A/N: There was a mistake in part of the previous chapter where it was saying how the Gen'Dai had an average life of 200 years. That was a typo and it should have been the Balance Keepers and that error should be fixed as of now.
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The Sith Empire for 1000 years has seen immense development. The reforms that Vitiate had implemented under Daimon's guidance had taken root throughout this time.
The co-optation strategy for the Mandalorians had worked, at least initially, in the way that Marr had predicted it would. The most capable clan leaders had been absorbed into the Sith military hierarchy, given titles and resources and the particular satisfaction of having their martial abilities directed toward enemies that were not their own people.
With this Mandalore was quiet for two centuries.
Then the first generation of co-opted leaders had aged and died, and their children had inherited the resentment their parents had suppressed in order to make it. The second Mandalorian uprising had been considerably larger than the first, and the Sith had suppressed it with such brutality that it created a third.
The third uprising had not been suppressed but negotiated instead. Because by the time it occurred, the Dark Council had enough experience with the cycle to understand that suppression was just simply buying time.
The negotiated settlement had given Mandalore genuine self-governance within the Sith Empire's framework, which was what the original independence movement had asked for eight centuries earlier.
The more significant transformation had come not from the Mandalorian question but from the internal culture of the Sith themselves. The Dark Council reforms that Vitiate had implemented in the aftermath of the war had addressed the most obvious structural failures, the parasitic accumulation of power, the factional infighting that consumed more energy than external threats, and the tendency of Sith Lords to treat the Empire as a resource to be extracted rather than an institution to be maintained.
These reforms had held longer than most had expected. Over several centuries, the new Dark Council had been selected through competition rather than political maneuvering, and the people who had earned their abilities tended to do things differently than those who had acquired their positions through manipulation.
Still, this didn't stop the Sith from being what the dark side turned them into. They were still hungry for power and supremacy and still hated the Jedi Order and the Republic.
In fact, they had already publicly declared the Jedi Order their mortal enemies and the Republic an adversary. Thus, this started a 400-year cold war which was still going on.
Darth Marr, who was a legendary Sith in history, had died after living to about 150. Daimon would have tried to catch him like a Pokémon, but he saw in a vision that Darth Marr would return sometime in the future. He didn't get many details but it did show Marr leading the armies of the Sith once again, sometime in the future.
The Sith's economy was centered around war production and resource extraction. This was caused by centuries of Vitiate's reforms which had forced the Sith to build up their power before using it.
The result was an economy that was considerably more sophisticated than how it was initially. They were still lagging behind both the Republic and Imperium by margins that the Dark Council found deeply irritating and regularly discussed how to fix that.
Their military was formidable. Nobody with any intelligence disputed that. The Sith war machine had been maintained at full capacity throughout the thousand-year period, which was both a source of genuine strength and a symptom of the fundamental problem that Vitiate's reforms had addressed but never fully solved.
This path would ultimately lead them to war with somebody as you only sharpen a sword if you intend to use it. In the Sith's case, they can't wait to use it against the Jedi or the Republic.
As for attacking the Imperium, it wasn't completely off the table for them, but they would never openly say or do anything against the Imperium. After all, they didn't want the eyes of Daimon to turn towards them and cause another intervention.
After the Jedi, they also recognized the Balance Keepers as the final threat against their dominance. The Jedi were the ones who basically exiled their ancestors from the Republic alongside the Balance Keepers who fought in the hundred years of darkness.
So, it was natural that they would want revenge against both. But that also brought up the problem of Daimon. The Balance Keepers were created by Daimon and he was the head of the order as the Emperor.
The only thing they could do is use proxies to stir some trouble without having a direct link to them.
Darth Rune and his remnants have been doing exactly that for centuries. The secret base on the hidden world had changed considerably in the thousand years since Rune had transferred his consciousness into the cloned body. The facility had expanded outward from its original structure, carved deeper into the planet's crust.
The ten thousand Force-sensitive captives had long since been consumed. Their life force had been drained and processed through techniques that Rune had developed over decades of experimentation, each iteration producing a cloned body that was marginally stronger than the last. The current iteration was the forty-seventh.
