
by Roffles
Gabriel Oaks went into the mountains looking for clarity. Instead, he found himself in a cavern watching a dragon fight a phoenix, opened a magical box that should have stayed closed, and somehow survived. Not just any magical box. Pandora's Box. When Gabriel wakes, nearly sixty years have passed. Magic is real, technology has eroded alongside it, and the world he knew is gone. Fortunately, Gabriel isn't exactly normal anymore either. Good thing he never was "normal" to begin with. Armed with abilities like Heartburn Blast and Mana Marbles, a semi-sentient blade named Firefury that enables his terrible decisions, and the Pandora System that rarely misses an opportunity to roast him, Gabriel now has to learn a different world. As an avid gamer, he does what any experienced gamer does. Skips the tutorial. Now he's stumbling through a new world fueled by stubbornness, spite, bad puns, and decades-old pop culture references nobody understands anymore. As he's winging it through this new world, his trauma haunts him. Literally. Fueled by self deprecation, flexible judgment, and questionable methods, he's trying to figure out how to survive it all. In hindsight, he's finding new reasons to need therapy. Good thing the System gives it to him. Unfortunately for him, Pandora's idea of therapy usually involves boss fights.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 5 Oct 2026, 16:28 UTC
Entry forecast updated 5 Oct 2026, 16:28 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.
Coupled 14-day outlook
rs-joint-entry-copula-v1
Any eligible RS entry
9%
Two or more lists
3%
Likely threshold order: Tragedy → Psychological → Action → Fantasy → Main.
Leading bundle: Tragedy (7%).
Estimated from one fitted shared story path; category probabilities are not multiplied as if lists were independent.
Separate entry forecast; this probability does not enter the ranking score.
Overall Rising Stars Shadow RS rank
#3189 of 3,392 · 3139 below RS #50
By genre
beats 84% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 6% of similar stories
Hidden gem — exposure is the bottleneck
Readers who find this story follow it at a high rate; there just aren't enough of them. In our cohort data, near-daily posting lifted the odds of reaching 25 followers from ~0% to 17% — more chapters, shoutout swaps and ads buy the eyeballs this conversion deserves.
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.