Bria clutched her pin as their transport was escorted over the City of Dawn.

She thought the blue dragon that had rescued them from pirates as they left Kimlick was large, but as she looked to the palace and saw the massive red beast blow a plume of amber flame into the air as they approached, she realised she was woefully mistaken.

Two weeks ago, she had never thought her life would take such a dramatic turn.

She was an orphan, just eighteen years old and recently inseminated.

Bria shivered at the memory and berated herself for thinking if only this had happened sooner.

No, insemination was her privilege. At least that was how it had been explained to her all her life. An obligation she couldn't escape, though many tried.

It was said her kingdom, or her now former kingdom, was amid a population crisis. A crisis that had suspiciously lasted over four centuries. And that everyone had to do their part. Their willingness notwithstanding.

Orphans, upon sexual maturity, and often before, were taken by privileged men. The purpose was to produce offspring.

The daughters of such couplings typically fed back into the system unless the mother could pay back their debt to orphanage and claim their freedom. While the few males produced were taken from their mothers, never to be seen again.

It was slavery, just by another name. A practice of forced servitude for the greater good that they all knew was outlawed in almost every other society.

Four weeks ago, she had been just another captive, held by an inescapable debt. One she owed to the orphanage for keeping her clothed and fed all these years. One that grew larger every day. The only workable way to clear that debt was to carry male children to term.

But now, now things were different. Now she was one of Spectre's Orphans, entering the capital city of El'alora, the City of Dawn. Now she was free.

Everything had happened so fast.

They had just discovered her pregnancy after she had taken a turn, fainting in the queue for food.

The midwife's prognosis was not good, her child was male, and they were not expecting the child to come to term.

After the information was delivered, Bria was left alone in a dark, empty room to weep.

One of the older orphans, a cold, hard, uncaring woman, was stationed nearby to watch over her lest she try to escape her torment.

That was when someone came to get them both, and they were led to the outer courtyard, the only place large enough to contain everyone all at once.

An enormous musclebound oric'kien woman surrounded by guards wearing the strange livery of a glowing dragon scale stood on a chair and made an announcement that she barely followed in her disorientation.

Someone called The Spectre had bought them.

Her heart sank.

This was common. The orphans of Kimlick were traded like currency, or as it was put diplomatically, their debt was traded like currency. The first time she was traded, her debt had been bought from her mother's orphanage and she had been separated from her family, never to see any of them again. She was only six at the time.

But the murmuring in the crowd didn't seem right. Everyone was excited. Normally this is a moment of solemnity as friends, mothers, daughters and sisters were separated.

Wiping the tears from her cheeks, Bria asked the person closest to her what was happening.

That was when it was explained to her.

She had misunderstood. The Spectre had not bought their debt, but instead payed it off.

Furthermore, they were offered citizenship in the newly reestablished Empire of Dawn at the cost of The Spectre.

This Spectre had apparently contracted the Houses to offer all the downtrodden and unwanted of Alea a place of refuge, a new opportunity, a new life.

In their case, that included buying their debt and forgiving it.

It wasn't just that, though, the oric'kien woman explained they had a choice. They could take their freedom and remain in Kimlick, or come to Dawn, where they would be supported for the next three decades at the expense of The Spectre.

That support boiled down to an offer of protection and a place to live while they received an education and should they wish it training. The hope was that they would find a means to establish themselves as citizens of the Empire and would no longer need The Spectre's support.

They were cautioned of the danger and the struggles they would face. The land of Dawn was fabled for being untamed, after all.

She accepted, everyone did, and before she knew it, she was given a silver scale to pin to her chest.

The Spectre's scale, they called it.

It bound to her dormant mana and marked her.

The explanation they were given was that they were now under the protection of The Spectre and the scale allowed them to be tracked. Should the pin be removed from her, they would know. Should she be taken, they could track her.

It kind of scared her, made her feel like property, but she had always been property.

The fact that the pins worked was made clear when not two hours later the Orphanage was burning behind them.

