Professor

Being a loser in his in-laws' household, Vero is constantly looked down upon because they believe that a son-in-law like him could never become successful. With no known family background and having grown up in an orphanage, he is mocked and despised by everyone around him. At the office, he is often taken advantage of and even bullied for being too honest and innocent. Everything changes the day Vero catches his wife making out with her boss in their bed. Heartbroken and pushed beyond the limits of his endurance, Vero decides to end his life. However, that very incident unexpectedly activates a mysterious system that has been linked to him all along. The system was created by a mad scientist determined to change the fate of his descendants—Vero's own grandfather. A brilliant professor who once collaborated with some of the world's greatest scientists, he developed a technology far ahead of its time. Unfortunately, before the system could be fully activated, his laboratory was raided by people seeking to steal his technology. Left with no other choice, the old scientist implanted the System Chip into the body of his grandson, Vero. Now, with the system finally activated, Vero's destiny is about to change forever. The system inside Vero's body will only activate when he falls into extreme despair and his desperation level exceeds 80 percent. A system capable of turning an ordinary man into a billionaire overnight.

Nathaniel "Nate" Cole once designed skylines. Now he guards one at night, a security badge instead of a license, after his partner Preston Vale framed him for a bribe he never took and stole both his practice and his name. Working nights in the Meridian, the Atlanta tower Vale built from Nate's own blueprints, Nate discovers a floor that officially doesn't exist: a concrete corridor carved with binding runes, sealed behind a steel door that knows his name. Vale finally confesses the truth. The tower isn't just a building. It's a cage, built over a century-old tomb, designed with ancient containment architecture to hold something that has been quietly waking for eighteen months, feeding on the fear of every tenant who has died, vanished, or fled since the day it opened. The entity behind the door, the Hollow Word, has been shaping Nate's life far longer than eighteen months. It orchestrated the bribery charge that ruined him, steered him back to the one building only he can unlock, and now holds his younger brother Eli as leverage, offering Nate power, vindication, and revenge against everyone who ever wronged him, in exchange for one thing: help it walk free. With his brother's life on the line, a retired professor's fragments of the closure ritual, and a partner who refuses to let him go in alone, Nate must descend through the tower's hidden maze toward the tomb beneath its foundation. What waits there rewrites everything he believed about his own bloodline and why the Meridian chose him from the very beginning. Closing the door will cost him something he can never get back. Refusing costs everyone else absolutely everything he has left.