To Pay Off My Student Loans, I Had to Take a Part-Time Job Collecting Demons' Corpses

In this fantasy world at the end of the age of magic, airships and cannons have replaced dragons as rulers of the skies, while steel armies have taken the place of knights and flattened the land. The Holy Human Empire rises during the Second Industrial Revolution, spreading the equal truth of its guns within firing range to elves, dwarves, and every colonized nation.

To Gawain, such grand historical narratives are a distant concern. He is merely a poor student, scraping by at the academy on the few connections and social skills his father left him, too broke to pay off his student loans.

While dissecting his hundredth demon corpse, he unlocks the “Grave Robber” talent, which lets him extract life essence from corpses. It earns him his first ticket into the world of the extraordinary.

He starts by spending little to make a lot, scavenging unwanted demon corpses for their essence and brewing potions. His small workshop grows into an underground market. He deals with both righteous and wicked factions, befriends powerful nobles, and navigates between the major powers, step by step entering the heart of the empire’s political machinery until he stands as an equal to the emperor who has ruled unchallenged for ages.

“You used to call me Gawain El Johnson. I let it slide back then. What should you call me now?”

A professor’s favorite and trusted messenger, the underground godfather of Byron Weiss Academy, the great detective Sherlock Holmes’s close friend, one of Cambridge Bay’s Ten Outstanding Young People, a scourge of evil hidden in the night, king of the underground auction market, an alchemical genius unseen in a century, the emperor’s sharpest sword...

“Sorry, sir, we can’t fit all those people in here.”

“Then I’ll have the cheapest fish and chips combo. I can’t afford anything pricier. I still have student loans to pay at the end of the month.”