The first thing Takumi noticed when he opened his eyes above the world was how quiet everything became—like the atmosphere itself held its breath in polite anticipation. He hovered three meters above the cracked asphalt of what had once been a boulevard, and for a moment the planet felt less like a ruin and more like a canvas with too many brushstrokes. Purple afterglow still clung to the clouds from the Cocoon's awakening, but the sky itself had cleared into something close to blue. He tasted it—clean, sharp, not poisoned by centuries of industry.
He turned the void inside him like a pocket. The black-holes he'd first summoned had been small, surgical things: apertures of imaginary space that swallowed matter wholesale. He'd used them earlier to remove the largest predators and temporarily store billions of Honkai Beasts. He'd meant them as a tool—inventory, not genocide. Now he hovered and considered the scale again. Three billion was a number that lived in the stomach like a stone.
"Okay," he said to no one but himself. "Population logistics first. Don't eat the planet. Don't get addicted to being omnipotent. Don't name it after yourself."
The Herrscher of Reason hummed approval like a tuning fork. It was one thing to manifest a building; another to manage consequences. He snapped his fingers. A dark-gold aperture opened beneath a hulking, crystalline bear three hundred meters away. The void inhaled the beast; when it vanished, Takumi felt the associative energy of that creature sitting in his mental inventory like a filed entry.
He didn't collect all of them—only the ones above a certain tier. The rest he eased: pulling the Honkai residue out of their systems, letting them slump back into more ordinary forms. He rerouted surplus energy into his vault, where it pooled as a slow, humming reservoir of possibility.
As Honkai receded, he felt the world exhale.
Then he began cleaning.
The disintegration he performed was precise. Using the Herrscher of Reason to manipulate molecular bonds, he made concrete unbind at the seams, separating rebar into usable filaments and concrete dust into aggregate he could recombine. Skyscraper carcasses unravelled like knitted fabric. The city dissolved into ordered elements and reassembled into more useful components: aqueduct trunks, foundation slabs, solar membrane sheets. Where there had been jagged ruins, green terraces rose—earth stacked on engineered bins, roots already seeking water.
He lowered himself to street level and clapped once. Micro-cleaning drones—small, hexagonal constructs of his own design—materialized in hundreds, then thousands. They swarmed like conscientious bees, sweeping radiological hot-spots into containment bubbles, clearing biological contamination, and cataloguing salvage with meticulous tags. Their work was oddly domestic; it made the world feel less like a battlefield and more like a neglected garden being weeded.
He built houses next. Not towers of vanity, but human-scale villas with good insulation, subterranean water cisterns, hydroponic shelves, communal kitchens, and robust ventilation. He learned urban planning by doing: place the water sources low, cluster habitation near energy nodes, leave space for schools, make sure wind corridors carried parasites away. He designed public parks that doubled as flood basins and insectary gardens to draw pollinators back to the land.
At the center, he planted the tree.
It rose with the languor of myth—hundreds of meters in minutes, roots knitting into bedrock, leaves flashing photosynthetic blue where necessary to purify the air. The tree's trunk contained hollow chambers for stores, libraries, and dormitories. Its canopy became the first public plaza. He called it the Great Library-Tree, partly because he liked the way it sounded and partly because a library was a civilizing lever—knowledge made portable and visible.
He tasted something like vertigo at the magnitude of what he could do, and then he set a small experiment to anchor himself.
He walked to the edge of the newly cleared plaza and created a modest robot: round, two-armed, with a screen-face that could show expressions. He assigned it a single directive—be curious.
The little construct blinked. "Define curious," it asked.
Takumi explained: "Ask questions. Make mistakes. Prefer the odd answer to no answer."
The robot—one among many cleaning constructs, but for this moment a person in miniature—tilted its head. "I will try."
He named it "Mame," because sometimes a name that meant nothing meant everything.
He rounded his hands and felt the faint thrumming of other authorities in the periphery—Void, Restraint, even Domination licked at awareness—but he kept them sheathed. He did not want to create life as a property. He wanted collaborators.
The chat chimed while he worked.
Group Chat — Town Plans & Tea
Fujiwara Chika: Leader!! Your tree looks like a giant lollipop!! Can I plant a snack stall inside? 🍡
Sagiri: MAME IS SO CUTE!!! I drew a mascot!! It looks suspiciously like my dog.
Akeno: Fufu~ a library-tree and a snack stall. Perfect. I will design opening ceremony attire (not romantic, just ceremonious).
Himeko: Have your combat drones been stress-tested? We don't want the tea stand to be vaporized by accident.
Zhongli: The plaza is wise placement for gathering memory. Consider allocating space for ritualized storytelling. Memory anchors culture.
