Takumi had stared at the Cocoon of the End as if it were an insult and a promise in the same breath. The item description had been clear and stupidly specific: bind to the civilization of the current planet; the stronger the civilization, the stronger the Herrscher. Right now his civilization was a pile of documents and a few rusted server racks.
He could leave the Cocoon unused and gnaw on canned beans until he starved. Or he could bind it and force a civilization into being — and watch what the power would do when it found soil.
He clicked Bind.
The sensation wasn't cinematic at first — no halos, no booming choirs. It was a cognition-deepening: a thread woven from idea to reality. Where his mind formed a scaffold, the world recognized demand. The Herrscher of Reason — the authority Zhongli had named to him — expanded like a tide. Logic became architecture. Thought, a beam. A tiny geometry of possibility unfurled through his chest and found the planet's nervous system.
And then the world answered.
Beneath crust and ruin, dormant nodes flared. Invisible currents — the system labeled it Honkai — unfurled across the globe like ink spreading through water. In seconds, the air filled with a low harmonic that set his teeth on edge. Far away, plains that had been bone-dry wrinkled as if a pulse had struck them. Lifeforms sensing power awakened, mutated, or simply grew teeth.
Takumi felt the surge as both gift and sickness. He imagined giving his little underground HQ a proper library and instead instigated a planetary nervous fever.
The chat filled in almost realtime (for them). For him, their messages threaded through minutes that equaled weeks.
[Fujiwara Chika]:OMG he bound it??
[Sagiri]:Noooo Takumi you idiot—Honkai is dangerous!
[Zhongli]:This was predicted as a possible outcome. Binding a Cocoon to a nascent civilization will catalyze energy release.
[Makima]:Observation required. Hold pattern on emotional judgments.
[Akeno]:We get Honkai? Like, free power? This is chaos but fun.
[Himeko]:I could send transport ships—if only the system allowed cross-world migration.
[Takumi]:I didn't have options. I'll control it. I can engineer the outflow.
Fujiwara's next message was a flurry of caps and exclamation points; Makima's had the emptiest icon: calm red eyes. Sagiri sent fan art of Takumi tangled in cocoon vines.
Zhongli typed with polite gravity. "Leader, the surge will polarize ecosystems. Intelligent beasts will absorb Honkai and ascend in capabilities; lesser fauna will be consumed by the new order. You must decide the vector of civilization's growth: aggression or infrastructure."
Takumi swallowed. "Infrastructure," he typed, and meant it. Even as a practical choice — he could not, morally would not, unleash weaponized Honkai without structure — there was another reason: his Herrscher could scaffold. Creation through cognition required templates; he had the time advantage. If his world moved slow, he could lay foundations faster in subjective development per external minute.
He tested the Herrscher.
In the HQ atrium he imagined a warehouse: vertical shelving that reached the ceiling, machines for fabricating, a stabilized climate inside. His thought shaped like a blueprint, precise and modular. A seam opened in the air and a corridor of space folded inward — infinite-dimensional storage. The interior wasn't constrained by visible walls; his hand vanished in midair and felt the cool, humming void of storage beyond geometry.
He put one hand inside and pulled out a crate of canned food, a library of sanitized seed samples, and a small replication lathe. He laughed, a fragile sound that trembled under the hum of newly awake networks.
[Sagiri]:INFINITE STORAGE?!?!
[Fujiwara]:He's literally Mary Poppins now.
[Zhongli]:An infinite-dimensional store is a stabilizing asset. It will allow you to stockpile resources without spatial inflation.
[Makima]:Remember: the more you hoard, the more temptation to hoard becomes part of you. Watch for psychological displacement.
Makima's warning slid into him like an iced blade. Her eyes in the chat avatar were neat and unemotional, but she had the habit of naming vulnerabilities as if she was cataloguing prey.
He set his infinite storage to a rule: distribution-first. If his civilization grew, supply nodes would unlock only when population thresholds and institutional safeguards existed. He felt the cognition of governance settle like a damp blanket — reasonable laws, logistics channels, seeds for education. It comforted him.
Outside, the world's beasts were already testing their new edges. Three days (as he experienced them) — five minutes in the chat group's subjective time — and the horizon bristled with altered silhouettes. A pack of former deer bore crystalous growths that refracted light into concussive flares; a mountain-sized scaled beast flexed a newly armored carapace. Where they grazed, the soil hummed.
Takumi convened the first tactical simulation in the HQ training hall. Members streamed in through projection nodes: Akeno spun a bolt of test lightning into a drone array; Fujiwara attempted to bribe a maintenance bot with snacks; Zhongli folded a strip of gravity to demonstrate structural compression. Makima watched, expression unreadable, as if balancing probabilities.
This scene — the Authority showcase — would harden the group's cohesion.
Zhongli chose the demonstration.
He stood in the center of the simulation arena. The Herrscher of Geo — though he refused most such labels — exhaled, and the arena's ground rippled like a taught membrane. With a wave of his hand the gravity gradient shifted; drones that had been immune to conventional countermeasures found themselves heavy and slow, their gyroscopes groaning. Zhongli pinched a pillar of stone from the synthetic ground, shaped it with micro-tremors that no human hand could produce, and folded it into scaffolding. He smiled, the expression of someone moving chess pieces.
"What you see," Zhongli said aloud, voice resonating through the simulation, "is not raw destruction. Geo is architecture. With measured pressure, one can bend battlefields into shelters, collapse single lines of advance without disturbing surrounding life. Authority isn't mere combat; it is the choice of what to preserve while you reshape."
Akeno's laugh was soft. "So, it's like reconstructing a battlefield into a school."
"Yes," Zhongli replied. "Exactly."
