If what hooked you in The Emperor’s Soul was Shai’s meticulous, rule-bound Forgery—crafting soulstamps to rebuild Emperor Ashravan’s mind before the 100-day deadline—then you’ll love the way Foundryside treats “scriving” as logic-driven magic. Sancia’s crew bends reality by inscribing commands into objects, and the caper escalates with the same cerebral puzzle-solving you saw when Shai outwitted Frava’s council and the Bloodsealer. It’s inventive magic-as-engineering, paired with sharp cons and a race against powers as dangerous as any imperial arbiters.

If you enjoyed the tense negotiations between Gaotona, Frava, and the other arbiters while Shai quietly reshaped the emperor’s soul, The Goblin Emperor delivers that same pulse of courtly knife-fights in silk. Maia must survive backstairs conspiracies, navigate etiquette as lethal as the Bloodsealer’s marks, and outmaneuver factions that could topple a throne. It’s intrigue-forward, compassionate, and full of the small, decisive choices that echo through an empire—much like the deliberations that determined whether Shai would live long enough to finish her grand work.

The claustrophobic focus of The Emperor’s Soul—Shai working from a handful of rooms, piecing together a man from scraps of memory—has a kindred spirit in The Seventh Perfection. As Manet pursues a forbidden truth through a sequence of intimate interviews, each exchange adds a shard, just as Shai assembled Ashravan’s identity from curated artifacts. The narrow scope sharpens the suspense and the ultimate revelation lands with the same contained, elegant intensity as Shai’s final stamp.

If Shai’s blend of thief’s pragmatism and artist’s conscience—taking a job she despises under threat, yet crafting a soul with empathy—spoke to you, meet Ren, a con artist infiltrating high society to pull off an audacious long game. Like Shai bluffing past Frava and working around the Bloodsealer’s constraints, Ren juggles lies, politics, and a ritual-tinged system of pattern magic. The masks, aliases, and slippery ethics make every choice a tightrope—and the stakes for the city’s elite are as treacherous as an imperial court.

Shai’s work in The Emperor’s Soul is as much philosophy as craft—what is a person but their memories, habits, and stories? Piranesi explores that same question through a solitary figure mapping an endless House of statues and tides. As Shai reconstructs Ashravan from artifacts and journals, Piranesi reconstructs himself from careful notes and patterns in his world. The result is a quiet, profound inquiry into identity that pays off with the same reflective resonance as Shai’s final, compassionate choice.