The Imaja Empire was once feared and respected. Mostly feared. Theirs was a grand experiment involving the shaping of thousands of civilizations across a vast galactic territory over a course of millennia. Its rulers revered as gods amongst lesser beings. Life was very good back then.

But that experiment is long over, having ended very badly. The Empire is in pieces, its surviving members living as a monastic community upon a miserable desert planet orbiting a little red sun, reflecting on what had been and how it had gone wrong.

Sorting through the pieces of what had been is Dr. Seito Akai, a younger member of the Order who has great ambitions…if only he could stop being sent on errands to the most miserable places in the former Empire.