In a corner of the southern Tapal Kuda region, a community lives trapped in a space of transition: no longer owning rice fields to till like villagers, yet remaining far from the luxuries of urban facilities. We are the Pandalungan people—an intersection of Madurese cultural firmness and Javanese flexibility—who depend for our livelihoods on the informal sector and daily labor. Through the pages of this ethnography, our daily pulse is recorded: how the kitchen hearth manages to stay lit through a safety net known as bon warung, how humor serves as a bulwark against exhaustion, and how the younger generation views the future amidst limited infrastructure. This is not merely a tale of poverty, but a chronicle of endurance, communal warmth, and human strategies for survival along the borderlands.

Three hundred years after the Ash Fog drowned the continent, humanity lives in seven cities floating above the clouds. Arka Veyr is tasked with keeping the Gravity Heart of the City of Aster burning. He knows every gear, pipe, and seal in the engine room. Because of this, he also knows that when the city begins to fall, the cause is not sabotage. There is something starving inside the heart of the city. When the Ruling Council seals the engine room and makes Arka the scapegoat, he is forced to descend to the surface—a world that for centuries has been called dead. Beneath the toxic fog, he discovers the ruins of the old city, humans who never left the earth, and the traces of giant creatures that should have been extinct. To save Aster, Arka must unravel the secrets that sustain the entire sky civilization. Because the cities do not float because humanity found a way to conquer gravity. They float because something down below is still holding the world from falling.

Following her mother’s passing, Lestari returned to the quiet provincial town of her childhood with a singular purpose: to sell the family estate and settle lingering debts. Yet, among her mother’s sparse possessions, a cache of hidden letters shattered her grief, suggesting that her father’s fatal accident twenty years prior was no accident at all. The cryptic trails pointed directly toward the Wiratamas—an influential, wealthy dynasty long blamed for orchestrating her father's public disgrace. Amidst her private investigation, Arga Wiratama re-entered her life. Once inseparable in their youth, their bond had ruptured when Arga’s family falsely accused her father of corporate embezzlement. Now, Arga offered his assistance while harboring a closely guarded secret regarding the fateful night her father died. The deeper Lestari delved into the past, the clearer it became: her mother had spent a lifetime shielding someone from the truth. The very house she sought to abandon held the bitter answer to why her family had never truly belonged.