Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Omega They called Barren: Kabanata 101 - Kabanata 106

Morning sun turned the glass-and-marble spires of the new Global Exchange Campus into pillars of white light, visible from most of the capital.Eighty acres adjacent to the main Academy now held four residential quadrangles, thirty crystal research labs, a medical center, and a botanical library overlooking the delta — built in barely three months, which struck most of the engineers involved as faintly impossible even after they'd finished building it. Workers from six different nations had rotated through the construction crews at various points, and more than one foreman had joked that the building itself was practically a rehearsal for the international friendships it was meant to house.Two thousand young scholars marched down from the railway terminus — physicians, engineers, jurists, all of them between sixteen and twenty-two, representing every one of the sixty member states. White linen robes, midnight-blue trim, wooden chests and regional banners carried with obvious pride, a

Wind on the granite peaks of the Frost-Spire Range carried needle-ice sharp enough to sting like broken glass against exposed skin.At eight thousand feet, where six Far-Western provinces met the clouds, five hundred thousand acres of terraced fields sat locked under eight feet of hard blue permafrost — an early arctic drop that had frozen the ground six weeks ahead of schedule, threatening five million people with a winter none of them had grain reserves to survive. Provincial couriers had been riding day and night for a week just to get word of the crisis to the capital in time.Two hundred steam-driven sleighs wound up the ice-slick switchbacks, Ashveil's banners flying beside the Far-Western eagle. Elira, Dorian, and Valerius led the vanguard on matching black warhorses.Elira wore midnight-blue velvet lined in white fox fur, hood up against the storm, one hand resting instinctively over her stomach where the twins rested beneath her layered wraps. Dorian rode close enough that th

The Sovereign Healing thundered along the rails at eighty miles an hour, its crystal boiler humming a steady note that carried across the river valleys it passed.Twelve carriages, all converted into a mobile hospital — two operating suites, forty isolation beds, a full pathology lab, three thousand doses of medical supplies packed and ready. It was, by any measure, the fastest medical response the world had ever mounted, and it had taken barely three days from telegraph alert to departure. Elira, Dorian, Hana, and Milo stood in the central laboratory carriage, brightly lit and busy despite the hour.Elira wore a medical tunic of midnight-blue silk over white linen, Elena's mantle draped over her chair, one hand resting over the now-visible curve of her pregnancy between tests. Dorian stood behind her chair, hands on her shoulders, keeping half his attention on her and half on the train's smooth, steady progress."Thirty-four hours to cross three thousand miles," Milo reported, checki