
by rocketcat2.0
For Larisa, survival at her parents' tavern, The Velvet Malthouse, means balancing the greasy, chaotic commoners' area with the silk-draped luxury of the elite VIP room. Like everyone else in town, she believes the Elderleaf Forest is nothing more than a foggy playground for wealthy hunters, blissfully unaware that deep within the abandoned war tunnels, an unseen horror resides. When Larisa chases a group of petty teenage thieves into the dark, rusted-iron void of the tunnels, she expects to drag them out by their ears. Instead, she stumbles upon a sickening terror. She finds one of the boys dead, his warm body snapping into a rigid Lazarus sign as she turns him over. His face has been agonizingly warped into dirty, cracked porcelain. Not wanting to stay around the horrific scene any longer, Larisa decides to leave. She refuses to acknowledge the event as reality, choosing instead to believe it was an exhausted hallucination. But will the Entity just let her leave after such an interruption?
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 8 Oct 2026, 01:08 UTC
Entry forecast updated 8 Oct 2026, 01:08 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 21% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 43% of similar stories
Mid-pack, room on both levers
Traffic and conversion both sit mid-field for a story this size. Growth here compounds from consistency: steady cadence feeds traffic, and a sharper hook lifts what each view is worth.
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.