On a rotting orbital station where ten tiers decide who lives and who is left to rot, a junkie dealer named Nico Chen finds a dead man's fortune—and tries to spend his way to a kingdom.
Nico Chen has been falling his whole life. Cut loose by his family at nineteen, hollowed out by an addiction to Veil, he survives in the airless slums of Level 8 on Covenant-7, dealing vials and undercharging the people too poor to pay. Then a cleanup job in a dead man's room puts fifty million stolen credits in his hands—enough to buy his way up, out, anywhere.
He cannot escape. So instead he stays, and he starts giving the money away: rent paid, debts cleared, the sick treated, the hungry fed. Level 8 begins to call him the Benevolent King. But every gift the system cannot account for is a threat it must answer, and a kingdom built on one man's charity has only as long as the money lasts.
Across three volumes—The Find, The Kingdom, and The Fall—this is the story of a man who tried to save people the only way he knew how, learned that charity is not the same as liberation, and taught a whole tier of the forgotten that they never needed a king at all.
The Benevolent King is a near-future trilogy set aboard Covenant-7, a vast corporate station in orbit around Jupiter, home to two million people sorted into ten tiers. Mobility is a lie: a background check, not genetics, keeps the lower levels permanently down. The upper tiers enjoy a paradise maintained by the people they will never have to see.
Into this falls Nico Chen, who discovers that an unaccountable fortune can buy almost anything except a way out—and that the most dangerous thing a poor man can do is take care of other poor people without asking permission.
It is a story about hope, power, addiction, and the difference between charity and liberation—told from the slums up, where the question is never whether the king is good, but whether anyone should need one.