The stars above Kobina's Reach were silent.
Not dim.
Not distant.
Silent—like something had taught them to keep secrets.
Kweku noticed it every night. Others didn't bother looking up anymore. The slum-world was layered in rusted towers and cracked walkways, its people trained to watch the ground, not the sky. Looking upward was a luxury for those who believed the universe cared.
Kweku didn't.
He adjusted the satchel at his side and moved through the alleyways, careful not to draw attention. Tonight was ration distribution. Tonight decided whether his family ate—or went another cycle with empty bowls and quieter conversations.
The ache in his palms returned as he neared the exchange gate.
It always did.
A pressure beneath the skin. Not pain. More like something unfinished.
Ignore it, he told himself.
You're just tired.
The siren sounded.
Low. Flat. Final.
People froze, then lined up instinctively as Enforcers descended from above—black-armored figures marked with the sigil of the Silence Accord, their presence heavy enough to bend the air.
These weren't cultivators.
They were regulators.
The kind that didn't care how strong you were—only whether you were permitted to exist.
Kweku lowered his head as the scanner passed from person to person. Hunger, fear, resignation—those emotions passed unnoticed.
When the scanner reached him, it hesitated.
A thin hum sharpened into a whine.
The ache in his palms flared.
Not power.
Not strength.
Recognition.
The scanner's glyphs flickered—attempting to place him, to assign a tier, to enforce suppression.
They failed.
The enforcer stiffened. "Scan again."
The device pulsed red.
Then went dark.
"…Fault," the enforcer muttered after a pause. "Move."
Kweku didn't breathe until he was past the gate.
He didn't see the ancient Adinkra symbol briefly reflected in the scanner's cracked lens.
He didn't hear the faint echo of drums that had not sounded in millennia.
But far beyond Kobina's Reach—
something ancient shifted its attention.
That night, the dreams returned.
He stood on ground that shimmered like powdered gold beneath a sky layered with fire and memory. Before him rose a throne of impossible radiance, woven not from metal, but from oaths, voices, and unfinished history.
He felt small before it.
Unworthy.
"I don't belong here," Kweku said, his voice trembling. "I don't even belong where I came from."
The throne did not answer immediately.
When it did, the voice was neither loud nor gentle—it was absolute.
"Power belongs to those above you."
Kweku's heart sank.
Then—
"Authority belongs to those recognized."
Figures emerged from the light. Kings and queens. Warriors and lawmakers. Their presence carried weight, but not arrogance. They did not glare at him.
They studied him.
"You are weak," one said plainly.
"You are poor," said another.
"You are late," a third added.
Kweku clenched his fists. "Then why am I here?"
An old woman stepped forward, her gaze sharp enough to cut fate itself.
"Because you were not born to climb."
The ground trembled.
"You were born to cut."
The throne pulsed once—acknowledgment, not acceptance.
"The empire fell because one of us reached too fast," the voice said.
"You will survive because you move correctly."
The sky fractured.
Drums thundered—not in celebration, but in warning.
Kweku gasped—
—and woke in the dark, sweat soaking his clothes.
His palms burned.
Faintly glowing beneath his skin was a symbol he did not understand—
yet somehow obeyed.
Far beyond mortal space, where suppression laws held the universe together, the Unknown Entities registered an anomaly.
A low-tier existence.
A broken reading.
A familiar pattern.
"The Ashanti error," one observed.
"It has resurfaced."
And for the first time since the empire's fall—
the cosmos began preparing for war.