A hush blanketed the Kingdom of Lorya as the sun slid behind its serrated crown of peaks. The last light spilled like molten gold over the Ministry of Progress's glinting towers, tracing sterile reflections across the industrial zones. Far below, in the soot-choked factory belts, smokestacks belched rhythmic plumes into a sky already bruised by overwork.
The cities ticked like machines.
Every breath calibrated. Every second monetized.
Joy, here, was a liability.
In Lorya, life bowed to numbers.
Gross Domestic Product dictated policy. Efficiency eclipsed empathy. Families were units of labor. Children were productivity futures. Even laughter, if unlicensed, was subversive. Ministers wore smiles like masks, measured in quarterly reports, while screens across the city pulsed with quotas, slogans, and surveillance alerts.
But beyond the neon glare of output screens and the cold glow of state dashboards, deeper truths slept in the roots of the land. Beneath layers of concrete and compliance, a promise endured—older than the regime, older than the GDP.
In shuttered monasteries and shuttered hearts, it persisted.
They whispered of it in forgotten sharims carved into cliffside stone. Farmers passed the tale from lips dusted in forest ash and mountain wind. They called it:
The Gross National Happiness System.
Not a statistic. Not a policy.
A system of the soul.
No one remembered when the GNH System had last awakened—if it had ever truly existed. Some said it was a relic of the old kings. Others believed it was code buried in the land itself, encrypted in the chants of mystics and the breath of the forests. One thing was clear:
It would not stir for numbers.
Only for a feeling.
And now, as Lorya crept toward another cycle of silent despair and synthetic smiles, the mountain stirred. The code pulsed faintly in the soil. A name, long buried, floated to the surface of the wind. One soul, fractured by regret yet unbroken by apathy, would hear its call.
Not a hero. Not a rebel.
Just a man named Adrian Vale—who once believed in order, and who would learn—painfully, beautifully—that happiness cannot be optimized.
And when the GNH System chose him, the first domino would fall.
And the regime's most dangerous threat would not be a bomb.
It would be a smile, freely given.