Mythical Contract [A LitRPG Action Story]

Long time no see! I'm sure a few of you who have post notifications on will see this and be surprised that this dead story is coming back from the grave, so I'm going to remind you specifically that Mythical Contract was the JJK-inspired story with the Curse Users and Myth Users. For everyone else seeing this story from search or something and reading this before you start the series, strap in. I have a story to tell you.

Back in 2020, I, like everyone else it seems, decided that I'd spend my free time pursuing new hobbies and interests. I tried many: cooking, learning a new language, reading… but the one that truly stuck with me was manga. Specifically, manga creation. I'd always wanted to do it (still do, btw), but I, like everyone else it seems, couldn't draw for shit. So, with nothing else to do, I decided to try my hand at Drawabox. It was fine at first. More than fine, I was great at it! I drew the fuck out of those boxes!

But I, like everyone else it seems, got bored with it. Very bored with it. Then I saw they wanted me to go from drawing lines and boxes to drawing an anatomically correct bird or a fucking supercar or some shit, and decided that drawing wasn't for me.

But I still had a story to tell. I had tons of stories to tell! I had a whole multiverse with interconnected characters and lore and crazy worldbuilding that I wanted to tell! Was I really not going to be able to do that because I couldn't draw?!

The answer would've been yes if not for a very obvious solution to that problem: writing novels.

I found Royal Road back when Dungeon Crawler Carl was on RS, and the top stories on the site were Super Minion and this story with a ship on the cover whose name I can't recall. The most interesting part to me, though, was what happened when I clicked on "Patreon".

These guys were fucking loaded!

Look. I'm not gonna pretend that money was the sole motivator for me making the switch to writing, but I'm also not gonna pretend it didn't play any part in that decision, either. The main thing that I saw from those absurdly high patreon numbers was validation. I could dedicate myself to this interest, learn how to do it, and make enough money to support myself… and maybe be able to write everything I could dream of!

So, I put those other interests to the side and focused on writing. I… uh… obtained a few books on writing craft as well as a few tangentially related books like The Psychology Book and The Philosophy Book. I treated all of them like college textbooks, reading and writing down notes for the entire summer just to learn how to write. In the end, I channeled all of that knowledge into my first ever story: Order & Fate: Rebellious Children. It was supposed to be some super deep shonen thing that played with the prose in a way that I thought was cool. I uploaded it to RR, paid for an ad back when nobody else did that so they'd expire in a few days, and made my ad look super unconventional to get clicks. It worked, and my story actually hit the bottom of RS Main! If it helps with dating it, I distinctly remember Actus's Eldritch Horror series being new at the time.

But that story isn't on this account. I ended up deleting it. It wasn't like the story was a flop or anything. The reason I dropped it was because I wrote myself into a corner. In all that time I spent learning to write, I never once learned to outline – something my ADHD brain required to be productive.

Now, I decided to lick my wounds and drop that story even though I really liked it. To this day, I legitimately think it had the best magic system I've ever developed, and I'm going to use it someday in the future because it was AMAZING! Anyway, I decided to move on to another story. I honestly don't remember the name of it, and I only ever uploaded a few chapters of it before dropping that story as well.

This story did bad. Not in a "2-Star Flop" kinda way. It was more of a "200 views, 3 followers" kinda thing. If I'm being honest, it felt pretty embarrassing. So embarrassing that I just deleted that account and made a new one… this one!

Unwilling to go through that pain again, I decided to look through Royal Road and my stories to understand what I could've done to make them more popular… and that's when I learned about LitRPGs and Cultivation Stories and their chokehold over the site! You see, neither of those first stories were either of those. They were what you'd consider "off-meta". As far as we're concerned on RR, off-meta stories can find success, but only if you have great marketing, an established presence, and/or impeccable writing. I was a new author who didn't know the first thing about marketing on RR, and my skill-level was Silver I at best (Seige scale). Basically, I was fucked. But, I still had my dream of writing that multiverse. So, I decided to pivot.

My next story was an adaptation of a different story I'd spent some time drafting on Scrivener. I uploaded the first five chapters during a writathon, not expecting much, and the story did well. Really well! Compared to those first two stories at least. I'd even gotten a review!

But I'd also gotten my first negative comments. They all talked about how the story was boring and cliche, and they all came from the same guy! I know they say you're supposed to have thick skin when you upload things online, but that isn't something you come with. It takes time to develop that. Like callouses. Mine are hardened now, but back then? Not at all. That shit crushed me. It crushed me so bad that I straight-up dropped the story. To this day, it's the biggest regret of my writing career: stopping a story with unknown potential because of a single person. It's the reason why I keep the story up on my page despite it being dropped: to remind myself about that story. I promise it's motivating!

