I've started posting some short stories that are really background for a much larger LitRPG series I'm working on. It's call the Integration Era.
Here's the overview of the Universe:
One hundred years ago, a colonial expedition cracked open something ancient on a frontier world. The Integration ignited — an alien system of unknown origin that swept across known space like a shockwave, writing itself into the mind of every sentient being it touched. Stats. Designations. A neural overlay that measures what you are in six numbers and doesn't ask permission.
Overnight, the rules changed. Soldiers became Vanguards and Sentinels. Engineers became Technicians. Leaders became Commanders. Conventional weapons still fire, starships still fly — but the Integration introduced something beyond engineering: abilities that bend physics, materials forged in alien geometries, and a progression system where every point spent reshapes what's possible and what's irreversible. The deeper you go, the more the system invests in keeping you alive. The question is what it wants in return.
The Architects who built it are gone. Whether they're extinct, ascended, or watching through the system they left behind is the mystery no one has solved in a century of trying. The Vethari — an alien species six centuries ahead of humanity in Integration development — won't say what they know. And at the edges of mapped space, the Unintegrated wait: entities from beyond the system's reach that it cannot classify, cannot quantify, and cannot stop.
Now the galaxy runs on two kinds of power. The old kind — oligarch dynasties and corporate empires fighting a cold war for territory and resources. And the new kind — Integration levels, designation tiers, and a prime-number cost curve that makes deep specialization a lifetime commitment and true mastery a generational bet. Between them, the Fringe: the frontier where the system's rules thin out, where people who don't fit go to disappear, and where the Integration is still deciding what the rules are.
The Integration Era follows soldiers and civilians, operatives and outcasts, across a galaxy where everyone carries a stat screen and nobody agrees on what the numbers mean. From the moment the system first activated to the present day — where a disgraced operative carrying a corrupted skill slot and an anomalous Flux score is about to discover that the mission that destroyed him was never supposed to succeed — these are the stories of what happens when an alien intelligence decides to measure humanity and humanity has to decide how to answer.
The system is always watching. It has opinions about what it sees.
I plan on posting twice a week (Saturdays and Tuesdays), until I begin the main story, which I hope to publish weekly.
I hope you come along for the ride and enjoy the tales.
Thanks for reading,
-Charlie