
by Calico Reefe
Seventeen-year-old Troy Demir keeps his head down—at school, at his after-hours job in the museum, and around the golden-boy bully who makes every day harder. On Halloween night, the people around him begin to change: red eyes, claws, and a hunger that turns the party into a massacre. A reclusive researcher injects Troy with a mysterious serum and locks him in a cryogenic pod. When Troy wakes, the world is gone. Magic has replaced technology. Society fears the feral, red-eyed ghouls that still roam the wilds. And when a young ghoul bites him, the serum in Troy’s blood does the impossible—it brings the boy’s mind back. Now Troy is becoming something the world has no name for. Hunted by a paranoid society, caught between humans and ghouls, and hunted by an ancient threat the ghouls were created to fight, he must decide what he’s willing to become to protect the fragile new life he’s found. Some strains don’t just infect. They rewrite everything.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 6 Oct 2026, 08:58 UTC
Entry forecast updated 6 Oct 2026, 08:58 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 67% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 19% 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.