She stood rigid, staring forward, immobile, the epitome of serenity on top of the podium, but inside her, walls had cracked and the ocean was flowing in. She breathed no longer to breathe—it was ash, glass, and salt. Her anger constructed a wave of hope and dread in her breast, wide and smothering, and for the first time in a decade, she didn't know how to breathe like a grown-up, like a teacher, like a woman who had planted her girlhood beneath a layer of administrative steel. Hiyori. My daughter. My flesh. My pride. And you let that beast drive you off the stage? It hurt her worse than she thought it should. She had honed Hiyori to a fine edge—sharpened her wits, sculpted her discipline, and broken her softness into diamonds. She gave her everything: tutors, books, and the cruelest love money and birth could afford. Hiyori had always obeyed, always towered over the rest, and always spoken as though the room was already hers. A Toyotaro. A natural queen. The heir. And now her name came second.
Second.
Second to him.
Shotaro Mugyiwara. The barefoot bastard with a sword and a heartbeat that defied every law this school was built upon. The anomaly she had sworn to eradicate before the seeds could take hold. The boy who walked as if he owed nothing to country or God. Without Warning. The student who stared at her in class as if he had been able to see through her—not her face, but through her, into the hollow, fossilized carapaces of a woman who had once believed in light. And now, all because of him, the perfect picture she'd spent her entire life painting—of Hiyori, of the system, of herself—was breaking like porcelain dropped onto cold marble.
Her wrath directed its attention inward, toward the girl sitting below her—Hiyori, struggling to keep her face immobile, cannot hide the quiver of her eyebrow, the stuttered embarrassment of her lips. "You were supposed to break him," Sakura's thoughts raged like scalding steam behind a clenched jaw. You were supposed to strut across his dead body of a scoreboard. What did you do with all the gifts I've bestowed upon you? What did I create you as but the instrument of chaos?
But Hiyori had failed. Her daughter had not been enough. And that, that was the most bitter of wounds.
Is this what I bred? Is this the daughter I created out of ash and perfection? Her inner voice choked on the acid of her own disillusionment. You had a purpose—to surpass me. And you—strangled.
She could not allow the people to see. She was as stone, but in her heart, her hatred of Shotaro burned with the fury of a furnace devouring flames. It wasn't dramatic, some malevolent soliloquy of darkness and silks. It was merciless. A love forged out of tragedy. The love of a mother who saw her child kneel on her knees for a man who did not even make the effort. A hatred with a heartbeat. And it beat only one name: Shotaro.
He had stolen from her. Not pride—she'd lost pride to control. Not dignity—she'd wrapped herself in it even now. He had stolen her story. The painstakingly written tale of how this year would go, how Hiyori would reign, how the others would bow, and how Toyotaro Miracle High would remind the world once again that order is all that ever prevails.
Hiyori Toyotaro sat upright in her chair, hands in her lap, legs crossed with deliberation—composure carved into her body like an epistle. Her face was empty, inscrutable as temple stone, but her breathing hiccupped once. Only once. The hush after Shotaro's name still rang like a gong within her bones. Second best. For the first time in her life, she had not been at the peak. Not the whispered name in awed terror. She was the norm—the North Star, the yardstick, the headmistress's child and the system's crown jewel. And now, she was looking up.
At him.
Mugyiwara Shotaro. Eight feet of tattered paradox, standing on the bare feet in the throng as if the floor was owing him something. He wasn't smirking, wasn't victorious. He looked perplexed. As if he'd stepped onto the wrong page of the narrative. His scarlet eyes passed indolently over the ranks, looking not for applause but for individuals. Friends. Hiroki? Bird? Where are they, for crying out loud? His expression spoke, "Already tired of being center stage." And then his eyes crossed Fatiba's—just a brief glance, like rain—and he smiled.
That smile.
It wasn't pride. It wasn't charisma. It was something heartbreakingly tender. Something that broke through the hierarchy like sunlight through stained glass. Fatiba's eyes were wide, amazed, applauding now with both her hands, cheeks flushing with the warmth she could not contain. And Hiyori saw it all—felt that moment stretch out to her, take hold. If it were anyone else, she would have taken them apart. If it was Shirou or another pawn with an inflated sense of self, she would have descended into maniacal rage, solving equations in her dreams, reworking all the laws until her triumph was certain.
