The hardest part about bringing an entire sector into one’s intergalactic empire without the use of System contracts was getting the people to assimilate.
Fear was a useful tool to begin with, but fear wasn’t how a new ruler won loyalty. System contracts didn’t win loyalty either, and that was a major reason Xavier Collins didn’t use them—that, and because the dragonkin wanted the people of his empire, the people of the entire universe, to have free will.
In the vastness of the multiverse, Xavier Collins was sure someone out there had managed to rule over the entirety of a universe before, taking it by force, contracting everyone within it once the System had spread to every corner. But he was also aware that people couldn’t truly unite when they were forced to obey. A soldier couldn’t live up to their full potential when it hadn’t been their choice to fight.
They might follow orders with their head, but their heart would never be in it.
The dragonkin needed to win the hearts and minds of not only the people of the capital of Orin, but the people of the entire universe.
It was an impossible task, but Xavier Collins dealt in the impossible almost exclusively.
Memories were long in this sector. Longer than those of Silver River or even those in the Ventorin sector. The Silver River sector was simply so much younger than the Orin sector—young in System integration terms, at least. There were Denizens in the Orin sector who had lived for thousands more years than Sovereign Rewke Fouran had even been alive—these were Denizens who had long ago plateaued on their journey toward power. D Grades, C Grades, even B Grades who’d stopped making progress and stopped caring to.
They remembered the last time power in the sector had changed hands. They remembered the violent battles that were fought. They remembered a ruthless conqueror, not a benevolent ruler.
And they expected the very same thing to happen when Xavier Collins came to their planets.
And yet, Xavier Collins’s rule did not start with a blood bath. His armies did not march through the streets, forcing contracts upon every citizen they found, killing those who fought back, killing those who refused to sign, sometimes killing just because their blood was up and killing was what they did.
It started with a show of power, yes—the same show of power he’d displayed to General Liaha Gadrin and the army she’d brought to take him down. But that show of power never had anyone come to harm. Xavier Collins didn’t need to kill to get his point across. Many thought this was the sign of a weak ruler, but when they were shown memories of what he’d done—memories of the death of The Collector, Sovereign Rewke Fouran, the A Grade Arrack, and even the S Grade True Dragon from the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth floor, not to mention the destruction of the entire Empire of Servitude’s armada—the word “weak” was never found in the same sentence as the name “Xavier Collins.”
The old timers had trouble believing in the benevolence of his rule, and those who’d been born and raised under the sovereign were wary of their former ruler’s killer, but that all started to change when Xavier Collins and his representatives started not only erasing contracts but teaching every single citizen how to erase contracts themselves.
Having that kind of power, that kind of freedom, was unheard of, and it was just being… handed out to anyone and everyone. Most people thought it was an insane thing to do. How could you rule a city, a planet, let alone a sector without the use of contracts? But none of them wanted to be contracted themselves, so it was never questioned.
What did they care if this Xavier Collins failed to rule them?
But erasing contracts wasn’t the only thing they were taught to do. It was as though the very secrets of the universe were laid bare for all to see, for all to learn. And not just this universe, but other universes too.
Not everyone lined up to be taught at first. Many Denizens—old timers and upstarts alike—worried taking instruction would come at a hidden cost, that they would be asked to do things they didn’t wish to do in exchange for these amazing gifts. Perhaps they would be asked to spy on their friends and family. Perhaps they would be asked to enforce the new laws.
And perhaps they wouldn’t be asked but made.
Still, like the erasing of contracts it was a difficult thing to pass up. Denizens were returning from training with new, amazing abilities—and entire new cores, cores no one had ever heard of.
And then there were the spell patterns.
Whenever Xavier Collins or one of his representatives took over a planet, the entire planet was engulfed within a time dilation field. The fact that one Denizen could do such a thing wasn’t lost on them—especially when it wasn’t even Xavier Collins who did it. Even those who served him were exceptionally powerful, which was proof enough that he shared his powers with those who followed him.
These time dilations fields didn’t seem sustainable to the citizens of the planets that who introduced to Xavier’s empire, until they realised what learning spell patterns meant. Once they’d been learnt, cooldowns became irrelevant, especially when Denizens were taught not only how to draw spell patterns, but manifest them, something that happened practically in an instant.
And they were also taught to use Pocket Time Stream, a spell that required they create artificial cores within themselves.
These things were thought to be impossible, and yet they were not only happening in front of their eyes, they were being taught how to do them.
