The Reluctant Cultivator (The Scepter of Aethon Series Book 1)

The summoning wasn't meant for him. When a dimensional rift tears through his office, Timothy Johnson finds himself in Tamaria — not as a chosen hero, not as a destined savior, but as an accident. The ritual that pulled him through killed four people to open the door. He was the wrong man on the wrong side of it. Tamaria doesn't care. The Scepter of Aethon has bonded to him regardless, granting him access to a dual cultivation path — Craftsman and Mage simultaneously — that the Mage-Lords consider impossible and the Church considers heresy. Both want him dead or controlled. Neither is willing to negotiate. Timothy just wants to understand the rules before they kill him. Across seven rifts — through dwarven mountain holds, elven deepwoods, the undercity beneath the capital, and the hostile Northern Wastes — he must master his cultivation, seal the fractures bleeding darkness into Tamaria's reality, and stay ahead of Tallon: the Church hunter who has made Timothy's recapture personal. He lost a hand along the way. He gained a prosthetic one, forged by a dwarven master in three days, that works better than the original. Some things you only learn by going through. Book 1 of The Scepter of Aethon Series.