Shotaro was not a competitor.
He was a gateway.
The unbeatable ceiling that made her long to jump. She did not despise him. She could not. Because some part of her—some primeval, rivalrous, godly fire—longed to jump into his tempest and see if she might soar as well. She wanted to beat him not for pride, but for reality. And that was more terrifying to her than second place would ever be.
Meanwhile, high above, Principal Sakura watched the exchange with a smile carved from restraint. Her daughter had taken the loss with grace. She had not flinched. But Sakura saw the light in Hiyori's eyes shift—and that terrified her more than the boy's victory. Hiyori had looked at him—not with disdain, but with hope.
He infects everyone, Sakura believed, venom running through her serenity like hairline fractures through porcelain. He doesn't conquer. He converts. And now even my daughter is a pilgrim at the altar of that smile.
I made her a queen. He made her a pilgrim.
And somewhere, deep within the bone of her rage, Sakura developed a new hatred, not cold and rational, but very human. The hatred of a mother seeing her daughter fall for the tempest sent to destroy them both.
.....
The planet did not function on diplomacy or democracy. It functioned on bloodlines—ten of them. Ten old-line elite families whose names could break stock markets, shift wars, and muffle governments with a nod. These families were not powerful; they were unavoidable. Each a pillar, a dynasty with centuries of acquired dominance, and under them, the sub-branches—lesser stars around their suns—each cut from a particular purpose, a function, a philosophy.
There were five such families in Asia. Only one of them, however, was spoken about in the awed hush reserved for omens and miracles: the Mugyiwaras.
They were the Chosen Ones' families—or so the world learned. Keepers of the Miracle Lineage. Proprietors of the massive Mugyiwara Zaibatsu, a spiritual-corporate empire that controlled not only business, but meaning. Its influence stretched from biotech to mythic arms, from divine patents to miracle agricultural rights. They were the messiahs of post-collapse society in textbooks. In secret, they were something ancient, something other.
And yet, he—Mugyiwara Shotaro—that barefoot tempest with silver locks and crimson eyes—insisted with a languid shrug that his surname was a typo. "It's Mugiwara, not Mugyiwara," he'd murmur, crunching on melon bread as if the heritage didn't count. And for all the genealogy websites, no one could quite refute it. And that disturbed the guardians of order. Because if he wasn't one of theirs, why did the blood sing in his name like prophecy?
The Japanese Mugyiwaras were not a monolithic force. They comprised a galaxy of seven sub-branches—each unique, old, and crafted as an organ in a divine mechanism.
The Ryomuns: mad-eyed fight-devils whose blood boiled like mercury. They regarded warfare as sacred, a tongue more true than words. Their clan crest was frequently inked onto the flesh of children before they celebrated their first birthday.
The Kinokos: stoic, learned types. Monks of the modern era. All Mugiywara children who did not perish at an early age were raised by a Kinoko. They were austere, indefatigable, frightening—teachers who could smile and shatter your mind in the same breath.
The Muramasas: Whisperers of Steel. Forge masters of impossible blades. They were they who bestowed the Mugyiwaras their holy family heirloom: Tokioni Muramasa, that sword said to bleed through the ages themselves. They were tight-lipped, but their work rang with gods.
The Kizaikushis: Ledger mystics. Bankers, lawyers, chartermasters—the unseen axis on which the empire turned. Every contract, soul deal, and divine copyright ran through a Kizaikushi's fingers. They didn't speak unless it was legally binding.
The Ushimuras: Oddly pastoral. Cattle breeders and rice barons. They grew the miracle grains that powered Mugiywara technology. The late Matriarch Himawari, mother to the current generation, was an Ushimura—her breath smelled of milk and stormlight.
The Kaguyas: moon-dwelling, lunar-blooded. They literally dwelled on the moon in biodomes over the Sea of Serenity, where they learned about gravitational ritual and metaphysical eclipses. They were the mystics—the ones who recalled things that had not yet occurred.
