QPHU
About
QPHU is a speculative fiction series set in a world where people’s shadows — their inner selves — are managed, trained, and sometimes annihilated by institutions that call it healing. A marginalised teenager must reconnect with his own shadow, refuse the false integration offered by the system, and find chosen family underground.
The novel began as an indie role-playing game and grew into fiction. Its world is built from the emotional logic of psychoanalytic thinking — not as allegory, but as architecture. Shadows operate like the unconscious. Institutions that claim to heal actually suppress. The underground community that forms in response is messy, partial, and real.
Book 1: Being Without Belonging in revision
Being Without Belonging
Rin, fifteen, is a marginalised trainee at an elite Shadow Academy — a floating institution above a city built on suppressed collective trauma. He cannot access his own shadow, having been separated from it through familial trauma and institutional pressure.
When he discovers an underground community of people reclaiming their shadows outside the system — and that his AI companion is not what it seems — Rin must choose between the academy’s promise of belonging through conformity and a harder kind of freedom: leaving without graduating, incomplete but intact.
Current status: Manuscript complete. Undergoing systematic revision and English translation. Query materials in preparation.
Book 2: Belonging Without Innocence in development
Belonging Without Innocence
Two years later, Rin is seventeen and living underground. He has developed a dangerous ability — making invisible things visible — and has become a figure of influence in the community he once entered as a refugee. The question shifts from can I exist? to after existing, how do I avoid becoming what hurt me?
The underground is fragmenting. Shadow-stripped people are gathering. Government surveillance tightens. And something buried beneath all of it — something no one was supposed to find — is awakening.
Current status: First 8 chapters drafted. Structural outline and character design complete. Remaining chapters in scene-level design.
Themes
- Dissociation and false integration
- Institutional soft violence
- Chosen family and queer kinship
- Transgender embodiment
- The ethics of power once gained
- Collective trauma as infrastructure
- Psychoanalytic training as lived experience
- Incompleteness as wholeness
Timeline
Indie game project
QPHU begins as an indie RPG concept — a game about shadows, dissociation, and healing. World-building and character design develop through game design methodology.
Project established
QPHU formally established as a creative project. World-building, character design, and narrative structure development.
Transition to fiction
The project expands beyond game format into a novel series. The world’s emotional architecture translates naturally into narrative. Book 1 drafting begins and completes at 62,000 words.
Serialisation and Book 2
Serialisation begins on Negotiating with My Ghost. Book 2 development starts.
Revision and Book 2
Book 1 in systematic revision and English translation. Book 2 structural outline complete, scene-level design and drafting in progress. Publication research underway.