The building was forfeit due to some obscure contract term the managers triggered when they tried to quietly remove one of the girls that was pregnant with a confirmed male child.

The Houses took possession of the building on behalf of the Spectre and, per The Spectre's standing order, burned the monstrosity to the ground.

The next thing she knew was she was on a ship, looking back at the Capital City, four ancient institutions burning to the ground. Her orphanage's quiet attempt to keep some of the girls after selling their debt to this Spectre had been repeated several times, or some other obscure contractual trick executed by the House's coming into effect.

No one mourned the loss of the facilities. But the wiser among them knew the practice wouldn't end, just change location.

That was until they were all interviewed. They were asked if they had family, and if so, where and when they last met them. Then a brief history of when and where they were kept, when and where were their debt was sold, and how frequently they were mistreated.

More than one woman left the interview looking lost, but the potential of reuniting with their separated family and loved ones loomed heavy on the passenger's minds. Many wept openly as they were informed a mother, sister, or daughter had already been found and were already on their way to Dawn.

They were informed two days later that their testimony had already been reviewed by international courts and an emergency council had been formed.

Later, they received another update. Their kingdom… it didn't officially exist any more.

It seemed abrupt, even impossible, but they were assured it was true.

There had been some obscure, long forgotten connection to the Empire of Dawn that the kingdom had been exploiting to avoid the eye of the international stage. That same connection, when it had come to light, had allowed the new Empress of Dawn to, upon hearing the reports, annex the entire kingdom for breaching the terms of the very agreement they were exploiting. She had then tasked the Union to which the Empire of Dawn was newly aligned to root out the corruption on her behalf.

The rumour on the ship was that the royal family and much of the nobility had already fled the kingdom.

Bria hadn't even had her interview yet and her old home was brought low.

She happened to be up on the deck enjoying the sunshine and the view when a red flare went up from somewhere.

A murmur spread rapidly through the deck of three ships tailing them.

When the second flare went up, a warning to the other ships to back off or face retaliation went up, and the rumour changed to pirates.

Filled with dread, Bria realised it was all too good to be true, her freedom and the annexing of the old kingdom that had kept her like a commodity. None of it mattered. The pirates would take them, and they would face worse than their institutionalised slavery.

When the third flare went up and a blue steak dropped from the sky, she watched in awe as a dragon tore the ships that had been staling them in to significantly smaller pieces.

When asked, the crew simply said they had Spectre's protection and the dragons would watch over them as they entered the lands of Dawn.

A day later, she finally had her interview.

She recounted as best she could her history. How many times her debt had been bought, how many times she had been moved and when she had last seen or heard of her family.

Unfortunately, they could find no reports of anyone matching her family. But she was told not to give up hope. These things take time apparently.

She could not find it in herself to hope they would find her mother, or maybe a sister. She had been six years old at the time, and her recollection was poor at best. Maybe her mother would remember better, maybe they could still be connected. The hope was slim, barely acknowledgeable, but she did what she was told and tried to hold on to it no matter how foolish she felt for letting the feeling show after so many years.

When she was asked how her pregnancy was going and if she needed anything, she broke down, as the stress of everything that had happened over the last few days was too much.

That's when a new hope was given to her.

The one interviewing her, an older Gnomel woman, ran to her side as Bria sobbed. She tried and failed to control herself, as she explained her child was male and that it was already confirmed he would not come to term.

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She didn't understand it. Bria felt pathetic. Everyone knew this happened. It was commonplace, male children failed all the time. She had seen it all her life, in one orphanage after the next. She should be numb to it, and yet when she had to confront it, the loss of her child tore her apart inside.

The Gnomel woman frantically checked Bria's pin, then after doing something with mana that was far beyond Bria, the woman visibly relaxed.

Then, of all things, Bria was told off for frightening the woman.

Pointing to her own little enamelled scale pin on her chest, the woman then explained that the Spectre's protection extended to her unborn child.

Bria was then told something she couldn't quite believe.

