The Heretic's Codex (Heretic Cycle Book 1)

Jake was a systems analyst debugging code in Seattle. Then he woke up dead — a digital consciousness trapped in a fantasy world where magic operates like software and reality runs on ancient code. But this isn't a game. Every death costs him soul integrity. Every respawn brings him closer to permanent deletion. And the world itself is hunting him. Caught between three warring factions — a zealous Church that burns heretics, a merchant empire that trades in secrets, and an underground resistance fighting for freedom — Jake must navigate a city where questioning reality is a death sentence. His only advantages: an AI companion that speaks in system notifications, the ability to see the code beneath the magic, and a rapidly depleting buffer of lives. When a second programmer arrives from Earth, her uncompiled presence triggers syntax errors that threaten to crash the entire world. The System responds with the Nullifier — an automated purge protocol designed to delete incompatible entities. Jake and his allies have one chance to prevent a server wipe that will erase every consciousness in Thornhaven. In a world where magic is code and death is deletion, how do you debug a reality that was never meant to be questioned? For fans of dark progression fantasy, system exploitation, and protagonists who fight with code instead of swords.