The Raikous: Lightning-born, grudge-ridden Demon-hunters. They did Raikou stuff—whatever that was. Their lives were marked by their struggle against ancient, unseen predators. And they never lost.
The primary Mugiywara clan tended to intermarry among its sub-branches—not simply to keep bloodlines intact, but to sustain a close-knit purpose. Its children were bred not only for authority, but for narrative continuity. A Raikou-Ushimura offspring might grow divine insight for crops withstood demonic corruption. A Muramasa-Kizaikushi offspring could write contracts that were also cursed swords. Every child was not an individual but a knot in a continuous legend.
Shotaro? He said he was none of them. Typo.
And still, he carried that name like a puzzle too perilous to complete.
There were ten families. Ten columns supporting the illusion of civilization. The Mugyiwaras could have governed miracle and legacy in Japan, but outside the islands, other titans awakened—older, colder, harsher. The upper echelons did not only possess the world. They shaped it. It was to unravel the code of destiny to study them.
The second family occupied India, not with splintered roots and disseminated lineages, but as a monolith. The Karmadhvas. Single. Powerful. No branches. They did not accept dilution. They accepted the Codex of the Nine Unknown Men—a sealed book handed down through generations like a time bomb wrapped in scripture. Story went it held nine books of forbidden knowledge—time travel, resurrection, mind control, even mass destruction through thought. Each generation of the Karmadhvas received one book, selected in blood ritual and battle of brains. The rest were imprisoned, gazed upon by the living vaults of the family: children trained from birth to be able to forget and remember at whim. The Karmadhvas seldom spoke, but when they did, revolutions stopped to hear.
They were India's unseen backbone—ministers, godmen, AI ethicists, disaster designers. Some said that a Karmadhva once persuaded the British Empire to retreat with a mere whispered command. Whether legend or remembrance, their shadow cast over the subcontinent.
The third clan dominated the ice-stung ironlands of Russia—the Vodkavitchs. Born in flames and entombed in snow, they were the old blood oligarchs: warlords dressed in three-piece suits, bankers with death tolls. Where the Mugyiwaras were wonder and intellect, the Vodkavitchs were power. They did not bargain. They did not fall back. They acquired brutality like others acquired money.
Their most feared sub-branch, the Olgavitchs, worked like a family of neatly dressed phantoms. Killers who struck with no trace or cry. If a Vodkavitch wanted a threat eliminated, it was the Olgavitchs that did the 'symphony of silence.' Their mark wasn't blood. It was vacancy—a chair still warm to the touch, a spinning teacup, a building still standing but completely empty. Some claimed they could delete not only people, but whole histories.
The fourth clan held its broken throne in Israel, donning two faces and using two tongues. The Shomerzahevs. Secret keepers. Legacy encryption owners who contemporary governments still couldn't break. Two branches fought like Cain and Abel: one in Tel Aviv, the other in Dubai. The Israeli branch claimed the divine authority of the Old Temple. The Dubai branch claimed oil, guns, and data as the new commandments.
There were no subsidiary branches—merely hostility, hereditary paranoia honed to diplomatic skill. But Dubai Muslim Shomerzahevs had aligned themselves by mutual understanding with a wild card dynasty: the Darvish clan—owners of the Darvish diamond company.
the fifith one,
THE YÀN CLAN (颜)
They didn't call themselves rulers. That was too crude.They called themselves preservers.Preservers of language, of dynasty, of silence.The Yàn Clan was ancient. Older than the revolution, older than the empire, older than recorded guilt. They didn't live above the system—they were the system. Governments came and went. Presidents, premiers, and protestors—all just seasonal noise under the old porcelain sky of their will.
The Yàns didn't show up in photographs. They owned the photographers.They didn't get tried. They wrote the definitions of crimes.
Headquartered in Shanghai, they operated not as a family, but as a bureaucracy made flesh. Polished suits and paper-thin smiles. Their family archive, known simply as the Red Pavilion, was sealed beneath a state library, guarded by monks that looked like civil servants.
