wave of her hand. She hated to be asked about her sickness. “I’m good for a couple more hours.”

  Final cache located. You may begin the slice, smuggler. Decipher the code to proceed.

  The in-game message flickered across my phone’s screen in alien letters, only to be repeated a moment later from its speakers. The stilted, mechanical voice hit me like a splash of cold water. This was it. If I collected this cache, I wouldn’t be tied for first. I’d win.

  “What’d you get?” Biz knelt behind me and peered over my shoulder. Her thin hands rested on my back, light as a pair of hummingbirds. “Puzzle or code?”

  “Code,” I said. “Almost got it figured out.”

  I’d memorized the alien alphabet when I’d first really gotten into the space opera movies. That had paid off in spades during this trip because all the codes were written with those symbols.

  “Ghostlight?” Biz asked. She’d been reading over my shoulder as I tapped out the answer to the code. “Ominous.”

  “Maybe this is a dark side cache?” I didn’t care. Scoring the points was all that mattered.

  I tapped the entry box and thumb-typed the solution.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  A metallic click, so faint it was almost inaudible, came from behind the cache’s faceplate. It opened to reveal a narrow slot lit by red and green flashing lights. I slipped my phone into the metal box and let out a sigh of relief.

  We’d done it. As soon as the lights all turned green, the cache was ours.

  “What are you doing up here?” A man’s deep voice boomed from off to our left.

  Biz and I swung our heads in that direction so fast I heard my neck crackle like crumpled cellophane. This was what my hunch had been warning me about.

  A tall man wrapped in a black robe stood on the roof of the cantina. His face was hidden by the shadows of his cowl, but I didn’t need to see his expression to know we were screwed. His voice was stern and authoritative, the sound of someone who’d just caught a couple of kids with their hands in the cookie jar.

  Panic chased my thoughts around the inside of my skull. My first instinct was to run. Fortunately, I kept my cool and shook it off. We weren’t breaking any rules, and that guy, whoever he was, looked nothing like a park cast member or security guard.

  An alarming idea surfaced. What if that guy was the player I’d been tied for first with?

  “Don’t run.” I caught Biz’s hand. “We’ll finish this. He can’t get over to us before the box opens. We’re gonna win.”

  “Good point.” Biz gave my fingers a squeeze. “Unless he grows wings, he’ll never get over here in time.”

  My phone’s cracked screen mirrored the red and green flashing lights inside the cache. I’d done this a few dozen times already and knew the growing number of green flashes meant it was almost over.

  “You weren’t supposed to find this one,” the cloaked figure called from his rooftop. A gust of wind had pushed his hood back to reveal heavy goggles over his eyes, and a strange mask that covered the lower half of his face in dark metal. “It’s not for you, Sleeper.”

  The weirdo hadn’t raised his voice to be heard over the crowds below us, but every word he spoke was as clear as if he was standing next to me.

  “Kai,” Biz whispered. “Your phone.”

  A glowing golden medal rotated in the center of my phone’s splintered screen. A ring of symbols swarmed into view like a squadron of space fighters on an attack run. When the final glyph had taken its position on the screen, the letters all flipped to their English equivalents. I caught a glimpse of a message announcing my victory before a burst of static clouded my screen. A single line replaced the elaborate graphics, the bold red letters glowing so brightly they stung my eyes.

  Final transfer initiated. Proceed to the gate.

  The voice that announced my victory from my phone’s crappy speaker was smoother than the mechanical announcements we’d heard the rest of the day. It also had a strange accent that I couldn’t quite place. Russian, maybe. Or German.

  “Look at that,” Biz said, her voice so low it was almost a sigh. “They really went all out on this contest.”

  A door had opened in the wall that bordered this section of the park. A downward-sloping tunnel, its walls glowing with electric blue lines set into their surfaces, beckoned Biz and me to enter.

  “Don’t!” The cloaked man had one hand raised in our direction as he shouted the words. “Turn back, Sleeper, before it’s too late.”

  “I don’t think so,” I shouted back. I’d spent my whole life hearing how things weren’t for me, how I wasn’t supposed to do this or that. This one thing was mine, and no cosplaying stranger could take it away from me. “I won, fair and square.”

  The man took one step back from the edge of the cantina, then launched himself across the gap with a single leap. He soared through the air, too high and fast even for an Olympic-level athlete. There was no way that guy could make a thirty-foot standing long jump.

  But the gogg
led figure did.

  Well, almost.

  I saw he wasn’t going to make it at the height of his leap. The scene sped forward in my head, and I imagined the poor idiot plummeting two stories to the streets below. He might not be too badly hurt—anyone who could jump that far had to be awfully strong—but the same wouldn’t be true of the oblivious people on the crowded street. Someone would get hurt, probably badly.

  There was no way I’d stand by and let that happen. I dropped my cracked phone and ran for the edge of the gatehouse as fast as my legs would carry me. My eyes stayed locked on the man as his leap fell short of the mark.

  “Kai, no!” Biz shouted behind me.

  It was hard to ignore Biz’s worried cry, but I couldn’t stop now. If there was any chance I could save this idiot from breaking his neck, or the neck of some tourist taking his kids to the park, I had to take it.

  A few yards from the edge of the gatehouse, I dropped to my knees and slid toward the stone rim.

  The goggled man was so close I heard his cape flapping in the breeze behind him. He was still above the roof, but he was falling fast.

  I reached the rooftop’s edge and braced myself against the narrow lip that surrounded it. Then I thrust my arm out to the falling man, fingers outstretched, straining to reach him before he fell past me.

  His right hand latched onto mine, the glove rough against my skin. His left hand locked around my wrist and clamped down so hard I was sure to have bruises there the next day. He dropped past the edge of the building, two feet short of his mark, and all his weight yanked down on my arm.

  The sudden pull nearly ripped me off the roof. I’d always been big for my age, though, and had spent time in the gym putting my natural gifts to the test. Biz needed me to watch out for her, and I’d vowed to keep myself in the best shape possible to do just that.

  I threw my weight back and grabbed his right arm with my left hand. I’d stopped his fall, but he still dangled over the roof’s lip, elbow twisted at an angle that had to hurt.

  “Help me,” I grunted. “Use your feet. Get up here.”

  “Don’t go through.” The man’s voice was harsh and strained. “It’s my only way back.”