The Tulpa Hunter
Three hunters have gone missing in Jakarta. The Bureau doesn't care. Bayu does – because one of them was the only person who ever pointed him toward a cheaper gear dealer without being asked, and because the symbol carved into the murder scene is the same one he photographed in a dead man's room three nights ago.
He's nineteen, broke, and working with a hand that still doesn't close all the way. He hunts Tulpa – the creatures that crawl out of Jakarta's collective nightmares – for the neighbourhoods that can't afford licensed crews or Bureau response times. The pay is bad. The work is dangerous. He does it anyway, because somewhere in this city is the answer to a question he's been carrying for three years, and the only way to afford that answer is to keep surviving long enough to find it.
The trail leads to a name: Rendi Kurniawan, a hunter who used to be one of the best. A man who figured out that Tulpa don't have to be killed – they can be kept. Grown. Sold. And whoever is buying them is purchasing in quantities that no black market has ever seen before.
Bayu doesn't have a partner. He doesn't have Bureau clearance. He has a knife he built himself, a power he doesn't fully understand yet, and Riska Amerta – Jakarta's most decorated surviving hunter – who has stopped pretending she isn't watching him walk toward something that already killed four people she knew.
The city runs on belief. What people fear becomes real. What they love, lose, or refuse to let go of takes shape in the dark and starts moving. Bayu has always known this.
What he doesn't know yet is that the Tulpa he's hunting knows his name. And it's been waiting.