Forty-seven bodies over a thousand years. Each one stronger. Each one lasting longer before the accumulated dark side corruption required him to move on.
The Sith Lords who had fled to his base after Darth Marr's purge had not all survived the centuries either. Some had died in service to Rune's experiments. Others had simply aged and died, because even Sith Lords were mortal. A handful remained, the most capable and the most loyal, though loyalty among Sith was always a provisional thing.
His strength had already surpassed that of the current Sith Emperor and now he was just biding his time until he attempted his return to the galaxy to fight Daimon.
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The Rakatan Dominion had seen some significant development as well. As a reward for their participation in the war and their loyalty, Daimon had gave them a few systems which bordered their territory.
Within these systems were a few dozen habitable worlds, some of which were already inhabited, thus increasing the Rakatan's population. The Rakatan used these worlds wisely. They integrated with the populations and actually managed to create a stable society with the addition of two different species.
Daimon didn't tell them this, but this reward was also a test to see how the reformed Rakata could handle integrating with another species. The results turned out to be beneficial for the Rakata, the integrated species, and the Imperium.
It gave the Rakata a good reputation with the rest of the galaxy and now the homeworld of Lehon was able to be opened up to tourists and other visitors. This increased the Rakatan Dominion's economy tremendously.
The Rakatan military also increased in its capability, which were benefits of being a subject under the Imperium. This was mainly achieved through joint research initiatives where both the Imperium and the Dominion were able to advance their understanding of Force-infused technology.
This resulted in the creation of powerful ships that could harness Force energy in ways similar to the Star Forge, but on a much smaller scale. This produced a new class of ships called Resonance-class ships. They were not big ships in any way, instead they could disrupt the Force connection of enemy vessels at range, creating interference that affected everything from targeting systems to the concentration of Force-sensitive crew members.
The technology was largely kept a secret and only shared between the Imperium and the Rakatan.
The Rakatan themselves had proven, over a thousand years, that the reformation they went through had allowed them to truly thrive and create a new path for their species. The cultural memory of the Infinite Empire was still present among them, preserved in historical archives and discussed in educational settings to show how their species had fallen before their return.
This contributed to their good reputation and invited tons of investment.
The Rakatan economy was mainly built on the production and export of Force-infused technology, historical tourism, and as consultants for Force-architecture design. Structures built with Rakatan techniques lasted longer, resisted certain forms of Force disruption, and had a measurable effect on the wellbeing of Force-sensitive inhabitants. The Jedi Order had commissioned three buildings using Rakatan consultants in the past four centuries, which would have been unthinkable a thousand years ago.
Force-infused technology was not something that Daimon kept to be a well known secret, nor did he restrict it from being sold to others. Only technologies labeled as strategic technologies like armors and weapons were not sold. Things like Force infused robes, construction materials, and other civilian technology were permitted to be sold.
The relationship between the Rakatan Dominion and the Imperium remained the strongest bilateral arrangement outside of Imperial space. This was not simply because of gratitude or shared history, though both were present. It was because loyalty to Daimon who had gave them a new path forward. They were already a galactic power, and they were able to fight in numerous battles, serving their warrior spirit.
The current Archon of the Rakatan Dominion was a descendant of Tarlen Kresh. His name was Archon Vael Kresh, and he was 94 years old, which placed him in the middle of what the Rakata now considered their prime years. The reforms to Rakatan biology that had come through centuries of Force-assisted healing and improved living conditions had extended their natural lifespan considerably beyond what the species had averaged during the Infinite Empire's decline.
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The Kingdom of Ryloth. One of two remaining empires in the Unknown Regions and the second Imperial subject had seen considerable growth under the Royal family that had ruled for generations. Their relationship with the Imperium had deepened considerably since Malrik's marriage to Princess Seraphine, transforming what had begun as a shaky Master-subject relationship into something greater.
The Kingdom of Ryloth was not large by Imperial standards. Their territory encompassed about a hundred and forty-seven systems, with a total population of eight hundred billion, which placed them somewhere between a regional power and a large Imperial subject.
