For Jiyong, Bastion Academy is more than just a school for magic in the heart of the Kingdom…

It’s his chance to pursue the secrets of the ancient ones’ machines and get his family out of the poverty-stricken outer-city. His acceptance letter in hand, Jiyong is sure nothing will stand in the way of his dreams.

When a street brawl lands him in a coma only weeks into the year, his chances of graduating are all but shot. With an unlikely digital companion, he’ll have to rebuild his magic core and catch up on all his classes, or risk being dropped from the academy at the end of the year.

But kingdom life is not like the outer-cities, and kingdom kids are far more ruthless about who they’ll allow to climb to the top. Jiyong will have to train hard and fight for every score to make it in this wealthy academy for powerful families, all while supporting his own from afar.

There are no shortcuts on the path to enlightenment, but some will try.

The summer was prosperous for Jiyong, giving him the funds he needed to attend another year at Bastion Academy. The new first-year students are just as bright-eyed and rowdy as he remembers being, but there’s something more sinister to blame for their aggressive behavior: designer drugs.

The ability for any student to temporarily unlock the full potential of their magic with a single potion threatens to upend the school’s ranking system. Worse, something dark lurks in the shadows of these performance enhancers: a signal sending personal data to a location within the kingdom, and Jiyong’s mother’s illness is responding to the same signal.

When the drug problem at the school turns deadly, Jiyong will have to hunt down the source to discover the cure before his friends and half the school’s cores are eaten from the inside out. Can he save not only the school, but his mother, too?