
by tenfingers
Chapters 1 to 34 are now available on Amazon as book1. If you are on goodreads, please consider leaving a review there. In the swamp, the rules are simple: you eat them, or they eat you. Nothing's ever that simple when humans get involved. They feed you weird potions, teach you ridiculous commands, and make you fight pointless fights with totally unfair enemies. The humans are insane. Nothing they do makes sense. After years of—very much non-consensual—experimentation, and a dark ritual involving goat's blood, System decided to reclassify Deluge as sentient. A nice title, but not something you can eat. Now, armed with heightened intelligence and slowly accumulating knowledge, you would think this artificial world would finally start to make sense. Turns out, no. It makes even less sense now! The more he learns, the more absurd it gets: civilization, laws, status, guilds, oaths - it's all just random nonsense! There's only one system that Deluge respects, and that's System. System gives you levels. System gives you power. Note from the author: I'm writing this book because I've always liked the idea of a monster perspective story, but don't like how such stories often progress by having the monster slowly turn human. That always leaves me feeling cheated. The main character in this story will never learn to speak, read, write or even understand language beyond simple commands and individual words. With that said, he doesn't turn into a psychopath either. Mostly he just hisses at people.
#6
6/9/2026
Peak #50
0d
#5
6/8/2026
Peak #36
0d
#4
5/15/2026
Peak #9
23d
#3
5/13/2026
Peak #8
26d
#2
5/13/2026
Peak #8
26d
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 24 Oct 2026, 11:38 UTC
Entry forecast updated 24 Oct 2026, 11:38 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.
Previously appeared on Rising Stars, but no supported current projection is available.
beats 74% of similar stories
beats 23% of similar stories
beats 95% of similar stories
Firing on all cylinders
Traffic and conversion are both strong for a story this size. Readers are finding it and sticking — if Rising Stars is the goal, this is the moment to push.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 20–49 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views over the recent window.