1% Lifesteal: Book 1

Twenty-one-year-old cashier Freddy Stern has spent ten years since being orphaned just trying to survive. A near-death encounter leaves him with a bizarre power — 1% Lifesteal — that lets him grow stronger and wiser with every enemy he kills, healing almost any wound in the process.

Set two hundred years after a reality-altering apocalypse, this action-packed LitRPG follows Freddy's weak-to-strong transformation from a struggling nobody into a formidable fighter, and asks whether his talent will let him hold onto his humanity as he claws his way up through a corrupt, broken elite society. Book one of a five-book series originally serialized on Royal Road.