The Baku's Stolen Dream

About this book:

In the fortress city of Kurokabe, nightmares have flavor—and Ren, a baku born of bear, tiger, and tapir, has made a feast of them for centuries. But when he slips into a warlord's bedchamber for a midnight snack, he swallows something that isn't a dream at all: a manufactured terror, cultivated like poison wheat, designed to topple the city by dawn. Now the nightmare is hardening in his gut like a lead weight, and the only man who can draw it out is a porcelain-masked scholar who holds Ren's life on an invisible tether.

Forced into an uneasy partnership, the mythical beast and the silent scholar have four hours to track a thief through a city of crooked alleys, pleasure quarters, and Dream-Weaver markets before the morning bell rings. The stolen phial contains more than a nightmare—it holds the key to Kurokabe's fall, and every faction in the shadows wants it. From rope-slides off ramparts to cellar forges where dreams are distilled into weapons, Ren must hunt on borrowed time, his own body turning against him with every passing hour.

Lush, tactile, and steeped in Japanese-inspired myth, *The Baku's Stolen Dream* blends heist thriller with dark fantasy in a world where fear is currency, memories can be forged, and a creature who eats nightmares for breakfast finds himself the main course.