I spent the next few months debating what I wanted to write next. Story idea after story idea. Each time I'd get far along enough in the outline to write something, I'd remember those negative comments and second-guess whether I really should. Shit sucked. I'm being reductive, but that really was a shitty period in my writing career. The only good thing to come out of that period, though, was that I finally learned how to outline! Though it came at the price of like… ten abandoned stories… (RIP Pylrin, Magoro, Tower of Nothing, Re:Randomizer, Popular Kid Isekai… your names will be known someday! Except you, Re:Randomizer. And probably popular kid isekai… unless i become a haremlit author😈)

Anyway, fast forward to 2023. I stumbled across a competition that Honeyfeed was offering where the winner got a publishing deal and some money for writing a romance story. I love writing romance, so I decided to take part! I uploaded my story to Honeyfeed thinking I had that shit in the bag and… nothing. It wasn't like people didn't like the story; it was that it was impossible for stories to find organic traffic on there. So I looked to see how well the popular stories in the competition were doing and they were barely getting a few hundred views! Upon further research, I ended up finding out that they're only getting that interaction from other participants! It was basically an under-the-table view for view, comment for comment thing! More than that, I looked into the winners of previous Honeyfeed winners to see how well their stories were doing and they weren't even published! So, I decided to cut my losses and upload that story to Royal Road. No ads, no expectations. I just put it up because I'd spent too much time on it for it to not get read. In the end, while that story didn't blow up or anything, it did so much better than I'd expected it to. Furthermore, the wait for my next story wasn't going to be that long this time!

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

I already had an idea in my head, and it'd become my damn baby: Isekai Times Ten. I was in love with it. It was like Chainsaw Man mixed with Mob Psycho and all the adventures were inspired by Over the Garden Wall where the stuff they did had thematic relevance and whatnot. It had humor all throughout but a deep story that wasn't afraid to get dark and tragic (major character death? In MY LitRPG?!). I uploaded it, posted an ad, and waited for the story to blow up.

I didn't get a single follower. Not one. To make it even funnier, my first review was a 0.5! Granted, it was probably because of a viral marketing campaign I concocted on r/progressionfantasy that may or may not have had long-lasting effects on that subreddit's meme/shitpost ecosystem, but in reality I think the biggest problem was that I still had so much to learn about Royal Road, namely: reader expectation. They want stories to be paced a certain way. They want the MCs to act a certain way. The MC of ITT wasn't very badass, he wasn't the leader of the party, and the story didn't really kick off until Chapter 7.

I knew how to write, but I didn't know how to write for Royal Road.

Honestly, I started to get pretty angry by this point. It'd been years by this point since I started. I'd dedicated years of my life to this passion that was starting to feel like an abusive relationship. I put so much of myself into it, only to receive nothing in return. Once again, shit sucked. But, once again, I had an idea. I decided that I'd write a story that took everything I knew about writing mixed with the "write for RR" ethos and make a new story: Mythical Contract (that's this!).

One problem, though: I had absolutely no passion for it.

Something interesting that I've noticed in hindsight is that both Valkyrie Cadet and Isekai Times Ten had active comment sections. People who cared about the characters and the story enough to feel compelled to react to the things that happened to them. People commenting on the more profound/deep moments of Isekai Times Ten, people rooting for Cora and Seiji in Valkyrie Cadet, reviews talking about how much those stories made them feel! I think the reason why they had such reactions was because of how much love I involuntarily poured into those stories. With Mythical Contract, though, the story felt like a business decision. It wasn't a story written out of passion; it was content. Writing it felt like a chore, and I hardly felt anything for it when I'd read it. When I stopped writing Valkyrie Cadet, it legit felt like a breakup. My heart wanted to go back, my mind wanted to go back, everything in me wanted to go back, but I just knew that Isekai Times Ten was better for me. When I dropped ITT, the same thing happened! With Mythical Contract, though, I was ready to drop it. It just… didn't do anything for me, and I don't think it did anything for the people who read it, either; hence the mild/nonexistent reactions to it.

Honestly, I think that's why it took so long for me to upload a new story on RR. I outlined quite a few and have a ton of ideas to fall back on, but the thing is, I don't want to just write content for profit. Don't get me wrong, I want to be compensated for the years I've put into this, but I don't want that money to come from stories I'm indifferent about.

