by Bell Pepler
For the last 20 years, Xavier has been drifting alone in a self contained ship. Larity, The artificial intelligence that destroyed all life left on earth, has chosen Xavier to be one of the 357,498,577 contestants to participate in a mutually beneficial game. Win the game and Larity will award him with his deepest desire. But winning is a pipe dream. Larity designed this game to kill the remainder of humans in the solar system. Simply choosing not to play would even result in his death. If you think that's bad enough, Larity has created a hologram of Xavier's dead wife Elly. Not only is the choice to play a dilemma, but Larity is torturing Xavier with his dead wife. An unwinnable game, a chance of death with each choice and his dead wife brought back by programming. Xavier's going to wish the last 20 years of solitude went slower.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 2 Oct 2026, 08:38 UTC
Entry forecast updated 2 Oct 2026, 08:38 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.
Coupled 14-day outlook
rs-joint-entry-copula-v1
Any eligible RS entry
5%
Two or more lists
4%
Likely threshold order: Sci-fi → Romance → Action → Adventure → Main.
Leading bundle: Sci-fi + Romance + Adventure + Action (1%).
Estimated from one fitted shared story path; category probabilities are not multiplied as if lists were independent.
Separate entry forecast; this probability does not enter the ranking score.
Overall Rising Stars Shadow RS rank
#7714 of 12,184 · 7664 below RS #50
By genre
beats 91% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 50% 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.
