Interlude I -- Forgotten in the World's Eyes
The world did not watch for long.
The bones in the valleys were still warm when the headlines faded. A handful of newspapers granted a column, a paragraph, a single line: a new republic declared in the ruins of three fallen states.
The diplomats called it stability. The markets called it a curiosity. To most, it was nothing more than another fractured experiment in the endless theatre of Southeast Asia.
The storm that birthed it was already forgotten. The vows spoken into the rain were never heard beyond the chamber walls. In the capitals of faraway empires, life continued as if nothing had changed.
But the land remembered. And so did the people.
They called it the Republic of the Houses. Eighteen clans bound by blood and merit, sworn to stand where states had collapsed. For the world, it was a curiosity; for those who had bled, it was survival itself.
What began as desperate necessity evolved into something unprecedented. The Houses system, born from the ashes of genocide, grew into a peculiar form of governance that balanced ancestral lineage with proven capability. Each House claimed dominion over specific knowledge domains—engineering, medicine, agriculture, trade—whilst the Federal structure bound them into a single nation. Merit determined advancement within each House, but blood determined which House could claim you. It was neither pure democracy nor aristocracy, but something entirely new.
The Republic chose a path the world had not expected. Rather than seeking aid or alliance, it turned inward, pouring every resource into research and development. Universities sprouted like mushrooms after rain. Laboratories hummed day and night. The survivors' children, raised on stories of abandonment by foreign powers, dedicated themselves to ensuring their homeland would never again be dismissed as irrelevant.
Thirty years passed. Then thirty more. Seasons shifted, rivers changed their course, but the Houses endured. Not seeking the world's recognition, not asking for its blessing, only walking their own path, step by step.
By the sixth decade, the strategy had succeeded beyond all expectations. Patents flowed from the Republic like water from a spring. Breakthrough technologies emerged from research centres that had once been refugee camps. The global economy began to notice strange disruptions—manufacturing processes revolutionised overnight, communication networks enhanced by mysterious new protocols, medical treatments that defied conventional understanding.
The same powers that had dismissed the Republic as a failed state now found themselves unable to ignore it. Trade delegations arrived with increasing frequency. Intelligence services probed the borders. The great nations that had once debated the Republic's fate now debated how to manage its rise. What had been condescension became curiosity, then concern, then barely concealed hunger.
The world had forgotten the Republic of the Houses. But the Republic had not forgotten the world.
And now, nearly six decades on, the Republic stands at the threshold of its next succession. Every House waits, every rival watches. The vows made in storm and blood echo still, though few remember the men who swore them.
One of their sons remembers nothing of it.
His name is Christopher Xiong.
He does not sit in the halls of power. He does not command armies or bend markets. Like so many of his generation, he came to the Republic for university, drawn by prestigious programmes and cutting-edge research facilities. After graduation, he found work maintaining the virtual reality systems that powered the Republic's technological edge—cleaning the dust and sweat from machines that others used to dream inside revolutionary innovations.
It was generic work, the kind any qualified technician might do. Nothing special. Nothing that suggested destiny. Yet the same blood that survived exile and fire runs in his veins, carrying genetic markers that trace back to the eighteen founding Houses. Though he knows nothing of his heritage, understands nothing of the vows that shaped his world, the shadow of that storm-sworn promise will one day find him.
The Republic had been forgotten once. That would not happen again.