Chapter 548 First, Change the Children

Chapter 548 First, Change the Children

Aron nodded. “It’s exactly what you think,” he said. “The awakening phenomenon isn’t over, and when people reach the early stages of puberty, the clock will start ticking down to their eventual awakenings as well. Thankfully, though, the process will be much smoother as it won’t be as... abrupt as the first awakening was.

“So, to prevent the orphans who are soon to awaken, the House of Hope plan was brought forward and made the main thrust of the Coeus Foundation’s activities. We will guide the newly awakened through their growth phase and seamlessly shift them into ‘hero academies’ as they reach the age of awakening. That serves a dual purpose—first, it’ll prevent them from their desperation driving them to a life of crime, and second, it’ll guide them into working for the empire instead of becoming part of private forces in the hands of noncitizens.

“Prior to the mass awakening of the three percent, we’d already made plans for the House of Hope project, but at that time, it was meant to raise generations of people who would be staunch imperial loyalists. We would raise them, teach them, and train them to work in whatever sector we needed them, but that became infeasible after the mana density reached critical mass.”

Aron stopped speaking and waited for his fiancee’s mind to catch up. She was a very intelligent and quick-witted woman, but exhaustion makes fools of the best. He sneakily carved a refresh rune in the air and pressed it to her, clearing the fog from her mind, then waited for her response.

The silence stretched for a moment as Rina’s face scrunched up in thought. Then she finally asked, “You said there were other reasons. What are they?”

“At the time, unemployment, especially among the uneducated, was on the rise. If we hadn’t done something to combat it, it would’ve led to an unrecoverable tailspin into another economic depression. So we overstaffed all of our programs that were run through the Coeus Foundation as part of that. With a staff to child ratio of one to five, that provided twenty million jobs to people who were of good character, firm convictions, and strong morals through the House of Hope program alone.

“Besides, the alternative is for them to end up on the streets or as victims of forced prostitution, sweatshops, organ farms.... The list of potential bad ends for orphans goes on, especially those who have been picked up by shady, underfunded orphanages relying on unreliable donations or criminal consortiums backing them.

“The House of Hope program is a closed orphanage system that will not allow for adoption or outside fostering of the children we raise in it. If anything, it’s more like a boarding school for all ages, where the caregivers care for the children, the children care for the younger children, and all of them are given the best of the best when it comes to providing them with the tools to lead a successful, happy life once they age out and become Hope Alumni.”

“Now I’m really curious to see how the so-called ‘Hope Alumni’ influence the empire in the future,” Rina said with a smile.

Currently, the empire was being held together by spit, chewing gum, and baling wire, through Aron’s overwhelming military might and technological prowess. No one was foolish enough to think that all imperial citizens had been completely willing when they joined the empire. They were merely in it either in pursuit of the benefits offered to imperial citizens, or in fear of the dystopian nightmare that they felt noncitizens would be suffering through once the fortress cities were complete and the two societies finally completely separated.

Thus, raising his own imperial adherents was a masterstroke of planning from Aron’s side and displayed his forward thinking. It was becoming more obvious as time passed that the Terran Empire would long outlive its founder and first emperor, and Rina, whose curiosity was finally sated, closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.

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