The VantaPsy Chronology

A dark rural-modern fantasy set within the wider VantaPsy Chronology, blending folklore, industrial fantasy, surrealism and cosmic horror into literary fiction exploring desire, the nature of the soul, and the ways love, suffering and inherited wounds shape what we become. Structured around two interwoven arcs, it follows Zuki's ascent through Aokusa and the Sahrani expedition into the Geode, expanding the world of VantaPsy: Soul Snatcher through stories and characters beyond the game.

What is a mountain that never listens? Zuki lives in the mountain realm of Aokusa with her weakening mother, Kasumi, while her father Daigo is always away on military patrols protecting the village. When Kasumi refuses a sacred flower said to cure her illness, believing she must climb Megami-no-Mine and receive one from Eirimegami herself, Zuki decides to make the climb in her place. Mika, the village girl who has spent years alternating between mocking Zuki and quietly looking after her, follows because she knows Zuki is unequipped to survive the journey alone. What begins as a search for a single flower becomes a dangerous passage through the mountain's forests and abandoned routes, where they encounter Cursed creatures, Kodama, Yamakage, old shrines, recorded echoes, death gardens and outcasted afflicted.

What is an earth that remembers? The people of Sahran live in repentance and exile under a lopsided alliance with the technocratic Autarchs. Bitter engineer Tayyir and tech-savvy geologist Qumari are sent into the Geode's newly discovered high-pressure Vanta vein, where their knowledge of its dangers makes them better suited than the miners who work it. They leave their engineer prodigy son, Khaliat, under the not-so-watchful eye of an overly devout caretaker, while the expedition descends under the watchful and handsome eye of Hiro, an Autarch mech pilot whose easy humour masks a life shaped by war, duty and displacement, and Dr Lucan, a Solmaran researcher using the expedition to prove himself to his peers. As the Geode itself begins behaving like something alive, the expedition is drawn towards a Vanta vein that may reveal the origin of the Curse.

The moonless, fractured world of Aerisu is haunted by a memetic Curse that erodes memory, dream, and soul. When strange signals rise from the abyssal trench of Vaelmir, the Ocean Maw, the great submersible dreadnought Vireliax descends to investigate. Officially, the mission is research. Unofficially, it is a plunge into something divine, or something monstrous.

A fragile fellowship gathers aboard: a scholar carrying forbidden truths about a planetary intelligence called Bahamut, a researcher clinging to memory and relics of the real, a disciplined warrior bound by loss and duty, a legendary pilot masking alienation, and a child recording myths in secret. What begins with ritual and banter soon erupts into blood and fire, while something far older waits below.