
by Detektive One_Chance
The Great Maze has surrounded the continent of Gondayla for five thousand years, and humanity has forgotten why. Officially, the Maze is humanity's greatest achievement, a living structure built after defeating the ancient oppressors. The Explorer's Guild maps its shifting corridors, hunts the beasts within, and engraves their power as Blood Runes upon their flesh. Rank by rank, Explorers carve their way deeper, seeking lost knowledge and glory. But some truths are buried deeper than any ruin. Linus was nobody. A quiet orphan from Freynom's outer ring, withdrawn enough that the world passed him by without noticing. When his first assimilation broke him, something else woke up within. Rudra, fierce and burning and determined to survive. They are not two souls. They are one person, fractured and reforged, learning to be both. Now they have choices to make, ranks to ascend and mysteries to resolve regarding their past and their future. Bearing a curse that is mutating as time passes, an ancient classification the Maze itself bestowed—Echo—and the growing certainty that the world he was taught to believe in is a carefully maintained lie, they will find their own path. The Maze does not forget. It waits. And somewhere in its oldest memory, it recognizes him. What to expect: This is a slowburn mythic progression fantasy about identity, an adventure that will slowly unfold, a journey that is experienced. I usually focus a lot more on world building and creating mysteries surrounding the world setting itself and for the characters to explore these settings and mysteries. The one difference from usual in how I write about this story is that I also chose to explore the theme of multiple personalities in a main character, to write about identity and psychological undertones. Again that theme will also be slowly fit and produced in the story as I am also learning about it. Release schedule: Will do mass releases, putting out complete mini arcs and batches of chapters like 7-8 in a go...
No streak history
Rank updated 13 Aug 2026, 04:15 UTC
Entry forecast updated 13 Aug 2026, 04:15 UTC
Overall Rising Stars shadow rank
deep field · ~#6015 of 7,628 · 5965 below #50
By genre
beats 42% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 8% of similar stories
Mid-pack, room on both levers
Traffic and conversion both sit mid-field for a story this size. Growth here compounds from consistency: steady cadence feeds traffic, and a sharper hook lifts what each view is worth.
At this conversion, the Mystery Rising Stars bar (≈1 new followers/day) costs about 762 views/day — the story currently gets ~36.
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.