
by Unnamedwriter
I slept for a few centuries. This is not unusual for me.Waking to find six of my seven servants missing, my home in ruins, and my lands under the shadow of a power I have never heard of: that was unusual.Someone would have to look into it. Regrettably, that someone was me.So I folded twenty meters of myself into the shape of an ordinary black cat and walked into Aykale, the nearest city of humans. It is an excellent disguise. Tired people tell their cats everything, and no one has ever once suspected the animal asleep in their lap.Here is what I have learned so far, from laps and from under tables.The poor at the foot of the walls are not going missing. They are being subtracted, which is a different thing, because no one goes looking for what has merely been subtracted. At night there are things in the streets that are not human. And the men at the top of this city are quietly selling everyone beneath them for a power the common folk have never even been told the name of.None of this is my problem.Unfortunately, my servants are somewhere underneath it.What this is: a slow-burn mystery in a rotting frontier city, told mostly by a very old, very lazy predator wearing a cat.What this isn't: no system, no levels, no stat screens. The protagonist is already stronger than anything in the story. The question is never whether he can win a fight. It is what he is willing to get up for.A note on the AI-Assisted tag: the story is written by me, in Turkish. The English you are reading is translated with AI help, and I use it as an editor as well.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 9 Oct 2026, 03:58 UTC
Entry forecast updated 9 Oct 2026, 03:58 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 80% of similar stories
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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 20–49 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views over the recent window.