The sharing of these powers, and the safety the citizens were given, made the majority of the population come around quickly to the new ways of being. There was unrest—there was always unrest—but the unrest was dealt with non-violently when possible, and violently only when absolutely necessary.
The people had to be shown that there were evils that wouldn’t be tolerated.
The former general, Liaha Gadrin, could hardly believe her eyes when she saw how different the lives of the people in her sector could be lived. Power wasn’t something only brandished by the few, but the many, and it was never used as a means of control. Once she’d come to terms with the reality of the situation, and the haze in front of her eyes had been lifted when it came to how she viewed the old sovereign, she became Xavier Collins’s strongest advocate in the Orin sector.
She was one of the first to learn from him and his representatives.
Decades could quite easily pass on every one of these newly assimilated worlds with barely a moment passing in the universe’s time stream. Denizens from the Silver River and Ventorin sector were portalled in to train up the new citizens, and to take Xavier’s rule to the next world, and the next, until those of the Orin sector were trained up enough to do the same.
Liaha Gadrin—no longer a general—took on this duty, embracing it wholeheartedly. She, along with many in her sector, studied the memories their new ruler had provided them. Mostly, they studied two different memories.
The memory that showed the Interdimensional Dragon ripping into a universe from the void, and the memory of Xavier Collins creating unfoldings of himself, allowing him to gain enough power to take out an S Grade True Dragon.
Studying these memories became a ritual, of sorts. The coming of the Interdimensional Dragon was like their Ragnarök, their Armageddon. The memory of Xavier’s triumph over the S Grade True Dragon, and how he triumphed, was how hope was instilled into the populace that one day, unity would win out over the threat to their universe.
As the decades and soon the centuries rolled by, it wasn’t only the Orin sector Xavier seized control over.
His rule spread, and everywhere it spread, peace and unity came with it. The universe around the sectors he ruled remained close to a stand still as his empire flourished and gained in power.
It wasn’t only other sectors Xavier spread to, either—it was other universes.
This was new territory, at least in this corner of the multiverse. Universes never tended to connect with one another, but Xavier’s vision was one of true unity, not just of one universe but many, and his vision was shared by the nineteen-hundred-and-ninety-nine other versions of him.
It would have been two thousand, but a certain Xavier Prime had fallen off the face of reality after Xavier Collins had returned from the Tower of Champions after completing the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth floor.
The search for that version of Xavier was ongoing, but there wasn’t much to be done when barely any universe time had passed since it had happened.
On every single converted world in the entirety of Xavier’s empire, which now spanned over ten sectors, inter-universal portals were created. These were permanently maintained waystations that connected all two thousand of the different universes Xavier had created when he’d made all those unfoldings. These universes were almost identical—they’d all formed from the same root event, when Xavier was facing the S Grade True Dragon—and so citizens of each had no trouble getting along, and they didn’t need to venture into the void to reach each other.
This interconnectedness was strange at first. Most people didn’t really know what to make of it. It wasn’t normal, interacting with another version of yourself. The advantages of such a connection were unclear to many, even though they knew what the ultimate goal was it was still a difficult reality to grasp. Each universe faced identical problems—how could them banding together prevent the old monsters of the inner sector from destroying their society if they each had the same old monster to deal with at the same time?
But it soon became clear how powerful their interconnectivity could be, because Xavier Collins wasn’t sitting on some throne, waiting for the threats to come to him. He was going on the offensive, seeking them out, neutralising anyone who could become a threat to his society.
And because he was taking the initiative, coupled with the use of powerful time dilation fields, he didn’t need to do this at the same time in each universe. He could stagger every mission, performing it in one universe first, so they only had to deal with one problem at a time.
At least, that was the theory. This was an approach he had yet to test. During this expansion phase the entire focus had been on solidifying his empire. It didn’t feel necessary to go out there and pick fights with the most powerful beings in the universe when time was really only something that was passing for him and those under his rule.
But Xavier Collins was a man of action, and he could only consolidate power for so long before he finally had to go out and use it.
Now that he and those in his empire had spent a good amount of time perfecting the expansion process, assimilating new planets and sectors with a ruthless efficiency no other Denizen in the universe had ever been able to manage—and all that without the use of contracts—it was finally time to put the power of what he and the other nineteen-hundred-ninety-nine hundred versions of himself over two thousand universes had created to the test.
The anticipation of this mission was felt by every citizen in over forty trillion planets in a combined sector count of twenty thousand over all two thousand connected universes.
Xavier Collins was going to take the fight to Jhanku—in one universe at a time.