In the ZERG empire, time was not measured by calendars.
Time was measured by growth.
By the hardening of shell and bone, by the sharpening of instincts, by the day a child's body stopped being purely soft and began to promise danger.
Chu Yan grew fast.
He learned the palace's moods before he learned its map. He learned which corridors warmed underfoot when the Emperor was near, and which ones felt colder, as if the hive itself had turned its face away. He learned that the Empress's attendants moved with a gentleness that wasn't weakness, and that the Emperor's guard moved with a discipline that could become cruelty if given permission.
He learned to smile at the right moments, and to keep his thoughts behind his eyes.
Sometimes, late at night when the palace quieted and the bioluminescent veins in the walls dimmed into a soft pulse, he would remember Earth.
Rain against glass. The smell of gasoline. Neon reflected in puddles.
And he would remind himself of the one thing that mattered: he had refused forgetfulness. Which meant he had chosen responsibility.
It was almost funny, in a bitter way. He had died as an ordinary human with ordinary regrets, and been reborn into an empire that did not even bother to give its rulers names.
The Emperor was the Emperor.
The Empress was the Empress.
His siblings were numbers. A ranking. A sequence.
First Prince. Second Prince. Third—no. In this empire there had been no daughters before. The words were different when they spoke of her. Not Third Princess. First Princess, because she was the first of her kind to be born into the imperial line.
It was not unkindly said.
It was simply factual.
Chu Yan heard it the first time in court, when he was old enough to stand without swaying and keep his expression from collapsing into a child's open curiosity. He stood between the Emperor and Empress on a raised living platform that shifted subtly to hold his weight, the palace itself adjusting to cradle the most precious thing it contained.
Below them, the court knelt.
High-class ZERG with stable, dignified forms. Imperial ZERG whose presence made the air tighten with instinctive deference. Lower-class ZERG at the edges, eyes downcast, bodies made for labor.
They did not look at Chu Yan directly. Not because they did not adore him, but because adoration here had rules. Even love had a posture.
A minister spoke, vibrations carrying through the chamber like a drumbeat.
The Emperor listened without moving.
The Empress listened with her attention spread wide, like a net that could catch every threat before it reached her child.
Chu Yan listened, too.
He understood more than they realized. Their language had edges—chemical cues layered under sound—and he had been absorbing it since birth, translating it into human concepts in the quiet of his mind. The speech was about territory, about harvest, about border skirmishes that never truly ended, only shifted.
War, always war.
He watched the low-class ZERG at the court's rim. Watched their stillness, their obedience that looked like devotion from a distance but was, up close, something closer to erasure.
No names.
No self.
Only function.
On Earth, the poorest had names. The most disposable still had names.
Here, a being could live and die without anything that belonged only to them.
Chu Yan's chest tightened with a feeling that had nothing to do with this body's instinctive hunger. It was something older. Human. Furious.
He swallowed it down.
He was still too small to change laws. Too small to speak reforms without being laughed at as an indulgent child.
But he could do one thing.
He could do something that was not a law. Not a policy. Not a battle.
He could give the empire a different habit.
It happened on his fifth year.
His body had reached that strange threshold where he looked less like an infant and more like a small, sharp creature learning to become himself. His eyes were clear now, dark and steady. His hands were strong enough to grip without trembling. His voice, when he spoke, carried meaning instead of only need.
The court that day was full.
There was a ceremony—one of those endless rituals that made power feel natural. Gifts were brought forward. Reports were delivered. The Emperor's approval was sought. The Empress's gaze drifted over the crowd like a tide.
Chu Yan stood between them again, as always.
He had been quiet that morning. Too quiet.
The Empress had noticed. Of course she had. Her attention always returned to him as if pulled by gravity.
But she had not pressed. In the palace, they did not force their beloved to explain his moods.
They trusted him.
That trust was a weight.
The minister's speech ended. Silence followed, ripe and expectant.
Chu Yan took a step forward.
A small step, but in this chamber it was enough to send a ripple through every instinct present. The attendants stiffened. The guards' attention sharpened. Even the ministers paused as if the air had changed density.
The Emperor did not stop him.
The Empress did not stop him.
They simply watched.
Chu Yan's heart beat hard, not from fear of punishment, but from the knowledge that once he did this, the empire would not quite return to what it had been before.
He lifted his chin and looked up at the Empress first.
His voice came out steady.
"Chu Yin," he said.
The court froze.
Not because they did not understand him. They understood perfectly. That was the problem.
