Necoco is the pen name of the Japanese author of Reincarnated as a Dragon Hatchling, a long-running and popular reincarnation fantasy. Like most light-novel writers, the author keeps no public biography, and little about the person is known.
The series began as a web novel on Shosetsuka ni Naro in 2015 and grew, across seventeen volumes, into a substantial saga. Its premise is a wry twist on the wish-fulfilment of the genre: a man is reborn into a monster-filled world not as a hero but at the very bottom of the food chain - as a helpless, immobile dragon egg - and must fight and level up simply to hatch, before beginning the long climb toward becoming the strongest dragon of all.
Illustrated by NAJI Yanagida and adapted into both a manga and, in 2026, a television anime, it is published in English by Seven Seas Entertainment. It remains Necoco's defining work.
