Some men spend their lives searching for power. Zen Guy learns what it costs to possess it.

Zen Guy's earliest memory is hunger.

Raised beneath the towering city of Neonfall, in the forgotten streets of Obsidian Row, Zen learns young that survival belongs to those who understand the world around them. Quiet, observant and fiercely self-reliant, he watches the powerful and begins to understand something others overlook: true power isn't about being the strongest man in the room.

It's about becoming the man everyone notices when he enters it.

From a forgotten child with nothing, Zen begins a journey that will eventually place him at the head of a criminal empire. Feared by his enemies and obeyed by his men, he builds the life he once believed would put him beyond hunger, weakness and fear.

Then he meets Elowen.

For the first time, Zen discovers something he wants more than power. But the world he has built does not simply disappear because he has found something worth loving.

And when that world takes from him the one person who made him feel human, Zen is forced to confront a truth no enemy ever could:

He may not have struck the blow.
But he built the life that caused it.

With everything he once valued beginning to lose its meaning, Zen must decide what remains when power is no longer enough — and whether a man responsible for so much darkness can ever become something else.

An empire made Zen Guy powerful.
Losing everything will determine the man he becomes.