Does a Disabled Omega Have to Be Forcibly Loved Too? (NPH) - Chapter 1: Congenital Defect
Chapter 1: Congenital Defect
Dinah was packing her things to leave work when she received an email from the Omega Association.
She opened the email. It was, as usual, a dull notice urging her to meet an alpha with a high compatibility match.
Most Omegas had their pheromones collected and entered into the Omega Association’s matching database after their glands matured at sixteen.
But Dinah’s glands were congenitally defective. Her pheromone secretion was so low that it wasn’t even enough for a single valid sample.
If the staff sending the email had been a bit more thorough, they wouldn’t have sent such emails every month to someone like her, whose alpha match list was empty.
The legal marriage age for Omegas in the empire was eighteen. Dinah was twenty this year. In the eyes of imperial law, she had just become an adult a month ago.
With the empire’s Omega-to-alpha-to-beta ratio being 1:3:6, it shouldn’t have been possible for an Omega to reach adulthood unmarried. But Dinah was an exception.
Imperial law stated that Omegas could only marry alphas. Marrying a beta was illegal.
But since an Omega could only be permanently marked by one alpha, the law also required alphas to pay a certain amount of social contribution points to marry an Omega. It also had age requirements.
Social contribution points weren’t easy to come by. Aside from fighting insectoids on the front lines, other ways to earn them were very slow.
No alpha would want to use their hard-earned contribution points to marry a disabled Omega.
In the department where Dinah worked, she was the only unmarried Omega. She had always been an object of mockery and pity to others.
But Dinah thought it was fine this way.
As someone whose mindset was still stuck in a primitive world where humans only had two genders—male and female—Dinah had always worried, before learning about her congenital defect, that she might be assigned to a female alpha.
Dinah was a transmigrator.
But she only remembered she was a transmigrator when she was eleven or twelve.
She had soul-transmigrated. But her luck was terrible. She ended up on a trash planet that had already become a battlefield.
According to the orphanage’s records, her parents died in the war when she was two. Since she hadn’t developed appendages, she had a very high chance of differentiating into a female Omega. She was fortunately brought back to the imperial capital’s orphanage.
The war on the trash planet had started before she was born and continued even after she was adopted.
When she was four, that trash planet finally burned out in the war. Now, the radioactive materials there made it impossible for any living thing to survive.
The Omega Association determined that her glands were congenitally defective because the radioactive materials from an explosion affected her mother during pregnancy.
Dinah suspected that her memory was also affected by those radioactive materials.
Even now, she hadn’t fully recalled her memories from before transmigrating. She also couldn’t remember if this world was from a novel she had once read.
But her memories weren’t the most urgent thing right now. The most urgent thing was that imperial law stated that if an Omega remained unmarried a year after reaching adulthood, compulsory measures would be taken.
These included, but weren’t limited to, sending the Omega to the front lines for mandatory labor.
In polite terms, it was called mandatory labor. In harsh terms, it was being a military prostitute.
The Omega Association had been fighting this law for over a decade. It was foreseeable that they wouldn’t succeed in the next year either.
She had been an adult for a month now. She only had eleven months left to find a foolish alpha to marry.
Although Dinah felt her chances of success were slim, she still had to try.
A kind Omega in the office introduced her to her husband’s subordinate, Oliver. He was an officer with no notable background who had just earned enough contribution points. He had asked her to meet him at a fancy restaurant that day.
Dinah had chatted with Oliver for a few days. Her impression of him was decent.
He didn’t mind, for now, that her glands were defective, that she could barely sense pheromones, that she couldn’t be permanently marked, or that she might not even be able to have children.
But based on her past two experiences, once the other party found a matching Omega through the Omega Association, they would immediately back out.
She hoped her luck would be better this time.
Dinah left the office and took a car to the meeting spot.
The restaurant was on the second floor of a high-end hotel. But without reservation details, she could only wait in the lobby.
The reservation was with Oliver. While Dinah was still on her way, he messaged her that he was delayed by some official business. He asked her to wait for him in the lobby.
Dinah had been tempered by her bleak life into staying calm. She calmly reassured Oliver not to rush. The lobby had tea and snacks available.
Not long after replying, Dinah suddenly heard the sound of military boots stepping on the tiled floor coming from the hotel entrance.
She looked up. A group of people walked in through the hotel entrance. They all wore military uniforms, but the person leading them had no rank insignia on their shoulder.
Dinah’s gaze shifted slightly upward.