Just over a week later, she clutched her silver pin, praying it was true as she watched a plume of amber flame reach high into the sky as her transport ship approached the dock.

Something about seeing the ancient city under reconstruction below and its great red protector made it all sink in.

Just as promised, her sickness had abated, and the general rigours of pregnancy ensued. Should the spirits and this Spectre continue to watch over her, she would bring her son to term. And should she wish it, she would even get to keep him.

For once in her life, she was overcome with a strange new feeling that made her want to jump up and down, scream and shout with joy: true hope.

…

Kai sat on the edge of the great hall's external platform, looking over a revitalised city.

It amazed him how quickly things had changed with the aid of magic. How quickly old buildings had come down and new ones replaced them.

It had been two long months, or twelve short weeks, depending on how you looked at it, since the meeting when he had become an emperor of what was an empty territory.

Later, when he asked how the empire existed when there were no citizens, he was informed that empire was a loose term on Alea. That it had more to do with the number of rifts and dungeons that a controlled territory had, and little to do with its actual populace.

One of the few reasons the territorial border of the Dawn Empire was maintained by Talious and her offspring was due to her loyalty and oath pact to the late Dawn family.

The line of succession was deliberately muddied by international treaty when the empire was collapsing due to the introduction of the system.

Apparently, it was a response to some land grab attempt to have the territory fracture and fall into the hands of other nations. Some convoluted attempt to prevent the power of such a large territorial area falling into the hands of the then Kingdom of Twilight by making it impossible for The Sage to fulfil legal requirements needed to produce a rightful heir.

The land grab was a complete failure, largely due to Talious and her relatives. Their insistence that the Line of Dawn persisted and their aggressive border protection undermined the entire endeavour.

It was all far too complicated for Kai, and he left most of it up to Alicia and Syl. The two of them took to the task far better than he ever could.

He merely showed up with Talious on his heel whenever people became difficult.

That and when his time dilations needed tweaking.

Over the last two months, he had been placing time dilations almost non stop.

It started when he wanted to get a little more time for a meeting with the Houses. The gathering was small enough that he could encapsulate everyone present in a barrier, and then hook a time distortion to that barrier. Four hours later, when they emerged undisturbed and realised that they had crammed hours of politics into just ten minutes, it became common practice for Kai to set up one or two meeting rooms a day for things to move along at an accelerated pace.

As the weeks went on and he grew more practiced with his temporal rooms, as they were now being called, the number and scale of rooms available which were temporarily adjusted expanded significantly. Some even receiving a complicated magical mechanism that allowed the effect of Kai's efforts to be maintained free of his control and mana pool.

The effect of his irregular practice with the temporal rooms was the palace became one of the fastest bureaucratic centres of Alea. The long drawn out minutia of reestablishing an empire taking weeks instead of months.

Many a wide-eyed politician or diplomat leaving after they had been seen in just hours instead of the days, weeks or months these thing usually took.

That did not mean everything was going smoothly.

They needed to establish themselves quickly or face exploitation, or worse, invasion.

Thankfully, though, as Talious kept having to remind people, the line of Dawn was intact and that meant the pact was intact. And the pact being intact meant the dragons would protect the interests of the Dawn line.

Kai had seen the reports of no less than six incursions since the system announced that the tower was established within the Dawn Empire. The number of reports curtailed when word got around the borders were in fact not open to all and that the dragons were still, if not more, aggressive to anyone that did not heed the warnings.

They had, of course, hired the Houses to reestablish things. The Houses were already ready and waiting for the task. Thousands of their people moved across the border once they received word they had permission.

The key part, however, was that the Dawn Empire had hired them.

It was far from the original plan, but this way, they maintained control of things, and through the contracts that they signed with their mana signature, secured a position of power for the centuries long term of the contract. Which, when completed there would either be a transition of power or possible renegotiation of terms.

Kai had wondered how they were supposed to pay for such a thing when he was informed the one thing they didn't lack was funding.

