The Sunken Empire. The Epoch Shifter, #3

The past isn't just a destination. It's a predator. In the year 2487, humanity lives in the sterile safety of the Mega-Sectors-domed cities where the air is scrubbed, the food is printed, and nature is a forgotten myth. For Jaxen Rift, a nineteen-year-old cadet in the Temporal Watch, the domes are a cage. But Jax is unique: he carries the "Progenitor Marker, " a rare genetic throwback that allows him to do what 99% of the population cannot.
He can Shift. In The Sunken Empire, the third book of the Epoch Shifter series, Jax is sent back 400 million years to the Devonian Era-the Age of Fish. His mission: protect the Tiktaalik, the first coppery pioneers attempting to walk onto land. If they fail to take those first breaths, the entire lineage of land-walking vertebrates, including humanity, is unwritten. But the Devonian is no tropical paradise.
It is a world of stagnant, anoxic seas, tree-sized fungi, and oxygen storms that turn the atmosphere into an inferno. To survive, Jax must undergo "Abyssal Mode, " a violent DNA rewrite that grants him gills, dermal armor, and sonar sight. Deep within the Rheic Ocean, a nightmare is waiting. The Chronophage-sentient entropy from the end of time-has possessed a Dunkleosteus, a four-ton armored leviathan with bone-plated jaws.
This "Void-Beast" is hunting the Tiktaalik breeding grounds, turning the cradle of evolution into a graveyard. As Jax dives into the lightless trenches, he discovers the wreckage of his parents' ship, lost ten years ago. Within its "Black Pearl" data-core lies a truth more terrifying than any prehistoric monster: The Temporal Watch isn't saving history. They are pruning it. With his own DNA drifting toward a point of no return and a Void-Ship closing in to "erase" the era, Jax must decide: obey the future that made him, or protect the past that defines him.
Dive into a visceral, high-stakes adventure where the stakes are life itself, and the price of victory is your own humanity.