Jonathon Eucole. Soldier. Scholar. Now an Initiate, the dedication without dedication, he finds himself both prisoner and master of an arcane edifice, the Ingress Estate, which can neither be escaped, nor controlled; only diverted, maintained, and pacified.

This is a gothic fantasy story, set in a world in which gods and the afterlife are not only real and known, but were both established in living memory of some of the inhabitants after millennia of arcane warfare with the being who constructed the mundane reality the humans occupy. But this isn't the story of those who colonized the afterlife at the cost of their own humanity, but a somewhat more ordinary man, in somewhat extraordinary circumstances.

This is also a LitRPG-lite, which means there's a system of sorts, fragments of which can be observed through Jonathon's eyes. Don't expect level-up screens, or statistics, or indeed numbers much at all, beyond those the inhabitants of the world itself apply to understanding their own reality. It pretty much doesn't matter to the story, I mention it so those who don't want to read LitRPG at all can successfully avoid it here.

I don't have any particular plan here, just some ideas inherent in the genre. This is a character concept I toyed with some years ago; an old man, bright of mind but weighed down into apathy, both by his past and his responsibilities for a terrible estate that cannot be left without stewardship. Don't expect any kind of overarching plot or story, because that's really not what this is about. Also don't expect much dialogue. Or character development. Or much of anything, really, because I've planned nothing in the way of an actual book, here.

Other relevant information, if you've read this far for some reason: The MC isn't super-powerful to begin with, and probably never will be. He's a veteran with some useful skills, and the insight on how to use them, so can deal with the world's ordinary threats reasonably well, but not too much beyond that.

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Currently on hiatus, as currently the story has a rather poor ratio of effort-to-personal-payoff. I may return to this once I have a clear idea of how to get the stories where I want them.

I've started a more standard LitRPG using the same system. But if you like intelligence characters who cleverly min-max their classes, it probably isn't the story for you; it's the story of a rather ordinary guy who winds up in a very similar universe.