They had three sub-branches—each a limb with its own domain, its own method of quiet dominance.
1. The Jiangs (Hong Kong Branch):
Currency. Discretion. Blackmail in a velvet case.
The Jiangs were the ghosts of British colonial finance, sinicized and sharpened by Yàn blood. They ran shadow stock markets where companies were bought, sold, and destroyed before sunrise. They made fortunes vanish.They spoke in English when intimidating Americans.They spoke in Mandarin when disciplining traitors.They built gilded towers in central Hong Kong—silent, seismic monuments to control over transnational commerce.
But their real currency? Information. Private videos, hacked chats, family scandals recorded in 4K before they even happened.
2. The Phams (Vietnam Branch):
Pharmaceuticals. Population data. Cultural memory.
The Phams pretended to be an emerging brand of nationalist industrialists. But their roots were soaked in war, and their biotech empire was born from old chemical maps used during the Vietnam War.They supplied both anti-government insurgents and state police with psychoactive suppressants.They sold antidepressants in cities, and sterilization drugs in rural zones.Their research facilities were guarded not by soldiers, but by history—rewritten textbooks, vanished authors, ghost-cities disguised as "economic test zones."
Their motto was whispered in state hospitals:"You don't need to kill a people—just change what they remember."
3. The Baeks (South Korea Branch):
Culture. Algorithms. God.
The Baeks were not politicians—they were curators of belief. They controlled K-Pop labels, esports empires, religious cults, and "mental health" apps used by tens of millions.They didn't hack phones. They hacked attention spans.They were seen as modernizers, even saviors—but every bright idol's smile was engineered through 3D facial modeling, every catchy hook was shaped by mood-altering neural metrics.
Their control wasn't force. It was addiction.You didn't fear them. You thanked them.
They ran beauty. They ran belief.They were gods—but disguised as influencers.
Together, the Yàn Clan ruled with a doctrine they never published, but everyone followed.Never be seen entirely.Never be named completely.Never let the people know how many kinds of war you're already winning.
And beneath it all?A name no one dared say in public.Mugyiwara.
Because even the Yàns had someone they were watching. Watching… or preparing for.
...
Europe's power didn't run through parliaments or parades—it flowed in boardrooms, encoded cables, and bloody coalitions. Three dynasties dominated the continent in a vice, each more entangled and incestuous than the previous one, their rivalries as deadly as their combinations.
First, the Bougettes of France. In daylight they were haute-couture legends—Paris runways, Milan showrooms—but in the shadows their ateliers controlled the continent's most efficient spy network. In Italy, the Del Amalfitanos owned both high-end pizzerias and organized-crime "pasta" lines, laundering millions in artisanal pies. In Morocco, the Taghineurs clothed heads of state while passing bribes through luxury kaftans; diplomats went missing under the cover of fabric orders. In the Netherlands, the Stroffenkruis wove financial corruption into filigree lace—each stitch a coded bank transfer, every hem hiding microfilm.
Then arrived the Chewsdayinnits, Britain's blood-titled goliath. Their influence spilled across all Commonwealth thrones. In Spain, the Torres de Inglaterra operated bullrings that served as arms-deals bazaars; both sold ticket a contract. Down under, the Downwraiths mined uranium outback for sale to the highest bidder while pretending to be mining philanthropists. Canada's Snorfields developed water-rights battles, patenting cloud-seeding technology and owning complete river systems. The Irish Ó Muintirs turned ancient-world "prophecy" think tanks into contemporary intel agencies, forecasting stock market crashes as plagues. And the Isblods in Sweden patented human-replication procedures—cloning CEOs to perpetuate their reach across multiple lifetimes.
And last, the German Fantasteins, masters of motor engineering and "hard power" technology. Their high-end-car empire dominated European transit, but their real empire was beneath the surface. Austrian Von Motorkaisers excavated clandestine tunnel systems formerly developed for wartime evasion, now providing safe passage to spies. Hungary's Turbolaks operated continent-wide railroads—each freight shipment a record book of political extortion. Denmark's Frostgears mechanized whole regions of farmland, their flying probes harvesting DNA samples in the guise of farm censuses. And in Sweden, a second Fantastein group built military exoskeletons for hire-forth armies, evading export restrictions under R&D fronts.