But the Kingdom was not at all stable. It had suffered four rebellions by nobles in the last thousand years. Now they were going on year four hundred, which was the longest they've ever been without having an internal conflict. Though some groups still existed within and some nobles have resorted to funding secret groups to de-stabilize the Kingdom.
This was all caused when Princess Seraphine took the throne after her father's death. The Kingdom had become split between various factions with some supporting Princess Seraphine, some nobles raised armies for themselves, and some gathered behind Princess Seraphine's brother, Mattack the son that her father had 20 years before he passed.
The King had picked his daughter instead of his son, which started the entire conflict. This caused her husband, Prince Malrik to join the war on her side, alongside the 10,000 Empyrean Guards that he commanded. Princess Seraphine tried to negotiate with the other factions, but then her very own younger brother tried to kill her.
In response, Malrik killed Mattack which made Princess Seraphine not want to sit on the throne anymore. And with an Imperial fleet heading to the Kingdom to support the Prince, she decided to do something crazy. She left the Kingdom, saying goodbye to the people, allowing another noble to be appointed as King. Then she negotiated with Daimon to not intervene in the Kingdom's affairs and let them settle their own governance structure.
Daimon had agreed, with one condition. The new King would swear a formal oath of fealty to the Imperium and maintain the existing treaty arrangements. The Kingdom's internal governance was their own affair. Its external behavior was not.
The noble who had taken the throne recently was a man named Reth Voraan, a pragmatist who had supported no factions during the last rebellion and had emerged from it with clean hands and a reputation for being the only lord in the Kingdom who had spent the civil war feeding refugees rather than recruiting soldiers. His descendants had maintained the throne for four centuries now, and the Kingdom had grown steadily.
Malrik and Seraphine had left the Kingdom behind and spent the following centuries traveling together, which was something neither of them had been able to do while carrying the weight of governance. They had eventually settled on Kashyyyk to live with the Wookies, who surprisingly accepted them.
Now for four centuries they have been living on Kashyyyk and has integrated with the Wookie culture alongside their children who enjoyed spending time with the Wookies.
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The Varraxian Technocracy for the entirety of its time in galactic politics has mainly stayed away from everything. They traded with the galaxy, but their main focus was in their own development. The Technocracy was, by nature and design, an institution that measured progress in technical outputs rather than political relationships.
A new drive system mattered more to them than a new treaty. A breakthrough in computational architecture generated more institutional excitement than a diplomatic summit.
This had not changed in a thousand years. What had changed was the scale of what they were producing.
The Varraxian Technocracy had spent the better part of eight centuries working on a project they referred to internally as the Lattice. The concept had originated from their observations of the Dimensional Gates that the Imperium had deployed across its territory. They had studied the technology from a distance, the way a craftsman studies the work of a peer whose techniques they cannot quite reverse-engineer.
What they had eventually concluded was that the Gates worked because they created a structured relationship between two points in space, forcing the geometry of the intervening distance to accommodate the connection rather than the other way around. The Lattice was their attempt to apply that principle not to individual transit points but to information.
If you could impose a structured relationship between two communications nodes across any distance, you could eliminate the lag that had always been the fundamental limitation of galactic-scale coordination. The Republic had learned to live with communication delays measured in hours or days. The Imperium had reduced those delays considerably through their own technologies, but the gates were different as they were physical infrastructure. They required construction, maintenance, and protection.
The Lattice would require none of those things. It would exist as a relationship between paired crystalline receivers, which could be produced in any advanced fabrication facility and installed in any vessel or installation.
They had been working on it for eight centuries and were, by their own assessment, approximately sixty years from a functional prototype.
Daimon had known about the project for four centuries. Cortana had flagged it as something worth monitoring, but not anything that would threaten the Imperium in the long run.
The Varraxian Technocracy also engaged in some research projects with the Imperium, but when it came to stuff like this, of course it was kept a secret. The Imperium did the same and so did every other empire so it wasn't a big deal.