
by LostInTranscription
“Ruling is the duty of oversight, to oversee instead of create. To govern instead of live. It came with power and prestige, with obligation and responsibility. Soldiers fought and farmers farmed, but to be King is to rule. To maintain the illusion of power one’s forefathers had built. Marcus didn’t care for any of it. He saw magic when he first opened his eyes, and nothing else ever compared. But the King is old and he an only child. Decisions had to be made. Important, hard decisions. No one expected much of him. Not in regards to anything but magic. They were right to. Until the cube. Until it taught him what life meant for people not born into nobility, and that all his skill with the arcane did not make him immortal. That running from problems did not, in fact, make them go away. Marcus Sepsimus Lannoy—Marcus to the friends he did not have—touched something he should not have on the day he planned to run from his problems.” Inspiration taken from The Menocht Loop, A Practical Guide to Evil and everything else I have ever read in my life. But mostly the first two, though not overly much from either. Concepts and the like. I hope to do them justice. Am I rambling? I feel like I’m rambling. Cover made with AI, no other part of this story is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Cross posted on Webnovel.com under the same username. Update schedule: Tuesday and Friday, 3-4k words each. Book one (Chapters 1 through 48) have been stubbed for the Amazon release. Links below! Amazon Audible
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 2 Oct 2026, 07:19 UTC
Entry forecast updated 2 Oct 2026, 07:19 UTC
Ranking model: rs-public-oracle-state-v1
Forecast model: rs-model-entry-v1
Chart history contains only this ranking model's runs; legacy points are not spliced in.
A confirmed Rising Stars eligibility removal excludes this story from the Shadow queue.
beats 1% of similar stories
beats 63% of similar stories
beats 89% of similar stories
Readers arrive, few stick
Traffic is strong, but conversion trails comparable stories. The usual suspects are the blurb, the cover and the opening chapters — fixing the hook multiplies everything the existing traffic brings.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 50–149 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views over the recent window.