They despised each other's crosses and met behind curtains of velvet only to redraft maps and marriages in equal proportion. Cousin wedded cousin to sanctify corporate unions. Sister bred nephew to amortize stock interest. Bloodlines curved back upon themselves until the trees of the family resembled closed rings—every branch a shareholder, every merger a blood vow.
This was Europe's actual aristocracy: dynasties who did not wear crowns but ruled continents. Democracy was a sham. The actual decisions—bank bailouts, border conflicts, wars over resources—were negotiated in these hidden salons, champagne flutes in one hand and poison needles in the other. And in each capital, a rumor coursed through the halls of power: "They're inbred. They're merciless. And they own us all."
They didn't require castles. They employed contracts. They didn't require thrones. They possessed launch codes.
The Cheezburga dynasty, masters of the American corporate bloodstream, was not only a privileged household—they were a dynasty conceived of petroleum, christened of media, and consecrated with military-industrial halos.
The current First Lady, Cassandra Cheezburga, grinned on morning TV with the accuracy of a missile strike. Wife to President Freedom Guns, she had sold lobbying packages to both sides of a Middle Eastern civil war—then aired documentaries on the 'liberation efforts' on TV networks owned by her family.
The Cheezburgas weren't merely Americans. They were America.
Their slogan, in small print beneath every schoolbook and gun patent, was:
"Freedom is a Trademark."
Their offshoots functioned like synchronized limbs of one creature:
The Stetsons (Texas Branch): Energy barons, rodeo-faced and God-pleasing, they controlled the refineries, meatpacking trusts, and volunteer militias.
The Wakers (New England Branch): Lords of academia and pharmas. They owned Ivy Leagues like pets. They didn't bribe journals—they wrote them.
The Ohayoans (Midwest Branch): Corn and cereal barons. They owned the FDA in everything but name. Food was policy. Hunger was politics.
The Mapletons (Canadian Branch): Soft smiles. Hard surveillance. Controlled Arctic mining, cyber defense, and every 'anonymous leak' tracing back to Ottawa.
The Sunchicos (Mexican Branch): First smuggled American weapons to insurgent cartels—until they themselves rose up. Blacklisted and pursued now, they work in the shadows, spilling Cheezburga papers, making former allies into enemies.
The Cheezburga family did not fight war. They bankrolled both sides until one fell from bewilderment.
.....
SOUTH AMERICA
While the North declared its empire, the South hid its secrets under gold-encrusted jungles and oil-soaked fields.
The Fernandezs didn't wear crowns—football jerseys, they wore; through pop stars, they spoke, and governed through debt.
Brazil-based, they were rainmakers—literally. They were owners of the privatized weather-mod corporations that manipulated agricultural rainfall across the continent.
Argentina, Peru, and Colombia bowed not with treaties, but with contracts written in legalese.
Their branches were separate, perilous, and autonomously independent:
The Solarons (Argentina Branch): Technically operated wineries and tango culture exports. Illegally operated blacksites for intelligence in vineyards, and coordinated blackmail ops with deepfake AI and luxury hospitality suites.
The Aquiluz (Peru Branch): Old gold and new lithium. Once they operated colonial mines. Now they operate rare-earth conglomerates, compensating peasants in blood-stained crypto while funding ecological conferences overseas.
The Reyes Verdes (Colombia Branch): Machine-gun-wielding eco-fascists. They maintained "green zones" enforced by drones. Green environmentalists in public; in private, the largest human capital traffickers in the southern hemisphere.
The Lobovics (Uruguay Branch): Managed cryptocurrency money laundering, clandestine biotech experiments, and neurological behavior adjustment. Their 'medical retreats' received diplomats and dissolved memories.
If the Cheezburgas were the empire's broadcast, the Fernandez were its forgotten echoes—the silent guardians of South America's controlled instability.
Where North controlled by spectacle, South controlled by silence.
And between them?
A pipeline of wars, markets, ideologies, and lost names.