I have notice for some time when reading a chapter of a story, the url/top of page chapter will be for next/second next chapter.
It lists 'storiesonline.net', the story title, but if reading chapter 32, it will show /34(sometimes /33) as an example.
This seems to happen with most stories.
Reading on Opera on Ubuntu 24.04.
The number in the URL is the ordinal number of the unit within the story. So, for a story starting with a Prologue, the ordinal might be 1 and the ordinal for a subsequent chapter titled Chapter 1 might be 2.
AJ
Checking the chapter page it makes sense now. The book starts with cast and interlude before chapter one. Thank you.
... or, to put it differently and much more wordily, the chapter numbers are arbitrarily set by the author (though they usually don't bother to change the default Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc.), but the URLs MUST be unique, and are assigned by the system, usually consecutively. In particular this means that if there is an Introduction or Prologue, that will (usually) be /1, with chapter 1, 2 etc being /2, /3 etc (or /3, /4... if there are both an intro and prologue). There are a few stories here internally split up into separate books where the chapter numbering restarts at 1 for each, so they have multiple chapters named Chapter 2 for instance, but these similarly-named chapters will have different trailing numbers after the / in the URL.
There is a wrinkle I've only just noticed which also causes a chapter/URL mismatch: some of the URL file numbers don't exist (or at least, are not accessible). For instance I was reading Deja Vu Ascendancy (again) and was near chapter 380 when I saw this thread; on checking, chapter 380 (the first of part 17) has file number 400, but the preceding chapter 379 (last of part 16) has file number /398; in the [More Info] page, listed between those two chapters, is the separator showing Part 17 ..., which presumably corresponds to the missing file number /399. Interesting.