The Starfield Farming Sovereign (Elizabeth Schofield) novel Chapter 5

The queue was a jagged, snaking line of misery.

Men, women, and the elderly alike—every soul there was skeletal, their frames whittled down to skin and bone.

Years of grime had caked onto their faces like a second skin, their eyes hollowed out by a dull, relentless exhaustion.

Beside them, homemade carts shrieked with every rusted rotation, while others dragged bulging sacks stitched together from a patchwork of industrial scraps.

Elizabeth felt a heavy ache of sympathy. It seemed that no matter the era or the universe, the life of a scavenger remained the same—a desperate, unending struggle for survival.

She stood there in silence as the crowd's frantic chatter forced its way into her ears.

The air was thick with a single name, repeated in a feverish, reverent loop, Cristian Hewitt, the general of the kingdom.

"Did you see the Starnet headline? General Cristian Hewitt's perfect genetic match finally surfaced!"

"I saw it! The Kingdom hasn't seen a perfect match in over a century. Especially for an SSS-level titan like the General—if they bond, their offspring is practically a guaranteed SSS-level powerhouse from birth!"

"I remember Princess Lucille back then. She had SS-level mental power, a royal bloodline, and her match with him was only 69%. So who is this 'Elizabeth' who just materialized out of nowhere? What kind of monstrous mental power must she have?"

"Is there even a doubt? Her mental power has to be at least SS-level! There's no other way the Genetic Registry would ever match her with an SSS-level Hewitt."

...

Elizabeth listened with quiet amusement, piecing together the logic of this strange new world.

So, to optimize the species, they had engineered a mandatory genetic matching system.

Truly, the universe never ceased to offer up new absurdities.

As she was marveling at the strangeness of it all, she caught the sound of her own name—or rather, a name that was phonetically identical to hers.

Her first thought was one of genuine surprise at the coincidence. The general's perfect match actually had the same name as her.

As for why she didn't even entertain the possibility that it was her?

It was blindingly obvious, wasn't it? As the gossip suggested, anyone deemed a match for an SSS-level titan had to be at least SS-level themselves.

And this body of hers? It was just a pathetic, D-level washback.

Same name, entirely different fates.

Talk about a cosmic joke, she mused.

For a moment, Elizabeth wasn't sure who to pity more. Here she was—technically a free woman, yet starving and clinging to survival on this Garbage Planet.

Or perhaps she should pity that faceless counterpart—a woman gifted enough to enchant the entire Kingdom, yet so thoroughly stripped of her agency that her very heart was a matter of perfect match.

Still, with such juicy high-society scandals to pass the time, the long wait felt considerably shorter.

Before she could even finish eavesdropping on the best parts, she had reached the front of the line.

She stepped quickly up to the counter. The moment she came to a halt, an opaque isolation barrier silently dropped behind her, sealing her off from the world.

It was one of the few mercies the station's owner extended to the scavengers.

A shred of privacy meant to prevent them from being marked and ambushed the moment they stepped away with a valuable haul.

On a world like the Garbage Planet, where the law was a dead letter, violent robbery was as common as breathing.

Still, that flickering barrier offered a fragile, if only psychological, sense of security.

Behind the counter stood a simply designed robot, handling all the station's daily work.

"Hello. How may I assist you?" the robot asked.

"Recycling these," Elizabeth replied, following the cold prompts. She emptied the jumble of scrap metal from her storage button onto the scanning platform.

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