There are no shortcuts on the path to enlightenment, but some will try.The summer was prosperous for Jiyong, giving him the funds he needed to attend another year at Bastion Academy. The new first-year students are just as bright-eyed and rowdy as he remembers being, but there's something more sinister to blame for their aggressive behavior: designer drugs.The ability for any student to temporarily unlock the full potential of their magic with a single potion threatens to upend the school's ranking system. Worse, something dark lurks in the shadows of these performance enhancers: a signal sending personal data to a location within the kingdom, and Jiyong's mother's illness is responding to the same signal.When the drug problem at the school turns deadly, Jiyong will have to hunt down the source to discover the cure before his friends and half the school's cores are eaten from the inside out. Can he save not only the school, but his mother, too?From J.D. Astra, author of Viridian Gate Online: Firebrand, comes a brand-new Cultivation Academy series, bursting at the seams with nanites, martial arts, and robot battling. About me... I'm a baller. Keyboard crawler. 20 inch display, on my ink scrawler. Holler. Getting flayed tonight, all my characters getting splayed tonight!In my spare time I love to cook, hike, play video games, and spend quality time with my people.Three questions people never ask me are; how do I look at myself in the mirror, what's in the box, and what does it take to build a story with likable characters in an interesting setting with important goals?The answer to the last is determination, dedication, and sacrifice. I've been working at being a writer since before I could string more than two sentences together, and it never gets easier, but it does get better.I'm surrounded by people who love and support me, which is the most amazing gift the universe could ever give. I will never give up, never surrender, and hopefully, keep on entertaining for the rest of my life.