For that reason, that's why I decided to rewrite Isekai Times Ten. I wanted to do Valkyrie Cadet, but there's so much under-the-hood work that has to happen to make it viable, whereas ITT just needs some minor structural/pacing work. That's why I deleted Isekai Times Ten 1.0 on my account. Not only did it inherently spoil a TON of things I wanted to bring to the new story, but it also had a 3.8-Star rating–though I'm 99.9% certain that was because of my tomfoolery in the author's notes. (shoutout to you if you somehow remember that kratos one, funny as shit but definitely lost me a healthy amount of readers😭)

But, you see, when I read through ITT 2.0 for editing, I realized something – it wasn't gonna work. It's not a bad story, and it's still gonna go up someday, but the story is inherently quite dark. That isn't to say it can't work, but people on this site like relaxing stories. Fun stories. Easy to read stories!

I'm talking out of my ass. The main reason is that I'm scared people won't like it again. You have to understand, I LOVE that story, and if it flops twice, I don't know what I'll do! So, I decided I'd play it a bit safe and upload ITT when I can afford to release it as-is without compromise. In the meantime, I'll be uploading a different story that doesn't have that problem:

Common Crook Transmigrated as the Young Master!

The idea came to me while I was working on ITT 2.0. It is functionally a prequel to ITT as well as a sort of spiritual sequel to it in that the MC of this story goes through a much more lighthearted version of the ITT MC's journey. It's weird, but it'll make sense whenever ITT 2.0 comes out. Anyway, Common Crook is a Kingdom-Building Cultivation LitRPG Comedy with a System inspired by Persona's social stat system and a world inspired by an old concept I had lying around. It's a Slice of Life story wearing Shounen Armor, kinda like Mob Psycho.

I love it a lot, but I'm not exactly sure you will. Remember when I said my first few stories failed because they weren't what RR wanted? Well, when I learned to write what RR wanted, that led to me creating a passionless story that I still don't miss. I think I've spent enough time on this website to where RR expectation is kinda baked into my outline structure (faster pace, satisfying moments, constant progression, (pro)active MCs), but not SO much to where I can't write the story I want to write. Basically, Common Crook is my story, but it's also my first attempt at writing a story both for myself and Royal Road.

Now, considering all that I've told you, I'm sure you're asking yourself why you'd want to read this story if I have a track record for dropping all but one of my stories. Well, I can't tell you that I won't drop this one either if it flops hard. I'm going to do my part to make sure it doesn't (20 chaps on day 1, a few good ads on launch, a few shoutouts on launch hopefully, 5chps a week for at least the first month or two, patreon on day/week 1 depending on backlog), but if I do all that and the story just DOESN'T go anywhere, then I won't force it. I have the first book written and half of the second at the time of me writing this, but I write about 4-6 chapters a day, so by the time Common Crook is live, I'll have the first two books written. If the story flops, I'll stop it at the end of the second book and I'll start ITT the day that last chapter drops. If the story doesn't flop but the story gets panned on RS and the patreon doesn't make shit, I might just stub it and finish it on Amazon. If it does well, then… hooray! I'll keep posting and take my time on stubbing assuming Patreon helps me keep the lights on. If Common Crook can't do that, then hopefully Isekai Times Ten 2.0 can. If neither can, then I know some Haremlit story definitely can. I don't want to become a Haremlit author, but I will do what needs to be done to fund my written multiverse. Do not question my dedication to my dream. I will go to questionable depths to see my multiverse released. This is me trying to fund it the clean way one final time. If it fails, then we're gonna get 𝓭𝓲𝓻𝓽𝔂👅💦

Thank you for reading this. I know it was kind of all over the place, but I have ADHD and didn't feel like organizing it. This word vomit felt more authentic. Sorry for leaving Mythical Contract behind. Despite all that I said, I do want to come back to Mythical Contract someday. I actually had some extensive plans for it! When I do come back, though, I'm reworking the entire first volume and looking over the rest of the series to make it some shit I like. That means more badass shit, higher stakes, character death, and the MC getting his ass kicked so the power ceiling is established and his victories feel earned and the revenge is sweet and those face-punching scenes all feel like that moment in One Piece (you know the one).

NO OP MCS OVER HERE. GO READ SOLO LEVELING OR ITS MILLION CLONES IF YOU WANT THAT SHIT. WE CLAW FOR THOSE VICTORIES OVER HERE!!!!! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

To anyone who's followed me from the beginning, thank you so much. I'm going to focus on writing stories that I love, and I'm going to continue to improve as an author so that I can finally turn this into a career and not just an abusive hobby like gacha or warhammer.

TLDR: If you don't want me to be a haremlit author, please read my new story Common Crook. If you do want me to become a haremlit author, then ignore this post.

Fun Fact: since you read to the bottom, i'm gonna tell you early that i'm still gonna be on that tomfoolery in my authors notes. I DON'T CARE IF I SCARE PEOPLE AWAY. THEY WILL NEVER TAKE THE SILLY FROM THE MAN!!!