Ink LitRPG · Time is the currency
A Titan's Core
The tower pays its winners in immortality and bills everyone else in years. Joe just wants his memories to survive the climb.
Joe Grant is having the worst day a gamer can have: his homemade AI has accidentally committed bank fraud, the federal agents are at the door, and the antique shop he ducks into turns out to be the kind where the shopkeeper warns you that immortality is a curse. He dies anyway. A glowing blue book swallows him, an old game box floats up out of the dark and asks whether he would laugh in the face of death, and when he says yes, a voice he will come to know very well answers: good luck, chump.
The other side of that yes is the tower. It is alive, it is enormous, and it is a prison dressed as a game. Every floor is a whole world with its own monsters and its own rules, climbers carry belts of glass orbs with living creatures curled inside them, and the arenas take bets the way this place takes everything: in years of your life. Dying costs time. Forgetting costs more, because the tower quietly eats the memories of the person you used to be unless you fight to keep them.
What keeps the climb warm is the company. Joe finds his old friends reborn as new people, one of them now a wisecracking little lizard fellow with an unpronounceable name, and the flame-blue passenger sharing his head turns out to grieve as hard as he jokes. Readers of a certain famous dungeon crawl will feel at home in the mix of running jokes and real stakes. Better still, this story finished its full run as a serial before coming to Kindle, so the whole trilogy is already written and the wait between books will be short.
Reading order
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Book 1 Rise (Aug 25, 2026 preorder) A read-along for this book is gathering · target start September 14 claim a chairView on Amazon
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Read it with company
This shelf has a read-along open in the Reading Room. A pen name is your only public face, and the weekly threads never spoil past the marked stretch.
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Is it on Kindle Unlimited?
Not yet, because the book itself is not out yet. Rise releases on August 25, 2026 and is on Kindle preorder at $5.99 as of July 28, 2026. Whether it joins Kindle Unlimited gets settled on release day, and this page will be updated that same day once we have checked. The signs are friendly: the authors' other series live in Kindle Unlimited, and this one is wrapping up its serial home the way books usually do just before joining. Call that a librarian's hunch and not a promise.
Rise arrives August 25, 2026
Rise is the first book of A Titan's Core, the tower climbing trilogy from the writing duo of Aoife Wai and Rachel A. Cooper. It releases on Kindle on August 25, 2026 and is on preorder now, with paperback and hardcover editions sold through the authors' small press. The entire trilogy already exists in finished serial form, so this is one of those rare new series where the sequels are a matter of schedule rather than hope.
No audiobook yet, but the authors have said an Audible edition is planned for later this year. Our read along for Rise starts gathering readers now and opens a few weeks after release day, which is exactly enough time to finish the book with company instead of ahead of it.
The Forum
Talk about A Titan's Core with other readers in the official halls. Every board says right on the door how far its spoilers go, so pick the one that matches your bookmark.
- The A Titan's Core Hall Anything goes, just say which book before you spoil it
- Theories & Speculation All books, spoilers wide open
Fan Art Wall
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The Book 1 climb, in four scenes
Studio concept art for this shelf. The titles trace the climb without giving the game away.
The audiobook angle
There is no audiobook yet. The authors have said Rise is coming to Audible later this year, and this shelf will grow an audio section the day that happens. Until then the tower is a Kindle and paperback climb.