
by JayTip
Barry has just come back from a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. Now, only a couple of days later, the monsters in his head become real. As if surviving wasn't hard enough, he now has to find a way to be "normal" all over again while a creature-or maybe two-has turned him into something else. Now he's on the hunt for the beast, meeting other strange things along the way.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 17 Oct 2026, 09:18 UTC
Entry forecast updated 17 Oct 2026, 09:18 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 86% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 1% 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 5–9 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views lifetime.