
by Herge
Ren was in his early thirties, had chronic knee pain, and an obsessive love for a franchise that the real world had already let die along with its creator. Every night, the same question consumed him: Why did the humans in Dragon Ball never get a chance to shine? He asked to relive the story from the beginning. His wish was granted, but without powers, without a special lineage, and without any shortcuts. Just an ordinary human body, cast face-down in the same desert where it all begins, with an entire decade ahead of him before Goku even appears on the horizon. Ren knows exactly what comes next. He knows who lives, who dies, who betrays whom, and which moves will decide each battle. The problem is that knowing the script is useless when his body can’t even break a rock. So he trains. He steals. He bleeds. He builds, through sheer brute force, something no human in that world has ever had: relevance. And every choice he makes, every life he saves before its time, every alliance he steals from fate, every path he rewrites with his own hands—stained with blood and sand—pushes the classic story further and further off the tracks he’s memorized. An adult reimagining of Dragon Ball, about a fan who traded his real life for the chance to rewrite, body and soul, the one he loved most.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 5 Oct 2026, 07:48 UTC
Entry forecast updated 5 Oct 2026, 07:48 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 96% of similar stories
beats 30% of similar stories
beats 84% of similar stories
Firing on all cylinders
Traffic and conversion are both strong for a story this size. Readers are finding it and sticking — if Rising Stars is the goal, this is the moment to push.
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.