
by made_in_heaven
V has no last name, no birthday, and no voice — he lost that at ten, to the man who raised him. For three years he stands guard outside the same brothel gate every night: expressionless, silent, invisible to every noble who walks past him. He has no idea the family he guards is the one that has spent fifteen years tearing the empire apart looking for their stolen son. When a young lord is poisoned three feet from his post, the city's most dangerous crime lord decides the silent guard did it and puts a price on his head. Nobody hunting him knows he's already dying, of something the streets never gave a name to. A broker with a gift for finding lost things is about to uncover both truths on the same night — and neither the family who lost him nor the empire he's about to inherit is ready for what comes back. The only question is whether V survives long enough to find out who he really is.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 13 Oct 2026, 09:48 UTC
Entry forecast updated 13 Oct 2026, 09:48 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 13% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 28% of similar stories
Both levers trail the field
Traffic and conversion are both below comparable stories. Cadence is the first lever — stories posting near-daily reached 25 followers 17% of the time; stories posting every few days almost never did. Get the flow going, then re-check conversion.
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.