A name. A personal name. Something intimate spoken aloud in the most formal place in the empire.
A few ministers' attention flared with alarm. Not anger—how could anyone be angry at the beloved prince?—but panic, like watching a rule snap.
Chu Yan turned his gaze to the Emperor.
"And Chu Ye," he said.
Silence thickened until it felt like a living thing.
The Emperor's presence shifted.
For one long beat, he did nothing.
No one breathed.
Chu Yan held his gaze. Five years old, standing against a tradition that had never needed to justify itself.
Then the Emperor spoke.
One word.
"Chu Yin."
He repeated it calmly, as if correcting nothing. As if confirming a truth that had always been waiting.
The sound carried through the court like a bell.
It was not loud.
It did not need to be.
In that single acknowledgement, something rewrote itself.
The ministers lowered their eyes, not in confusion but in sudden comprehension: this was now allowed. This was now real. This was now imperial.
The Empress's presence flared with something hot and fierce—pride, perhaps, and amusement, and a tenderness so sharp it could have been mistaken for pain.
Chu Yan turned then, as if the first stones had been placed and the rest of the bridge could now be built.
He looked toward his eldest brother.
The First Prince, tall and terrifying even in stillness, met his gaze with a faint tilt of the head.
"Chu Yun," Chu Yan said.
The First Prince's attention sharpened, and for a moment Chu Yan thought he might refuse it out of pure instinctive dominance.
But he did not.
He simply stared, and something unreadable moved behind his eyes.
Then he made a soft sound—not quite laughter, not quite approval.
Chu Yan breathed out.
He moved on, like a child offering sweets, like a ruler granting titles, like a human giving the most ordinary gift in the world.
"Chu Yang," he said to the Second Prince.
"And Chu Ying," he said to the First Princess—the first daughter born into the imperial line, the one who had only ever been called a position.
The First Princess's attention trembled. Just once. As if something in her had been waiting to be spoken into existence.
The ministers did not know what to do with themselves.
The scribes hesitated, their recording membranes twitching, caught between tradition and the Emperor's new permission.
And then the Emperor spoke again, not to correct, not to explain, but to seal.
"Record it," he said.
Simple.
Final.
The scribes moved.
The court bowed.
Names entered the empire like a blade into soft earth.
After that day, nothing stayed the same.
It did not happen overnight. Empires never changed overnight, no matter how beloved the hand that pushed.
But the high-class ZERG began to choose names, at first in private, then in smaller gatherings, then in court. Imperial ZERG followed, because the imperial family had done it, and to follow the imperial family was instinct.
Lower-class ZERG watched and waited.
Some took longer. Some were afraid. A name was a claim. A name implied the possibility of choosing a life, and choice was dangerous.
But slowly, in the hive's lowest corridors, in labor chambers and training pits, you began to hear them.
Names.
Not perfect. Not always beautiful. Sometimes crude, sometimes strange. But belonging to someone.
Chu Yan watched it happen and felt something in him loosen.
On Earth, he had been one person among billions.
Here, he had spoken a handful of names and watched an empire begin to remember what personhood could look like.
That night, when the palace quieted and the bioluminescent veins dimmed, he was brought to the Empress's private chamber.
The Emperor was there too, seated in stillness, the storm at rest.
The Empress held Chu Yan close, her presence wrapped around him like a tide that refused to let go.
"You spoke," her meaning pressed gently against him.
Chu Yan looked up at them, at the two most powerful beings in the empire, and for once he allowed himself to be simply a child in front of them.
"I wanted you to have names," he said.
His voice was small, still.
The Emperor stared at him, long and unblinking.
Then, unexpectedly, the Emperor reached out and brushed a finger along Chu Yan's head. A touch so careful it did not seem real.
The meaning that followed was quiet.
Accepted.
Chu Yan's throat tightened. He blinked hard, furious at the weakness of tears.
The Empress made a soft sound of satisfaction and pressed her forehead to his.
Beloved, her presence sang.
And Chu Yan, five years old, with an adult's memories and a child's body and an empire beginning to reshape itself around his smallest choices, closed his eyes and let himself feel it.
Outside, in the vast ZERG empire, names began to spread like light in deep water.
And somewhere far beyond the stars they owned, the human worlds continued to fear them.
Chu Yan did not know yet that he would one day walk into that fear and call it peace.
But he knew, with the stubborn clarity of a soul that had refused to forget, that if he could give a name to an Emperor, then perhaps he could give a future to a war.