Empire of Dust
Castian is the stain on a royal line, the bastard son of a king who never wanted him. Deemed a dullard and a failure, he is exiled on his nineteenth birthday to the most desolate corner of the kingdom: the dying, dust-choked city of Oakhaven. It is a sentence of slow, grinding death, a cruel jest from a father who wants nothing more than to forget his existence. He has no skills, no allies, and no hope.
But in the depths of his despair, as he kneels in the ruins of his new "domain," something impossible awakens. A System, visible only to him, flickers to life, offering a single, audacious mission: Survive and Thrive. Armed with blueprints for forgotten technologies and the foundational knowledge of a world far more advanced than his own, Castian is given the one thing he never had: a chance.
This is not a story of a chosen one, but of a rejected one. It is a tale of kingdom-building on an epic scale, where the first war is fought not with swords, but with shovels against a poisoned well. Where engineering is the new magic, and logistics are the key to victory. Castian will have to transform starving outcasts into an army, bitter rivals into allies, and a desolate wasteland into the heart of a new nation.
But as Oakhaven rises, a beacon of impossible prosperity, it attracts the attention of hungrier things than wolves. Raiders, a vengeful king, and a master of whispers all seek to claim his creation. To protect his people, the bastard prince must become more than a builder; he must become a commander, a spymaster, and the architect of a war fought not just on the battlefield, but in the minds of his enemies. From a handful of dust, he will forge an empire.