For centuries, other nations had been buying the right to mine liffurite from the sky stacks that drifted across the fallen territory of Dawn. Many of them agreeing to pay the defunct government upon request with some frankly insane interest tagged on. The thought, of course, was that the Empire of Dawn was never officially returning and they would never have to pay the debt beyond the admin fee to the Guild of Minerals, who were still technically contracted by the Empire of Dawn to manage these things.

The only issue for them was the Guild of Minerals had kept extensive records, and now the empire of Dawn was requesting their due.

Unfortunately for the Houses, they ran the Guild of Minerals and now had to collect the debts, one way or another. Luckily for the Houses, Kai, Syl and Alicia gave them a choice: work off what was owed and recoup the debt to pay the cost in their own time, or pay up immediately. The Houses took the first option.

As Kai thought it would be, citizens were another issue.

When Kai discovered the dragons were not citizens of any nation, one of his first acts as emperor, much to the confusion of those present, was to officially invite the dragons that had guarded the land as part of the pact to become full citizens.

Talious accepted emphatically with a strange, devious look in her eye.

Despite the confusion it elicited at the time, the innocuous act would later be called a stroke of political genius when within weeks, word would spread and dragons of all kinds would come to Alea to protect the one place on Alea that saw them as equals.

Why no one before him had done the same, Kai didn't know. But then again, until Talious changed form, Kai, Syl and Alicia were probably the only ones on Alea that saw dragons as more than fierce, thinking magical beasts that were extremely territorial. Well, them and the few dragon riders that would show up to deliver their own support.

That same meeting, when they were discussing the many options open to them to encourage immigration, Kai learned something that reminded him of Earth, and not in a good way.

Alea had a disproportionately large number of females because of the taint, and male offspring were highly sought after, while daughters were often discarded.

That meant nearly every nation had orphanages overflowing with women, many of those women possessing little means and even fewer prospects for their future.

When he suggested offering them citizenship, he was met with a sea of solemn faces and told while the idea was noble, it was also naïve.

These women were often illiterate and lacked any notable skills. As they were, they would make for poor citizens. That wasn't necessarily an issue, if they were will to take on the exorbitant expense of educating them, training them, and then housing them so they could become useful citizens.

Thinking of people as nothing more than citizens frustrated Kai.

When someone told him to forget these women and informed him that the focus should solely be on attracting men from noble families, that the rest would naturally follow because of the tower. Kai opened a portal to the palace grounds and had Talious throw the woman out of the meeting before he went back to the issue of the orphans.

Even after the display, Kai was just drowned in political double speak, for it's too hard, too expensive, and could cause friction with other nations.

In the end, they got nowhere beyond giving priority to the rifts and dungeons over to new citizens.

When the meeting finished, Kai took Estelle of the Houses aside, passed her an enormous dragon's scale, and politely asked her to make it happen and to tell him when she needed more funds if the scale was not enough.

Estelle looked at the scale, then back at Kai like he was an idiot before asking on whose behalf she was going to act, the Empire's, or his.

Knowing there would be political issues for reasons he didn't care about and needing someone no one could find, he said Spectre.

Four weeks later, the convoys started arriving and people all around the palace who sought to become full citizens started wearing little dragon scale pins as rumours that a mysterious power called Spectre was backing the Empire of Dawn started to spread.

The number of meetings Kai was required to attend suddenly decreased after that, and he found himself enjoying his time watching the city come to life with the sound of children.

Sure, he had caused a logistical nightmare, and there were diplomats showing up to complain now and then. But, as he heard the reports of what the orphans Estelle had targeted as a priority had been through, he knew he had done the right thing.

He was enjoying a rare moment of watching the city below, the still inaccessible tower off in the distance when there was a flare of heat behind him and he looked up from where he sat to see another transport come in.

"Do you have to do that every time, Talious?" Kai asked as he saw the fresh faces look back at him, or more accurately, the dragon on the platform behind him.

Talious chuckled, "I must great Spectre's Orphans. They're your children, after all."