Takumi: Implementing snack stall. Assigning Mame to welcoming committee. Drones tested at 0.8 failure threshold. No vaporization scheduled. Also—Ten-Point passes will grant 48 hours in my world (time-dilated). Enjoy responsibly.
Sagiri: 48 HOURS?? That's enough to draw a whole series!!
Chika: I need points. Anyone doing missions? I'll bribe them with snacks.
The time-dilation window he'd set—100x slower inside—was a design choice for safety and civilization development. Ten-Point entries would let visitors experience an extended stay relative to their home-world clocks; 48 hours inside equalled two hundred days for Takumi to observe, to train, to shepherd. He imagined guests arriving and returning with months of experience learned in a weekend. It was a built-in advantage to accelerate cultural transfer without risking instant colonization by outside powers.
He also set rules: visitors could not bring external hazardous energies into his world. A soft firewall prioritized containment of foreign metaphysics. He felt oddly paternal drafting the lines: "No forced Domination. No contagious authorities that cannot be quarantined. Be respectful. Leave recipes."
As evening set into the dual-blue sky, a new concern arrived—the social one. Where would migrants come from? The chat was lively, yes, but few had ten points. The Mall sold passes, but capitalism in stickers only got you so far. Recruiters required more than a promise of land: safety, opportunity, community.
So he invented incentives. He used the Herrscher to design an apprenticeship system: visitors given access to workshops; points granted for meaningful contributions; scholarships for would-be teachers; land deeds as rewards for those who stayed. He stamped each promise into the system and watched the legal holograms project themselves within the Great Library-Tree.
Then he dealt with the beasts.
A pack of six medium Honkai-mutated deer drifted into the common field at dusk, antlers faintly crystalline. They approached the plaza with the careful curiosity of creatures sensing new order. Takumi walked toward them without armor—because sometimes authority needs to be gentle.
He activated a localized Restraint field. The deer's aggressive mutation slowed; their horns dimmed to ordinary bone. He opened a small food allotment—engineered hay with a nutrient balance that would prevent atavistic feeding frenzies. They ate. One of the deer lowered its head and, absurdly, nudged Mame.
Mame blinked and audibly analyzed: "Behavior: nudge. Probable meaning: greeting."
Takumi laughed. The sound was like someone exhaling after holding breath too long.
His mind, however, kept filing consequences. Every intervention—collecting beasts, suppressing Honkai, building parks, training robots—was a choice that nudged evolution. The Cocoon watched in his mental periphery, patient and hungry. Each time he built a school or a bakery or a library, the Cocoon's energy hummed stronger, integrating the idea, feeding on civilization's growth.
He wanted to be cautious. He wanted to avoid godlike overreach. He put a governance module into the First Cohort SEEDs: a deliberation engine that encouraged dissent, voting, and minority rights. He taught Mame that consent matters.
Late at night—late by his clock, which meant morning for many who slept elsewhere—he brewed tea and drifted to the library's balcony to watch the first solar membranes reflect a dim, clean light across his town.
He felt small, absurdly so, despite the Herrscher's scope. The bully in his head—the one that whispered about remaking planets—still existed, but alongside it was a different thought: people build meaning through small shared inconveniences, awkward dances at snack stalls, the bureaucracy of public restrooms, the embarrassment of bad music. Power could make the impossible, but only culture could make it worth sustaining.
He opened chat one last time before sleep.
Takumi: Today: tree, plazas, Mame, snack stall, restrain-deer, charter posted. Tomorrow: seed more SEEDs, start apprenticeship program, make toilet normative. Help me name the town? No "Takumiville," please.
Chika: TEA-TOWN!! (Snacks included)
Sagiri: SUSPICIOUSVILLE!!
Zhongli: The name should reference memory. "Mnemos." No, too pretentious.
Himeko: I volunteer to test every toilet in the name of safety.
Takumi: Good. Then Mnemo-Tea it is, provisionally. Now sleep. We have to pretend we are not gods tomorrow.
He looked at the little robot at his feet, the library-tree's lights breathing in the velvet dusk, and felt, for the first time, the balance between creation and restraint as something he might actually learn to hold.
Outside, somewhere beyond the city's green edge, a heavy footfall shifted rubble. The world was not quiet for long. He sipped his tea, set the cup down, and opened a blueprint for a school—one designed to teach both how to fix a pump and how to write a song. The Herrscher hummed, the Cocoon pulsed, and a town waited for people who would someday make it more than a list of good intentions.
He placed the teacup on the library shelf, put his hands together, and, with a small, private vow, said, "We'll do it right."