Long Live the King

One moment, Fei is a broke graduate student on Earth, drowning in tuition debt. The next, an arrow is ringing off his helmet and siege ladders are rising against his walls. He has woken up in the body of Alexander, king of Chambord — a pint-sized vassal kingdom, ruled by a young monarch so famously dim-witted that his own ministers scheme against him in the open. The court is already placing bets on how many days he will last.

Then a cold, mechanical voice speaks inside his skull: "Entering Diablo world in 3... 2... 1..."

The video game Fei loved on Earth turns out to be real — a living world of rogue encampments, demon-haunted monasteries, and the Lord of Terror walking again, where he respawns as a level-one Barbarian with a rusty hand axe. But every level earned there comes home with him. Every skill, every rune, every piece of legendary loot crosses the boundary between worlds. And he can step between the two realms whenever he chooses.

So the "idiot king" starts grinding.

Armed with the powers of seven classes — the fury of the Barbarian, the auras of the Paladin, the flames of the Sorceress, the undead legions of the Necromancer — Fei turns Chambord's starving garrison into a war machine, its mud-street capital into a wonder of the continent, and its mockers into believers. Greedy nobles scheme. Rival empires march. The aristocrats of the Zenit Empire learn that the vassal king they laughed at has stopped asking permission. And when the godly kings of the Holy Church descend to judge the world, they discover a king who kneels to no god at all.

Yet the higher Fei climbs, the stranger the truth becomes. A thousand years ago, a catastrophe called the Polluters nearly devoured this world, and the bugs are returning now from beyond the stars — led by an enemy who was once human. To protect everything he has built, Fei must cross dimensions, drag Earth itself into the war, and rally races that have hated each other for millennia for one last Holy War on a battleground of shattered stars. At the end of that road waits the inheritance of the God of Creation — and the secret of two brothers from Earth who turned it into a battlefield.

Kings can be crowned. This one will have to be forged.

A gentle queen stands beside him through every battle, and a Valkyrie warrior at his other flank. Old ministers, demon-slaying champions, and a continent of former enemies rally to his banner. But the orphan from Earth remembers exactly what it felt like to have nothing — and he means to build a world where no one ever has to kneel to hunger, fear, or false gods again.

The walls are manned. The forges never sleep. The game is on — seven hundred chapters of sieges, betrayals, class levels, and one stubborn modern soul refusing to let his adopted people die. All hail Alexander, the Human Emperor of the North.

Long live the King.