
by copper_lantern
New Chapters Released Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. Reviews and comments are appreciated! Adrian Vaughn had money, connections, and a talent for making competence look effortless. Then a truck hit his rideshare, and he woke facedown in dungeon mud with scales, claws, and a deeply inconvenient tail. The good news is that death inside the dungeon seems temporary. The bad news is that Adrian is now a kobold, and some delvers consider kobolds renewable experience. Kobolds possess the same levels, skills, character sheets, and resurrection mechanics as humans. They simply lack training, equipment, legal protection, and enough time between hunts to become strong. Every death costs experience. Every return leaves them weaker. To the surface dwellers, that weakness is proof they were monsters all along. Adrian intends to survive, level up, master magic, and find a way back to his human life. Preferably in that order. His plans become more complicated when the dungeon begins to malfunction. Monsters grow frenzied, kobolds lose language and reason, and Adrian's human memories start disappearing. A young delver named Mira may be willing to listen, if Adrian can learn to speak before her team kills him (again). Unfortunately, the local powers have a simpler solution to the dungeon's decline: kill everything inside, destroy the crystal sustaining it, and wait twenty years for the dungeon to regenerate. Adrian's original plan concerned one person, but the dungeon has raised the stakes on that considerably. A progression-focused LitRPG featuring costly resurrection, dungeon ecology, kobold civilization, evolving magic, party building, dry humor, and a protagonist learning what privilege looks like from the wrong end of a sword.
Current
9/17/2026
Peak #24
14d
Observed Royal Road ranks are authoritative for lists where the story is active. Other eligible lists retain their Shadow RS ranks.
Overall Rising Stars Shadow RS rank
#2718 of 12,412 · 2668 below RS #50
By genre
beats 97% of similar stories
beats 27% of similar stories
beats 96% 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 10–19 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views over the recent window.