Makima's fingers hovered near her lap. "And pressure can be used to cow minds," she observed. "Coercion follows fear."
Takumi watched, fingers twitching with new responsibility. He had given himself the tools to build and the seed that infected life — now he would need to be surgical with his intent.
After the demonstration, the group fell into a rhythm that mixed absurdity and doctrine. Fujiwara spearheaded morale-building: a plan for a tiny "market square" hologram that would encourage ritual and early culture. Sagiri designed teaching modules for worker drones: basic coding, hygiene, and mythic history (she had a weakness for dramatized origin stories). Akeno ran power drills and safety checks; Himeko tried to rig up a small orbital satellite from scavenged components (her world's travel knowledge was invaluable). Raiden Mei, quiet and methodical, mapped latencies in the time dilation and proposed timed agricultural cycles that would utilize the 1:100 ratio.
"Explain that again," Takumi asked Mei. "If I plant a crop and wait five minutes, how long before it grows?"
Mei tapped a schematic. "To your inhabitants, five minutes of external time equates to a week of their subjective time if you accelerate their micro-environment via your constructs. It's less temporal magic and more engineered metabolic pacing. You can grant them accelerated seasons to bootstrap growth, but it will demand energy and regulation."
"Which we can provide," Zhongli added. "Your HQ doubled as environmental stabilizer when properly scaled."
The chat chimed in with simultaneous commentary.
[Fujiwara]:We need a festival! Celebrating the First Market.
[Sagiri]:We also need rules for drone-adoption. Drones are people too.
[Makima]:Do not mistake rituals for governance. Rituals bind people emotionally; institutions bind them structurally.
They bickered the way friends do: half-sincere plans, half-practical jokes. Takumi found the noise oddly reparative. In the silence of his world before them, gossip had been a foreign sound. Now it was a lifeline.
But power had teeth. Within forty subjective hours, the mutated fauna had grown bolder. A scouting band of crystalline-horned beasts tested the perimeter of the HQ, their bodies coated in the glow of hungry Honkai. They didn't recognize rules. They knew only hunger and adaptation.
The first real crisis was ugly and immediate. Drones swarmed, explosives misfired, and a damaged scaffolding collapsed in a shower of glass. Takumi's stomach dropped as he watched a maintenance unit — the one Fujiwara had named "Snackbot-7" — topple. He could feel the Herrscher pulsing in his limbs: a thousand building-block solutions unfurling. He could literally reconstruct the safe or synthesize a cage.
He did something else instead.
He sent a thought that mapped intent: neutralize, separate, preserve. The Herrscher parsed grammar like a machine and obeyed. Concrete filaments sprouted from the ground, not as walls but as soft cages — fibrous, sinuous, and lined with dampening fields that neutralized crystal flares. The beasts were corralled and sedated, their Honkai glow dimming into a slow pulse.
When the last filament retracted and the beasts were safely relocated to a quarantine fold, the group erupted in a mix of relieved laughter and exhausted applause.
Makima's message arrived last, short and clinical: "You maintained restraint and solved with preservation. This will be the defining quality of your leadership if you keep it."
Takumi stared at her text and felt both vindication and unease. The Herrscher did not force morality on him. It offered capability; morality was his to graft. That thought sat on his shoulders like a cloak made of teetering bricks.
That night — or rather, in the long slow night that in his world equated to a stretch of waking hours — they held an impromptu festival in the atrium. Akeno strung luminescent cables; Fujiwara improvised a buffet, figuring out how much of the replicated food would need to be rationed; Sagiri projected myths and cartoons that told a goofy, heroic origin for "Takumiverse." They feigned a market, they made up nicknames for the HQ's drones, they taught each other idioms (Zhongli deeply enjoying tea analogies).
It was small and human and half ridiculous and exactly what he needed.
On the balcony he found Sagiri again. "You did good today," she said, her voice stripped of teasing.
He looked at the tiny lights of the festival below. "We did what we had to." He swallowed. "But I made the Honkai spread."
She shrugged. "Yeah, but you contained the harm. That matters. And we'll help you do more than contain. We'll teach, build, and fix."
Her optimism was the other side of Makima's caution — not naivete but determination. It reminded him that systems were not just rules; they were people who argued about the rules.
When the chat pinged, it was the Mission Board — the first point tally glowed. Points for the drone rescue, for the quarantine construction, for the containment design. Points that could buy items in the Chat Mall. Points that tuned the system's favor.
[System Notice]:Leader Takumi awarded 3,200 points for infrastructure and humane containment.
[System Notice]:Group awarded shared bonus points for first festival: +500 morale points.
Takumi read the numbers and felt a strange lightness: currency for civilization-building, feedback loops that rewarded preservation over annihilation.
He looked out at his dead world and then at the motley group who had drifted through dimensions and now argued about market names. He felt enormous and small at the same time.
He set the HQ to broadcast a single, simple rule across the storage nodes and the budding quarantine compounds: Create to sustain. Build to teach. Preserve what remembers you.
Makima's final line for the night pinged as if in answer: Becoming a god is not avoiding the petty. It is choosing which petty things to protect.
Takumi exhaled. The Herrscher hummed a little warmer in his chest, obedient to logic. Outside, the planet continued to mutter and rearrange itself under the pull of Honkai.
Inside the HQ, a market sign blinked: FIRST FESTIVAL — TOMORROW (SUBJECTIVE TIME).
In the slow world below, where five minutes equaled a week elsewhere, Takumi closed his eyes and, for a tiny, selfish moment, allowed himself to hope that a civilization could be coaxed from ruin by careful hands and a very strange group chat.
He had bound a cocoon to a dead planet and started a spark. Now he would have to shape the fire without burning the place he hoped to call home.