The declaration rolled across the skies of ten thousand star systems like the gentle, resonant chime of an ancestral hearth bell.
Down in the Galactic Ancestral Hall Plaza—and across a hundred thousand public squares linked by live sky-screens. Ten million elected representatives from every quadrant of the Inner Spiral Galaxy looked at one another with hesitant, cautious eyes.
For eighty thousand years, the lines of caste division had been carved deep into the soil of the galaxy with blood, debt-tallies, and cold iron law.
Under the usurper regime of the Three Supreme Grand Elders and Gu Tianba:
- The arrogant “Immortal Main Line” had lived on golden pleasure moons in the Central Star-Cluster, looking down on the thirty-six “Branch Livestock Planets” as walking bone-banks and spirit-stone mines;
- The thirty-six branch systems had lived in perpetual terror of tax-collection fleets, hiding their most talented babies in root cellars so their Sovereign Star-Bones wouldn’t be dug out;
- And the outer-rim vassal sects and mortal blacksmith worlds in the Frost-Sword Quadrant had been treated. Meanwhile, disposable third-class laborers, forced to pay eighty percent of their iron and grain just to keep their heating arrays running through the winter.
Even now, with the Three Supreme Grand Elders scrubbing lunch trays in yellow daisy aprons on Iron-Root Star and the ten thousand golden palaces remodeled into free elementary schools. Hotpot canteens, the lingering chill of eighty millennia of caste suspicion still hovered nervously in the afternoon air.