Kai groaned, "Is that really what they are calling themselves?"

"Yes," Temra sighed from where she stood off to his side, "They come to the palace every day to meet you, or should I say to meet Spectre. We keep saying no such person exists, but they won't have it. You're a spirits blessed folk hero."

"I've done nothing," Kai said as he looked at Temra, his personal aide.

"You have done more than you know," Temra said as she rubbed her pregnant belly. "One day they'll find out their blessed Spectre is in fact Emperor Kai."

"Where is Kardain? Shouldn't he be coddling the mother of his child? The guy's not shut up since he found out it was a boy and you recovered from that turn you took."

"He's off preparing for our departure to Cibiale," Temra said as she stroked her belly wistfully.

"Did he really quit his position to baby-sit us?"

"Kai, he vowed to make sure you reach your potential. But it is more like he is taking an extended holiday until he is happy you can stand on your own. He takes vows very seriously.."

Kai stretched out his aching muscles and groaned, "I Know."

Temra, or Arnella as he used to know her, had, as it turns out, been selected by The Sage to act as a sort of manager for Kai, Alicia and Syl. She was there to help them establish themselves as true adventurers and even to protect them, if need be, while they were in Cibiale.

With the delay, she had become Kai's personal aid in the meantime, her principal task being to keep Kai out of trouble. While Kardain, on the other hand, seemed to have the principal task of getting Kai in to trouble with all the training he insisted on.

The two of them were butting heads with each other on more than one occasion, as they argued about how Kai should spend his time.

Then the two of them started to frequently disappear after their rather heated debates.

Finaly the two of them appearing a week later, hand in hand, to announce the pregnancy.

The devastating news came a few weeks after that when they discovered the child was male and Temra had taken a turn for the worse.

Seeing Temra stroke at her now swelling belly, fully recovered from her turn as they put it, Kai summoned the letter he had received from The Sage and read it over again.

Kai, I've done it! It was so simple. Once I was able to look at those chromosomes you mentioned, comparing a tainted sample to that of your clean one, I was able to isolate the cause of the taint. Through a little experimentation, I was able to undo the changes made to the Alean genetic makeup. While it will be difficult to treat the entire population, I have come up with a simple magical device that, when worn, will cleanse the wearer after a while, but more importantly, prevent any future offspring from carrying the taint. Working with the Houses and your 'secret' orphan project, I believe we can populate the lands of Dawn with a new generation of children free from the taint's curse and usher in a new age.

P.S. I Have accepted my daughter's request to act as Regent while the three of you depart to increase your levels.

Kai dismissed his letter and sighed.

There were already reports of extraordinarily high numbers of pregnant woman carrying male children longer than expected among the orphans. When word got out that the lands of dawn were indeed fertile, people really would be coming here in droves to settle.

He just wished The Sage had taken credit, and the orphans weren't calling it Spectre's Blessing.

He felt for information on his newest title..

Spectre You are the reclusive Spectre.

Due to the nature of this title, it is unique. Only one person in Alea may claim this title. Due to the nature of this title, it remains hidden from all but those you trust and the most advanced examines. Due to the rising infamy and acclaim associated with the Spectre that this title bears; the system has allotted a reward that scales with that infamy and acclaim. To redeem the reward, you must declare yourself Spectre and allow for this title to be tied to your identity.

Warning, others are attempting to claim the title of Spectre. 405- 406, people have attempted to claim they are Spectre.

Kai had the title he wanted; he had just done it in a way where he couldn't actually use it or he would reveal to all he was the Spectre. He had to keep it hidden, especially if he wanted that reward.

"You know," Talious huffed, snapping Kai from his thoughts, "I have decided."

There was a long silence as Kai and Temra waited for the large red dragon to elaborate.

"What exactly have you decided?" Kai asked carefully as he got a sinking feeling.

"Though it pains me, I have learned to remove my scales and horns. If Kardain can take a holiday, so can I. Besides, you will need me when those eggs hatch. And I can teach you magic… yes, true magic. That will work."

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