
by Miro Hitashi
Eighteen months ago, a brilliant electronics engineer's life shattered into a chaotic spiral of gambling debts, ruin, and alcoholism. His family accepted it as a tragic collapse. They were wrong. Seventeen-year-old art student Yokubo Hikari lived in the quiet shadow of that wreckage—until a desperate, bloodied stranger thrust a strange ceramic cat figure into his hands on a dark Japanese street. Inside lay an elegant, pristine notebook bound in brown leather. Stamped across the cover in gold foil was a single word: DESIRE. The rules are simple. Write a name. Visualize a face. Watch their deepest ambitions manifest. But absolute power is never free. The notebook is a cosmic parasite. It doesn't create dreams—it steals them from the target and forces them onto the writer, extracting a terrifying price in blood and tragedy from those left behind. Trapped in a dangerous alliance with a calculating supernatural entity, Yokubo must transform from a passive observer into a cold, hyper-analytical strategist. Because his best friend is watching his every move. The corporate empire that ruined his father is hunting the book. And in this game of shadows, a single psychological misstep means absolute ruin. A slow-burn, high-stakes Seinen psychological thriller featuring a calculating protagonist, tactical mind games, and urban fantasy lore.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 24 Oct 2026, 16:38 UTC
Entry forecast updated 24 Oct 2026, 16:38 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.
Not enough recent follower history to estimate a shadow rank yet.
beats 26% of similar stories
not enough data yet
needs about a week of observations
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 2–4 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views lifetime.