Hello, and welcome to The Last Precursor! This is a story I first wrote and published on Reddit back in 2020, right around the start of the pandemic. It is a fully completed story with 97 chapters! I will be publishing this story in chunks of several chapters a day over the next month or so.

This is a heavily rewritten version of the original Reddit release. It is not a mere copy-paste, and it features an edited ending, an entire brand new chapter in the middle, and several major changes to vastly improve the flow and continuity of the series.

TLP is part of the [CRYOVERSE]. It is not the first entry in the Cryoverse, but it is intended to be a launching point to get you into the rest of the universe. In addition to The Last Precursor, I am also currently writing The Cryopod to Hell and other stories. TCTH is the main serial. While TLP is approximately 350,000 words long, TCTH is currently 1,640,000 words and 408 chapters long.

You can check out all of my other writing through this link:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/wiki/authors/klokinator

If I end up getting a lot of readers through Royal Road, I will post TCTH on here as well, perhaps also giving it a heavily edited treatment like I have for TLP. Do note however that TCTH is far denser with information, so this would be a long-term project.

Something worth mentioning: This is a carefully planned-out story. Every element, every character, every 'odd moment' has a reason for its existence. If you read the story with a Cinema Sins mindset of "Well, that wasn't immediately explained, so I'm going to stop reading now" then you are not going to reach the moments that do explain things. If you do not read to the end of the story, you are going to miss out on a gigantic plot twist that changes your entire perspective on how the events of TLP play out.

I've had this story posted on Royal Road for about a month now, and the criticisms I keep receiving are all based on the same major issue: People read only a part of the story, hit a spot where 'something absurd/unbelievable happens", and they assume the story will never explain it. One big example is that in the area of about chapter 30, a major event happens to the protagonist. Several commenters said I pulled that moment out of my butt, but I did not. It is explained later, and its existence is paramount to the secret truth locked away in TLP's structure.

I know it sounds like a copout. "Read to the end, there's a big twist awaiting you!!" reads like author copium... but if you do not read to the end, you will never understand why all the people who DID read to the end give TLP a rating of five stars. And by 'the end' I don't mean Chapter 80, or 90. I mean the very, very end, Chapter 96. My Reddit audience knows what happens, and they are telling you without spoiling the reveal that the ending is absolutely paramount! Unfortunately, their reviews got downvoted, I guess because they seemed too overly positive? I dunno.

So please. Read all of TLP. If you stop halfway, you will never experience the "Luke, I am your father" twist that changes everything.

Feel free to leave comments and criticism in the comments of chapters. I will read them all and respond wherever possible. If you'd like, you can also join my Discord, which has over 600 other readers like you!

https://discord.gg/uTmq2dM

Finally, there is also a Cryoverse Wiki which I only started up two months ago... because I didn't realize you could just make a wiki for free. Feel free to contribute to it! We have discussions about the wiki in the Discord, mentioned above.

I hope you guys enjoy my work! Without further ado, let's get to reading!