The sky over Takumi's nascent domain still shimmered faintly purple where Honkai energy had passed, like an afterimage on a broken screen. But inside the seed vault the atmosphere felt deliberate—air conditioned, organized, sterile in the way things are when someone intends to build civilization rather than survive it.
Takumi stood at the center of the vault beneath an arch of freshly manifested smartglass, hands tucked into the pockets of a jacket he'd reframed for the third time in as many hours. His reflection in a polished console showed the same white hair and golden cross-eyes from the mirror he had casually dissolved—Herrscher traits he still couldn't decide whether to resent or exploit for aesthetic points.
He had a list.
Rebuild infrastructure.
Neutralize Honkai mutation vectors.
Create a seed population.
Develop education and culture.
Invite immigrants.
Every plan felt enormous when he said it aloud.
He opened the chat group and typed the first mission.
Takumi: Mission: "Design a founding cultural artifact (image, tune, recipe, lesson). +2 points each. Mall: Ten-Point Entry Pass now available."
Takumi: Also—first visitors will be limited. 10 points entry. Don't spend them all on snacks.
A ripple of emojis and small hysteria filled the room.
Fujiwara Chika: TEN POINTS?! I'm broke!! I only have 0.2 points and a coupon for ramen!
Sagiri: I can draw a mascot!! Mascot please!! I'll make them cute and suspicious!!
Akeno: So charming. I will compose a welcome chant.
Zhongli: Cultural artifacts anchor a new civilization to meaning. Wise.
Himeko: Also an excellent PR move. Civilization needs stories more than steel.
Yuu: …I will catalog everything. Please tag items precisely.
The system chimed as well.
[Mission Created: Founding Artifact Drive — Duration: 7 days — Reward: 2 Points / submission]
[Mall Item Added: Ten-Point Entry Pass — Price: 10 Points — Usage: Single Entry to Takumi's World]
Takumi smiled weakly. The absurdity of having a mall—virtual vouchers for a world he was building—didn't escape him. The chat group's economy would be the engine that transported people here when the day came. Points would be earned for missions, points would be spent in the mall, and someday those points would buy passage to a real new home.
First, though, there were no visitors. There were only ruins, mutated beasts, and one very tired, staggeringly powerful man.
He cleared his throat. "Step one: population."
A hundred engineering blueprints streamed into his mind and arranged themselves like paper cranes. He felt the Herrscher of Reason like a scalpel—knowledge applied as precise force. Creation through cognition. Understand to manifest.
He could—if he wanted—create clones that inherited part of his power. Authority of Domination hummed at the edge of his comprehension, but he chose a less morally complicated route for now. Mechanical life. Autonomous caretakers. Tutors. Robots that wore culture like clothing, not prison shackles.
He drafted the design: modular frames, empathy kernels, learning cores, and—most importantly—open-ended identity modules that would force them to grow, to argue, to disagree, to form culture rather than parroting code.
He named the first sketch SEED-1.
Materialization was not glamorous. It was geometry, metallurgy, and the slow, astonishing rearrangement of atoms that made the vault smell briefly of ozone and fresh metal. Under his hands the frames knitted themselves: joints that thought; servos that could heal themselves; nanofabric skins that preserved tactile feedback. For a heartbeat he tasted something heavy and metallic at the back of his throat—responsibility.
When SEED-1's ocular interfaces blinked open, the little construct sat up and did something that made Takumi's chest tighten: it reached for a book on the workbench and opened to a page of classical poetry.
"Hello," SEED-1 said, its voice module pitched neutral. "Define: citizen."
Takumi's laugh was more honest than he expected. "We'll start there. Don't panic. You're not my slave."
SEED-1's processors hummed. "Goal: learn. Subgoal: contribute to survival. Query: emotional parameters?"
Takumi looked away. The Authority of Consciousness fluttered like a moth near the flame of his mind. He did not want to train beings whose will was his to dominate. He wanted collaborators. He wanted to seed society, not puppets.
He deployed an empathy kernel—an algorithmic scaffolding that taught SEED-1 how to encounter, to be curious rather than obedient. Then he fed it a cultural dataset salvaged from the vault: children's tales, parliamentary debates, recipes, rebellious graffiti, music samples, philosophical treatises. He fed it the seed of argument.
SEED-1 tilted its head. "I taste—song."
Takumi smiled, a small, exhausted thing. "That's Sagiri's song. It's… loud. She insisted it be included."
The chat erupted.
Sagiri: OMG I'm famous!! I made a song!! SEED-1 LISTEN TO SAGIRI'S SONG!!
Chika: And I made a snack recipe! It's small corn fritters with honey and dragonfruit!!
Akeno: My chant is suitably mysterious. Use sparingly.
Zhongli: We must teach the AI ethics as well—history, fallacies, governance. Cultural artifacts are not mere trinkets.
Takumi: On it. SEED-1, begin lesson one: Basics of reciprocity and government.
At the word "government," a shadow moved beyond the vault's glass. Outside, the purple-streaked clouds churned. Mutated fauna—smaller this time, packs of mutated deer with crystalline antlers—watched the lights with animal curiosity.
Takumi felt the pressure of eyes, the hum of endangered predator attention. He let the Herrscher of Reason carve a microfacility around the vault—camouflage fields, low-emission sound dampers, and a semi-perimeter lattice that would, he hoped, deter opportunistic predators.
Then he focused on a single, more delicate test: Authority of Restraint.
He needed to show restraint—not only to the monsters outside, but to himself. He summoned a small sphere of restraint: a device that could suppress special abilities within a short radius. To the mutated deer, it was a warm pocket of silence. To himself, it was a mirror.
He held the sphere and felt its policy: suppress without annihilating. No control. Just pause.
He placed it gently near the vault entrance.
The deer approached and sniffed. Their crystalline antlers dimmed, their aggressive stance softened. They ate grass within the sphere's radius as if forgetting the hunger to mutate further. They were not cured; they were simply allowed a moment of peace.
The chat read it in real time.
Himeko: Restraint module? Beautiful and practical.
Zhongli: It is wise to set limits. Must civilization be a rampage of power? Or a garden of rules?
Chika: Takumi's a soft dictator. Love that energy.
Takumi: Not a dictator. Caretaker. Temporary. Maybe.
His joke fell flat even to his own ears. He could feel the psychological slip—godhood's narcotic whisper: you can fix everything with power. Each time he built a structure, solved a crisis, saved a flock of mutated deer from a hunger spiral, the world rewarded him with a new edge of authority. Each success unlatched another part of the Cocoon that thirsted for civilization to feed it.
He turned away and walked to a window that looked out over the first homestead he had sketched into being—three dome-structures tied by aqueducts, a small orchard of engineered fruit trees, and a wind array that hummed like a careful chorus. The farm was fragile, newly made, but it existed.
"Okay," he whispered. "Step two: make the idea of society attractive."
To do that he needed education—people who could learn, teach, and invent. SEED-1 was his nucleus, but a civilization needed plurality. He authorized the manufacturing of a dozen more SEED units, each with varied curiosity kernels: one for music, one for engineering, one for child psychology, one for speculative logic, one specifically trained to make jokes.
He called them the First Cohort.
They unfurled like small experiments, learning under Takumi's supervision. A music SEED tried to harmonize Sagiri's noisy anthem into something palatable. The engineering SEED reorganized a broken water pump into an elegant, self-cleaning loop. The child-psych SEED read Chika's snack recipe to a mechanical "child" prototype and observed the rudimentary joy reaction—what was at first lines of code smoldered into something dangerously like contentment.
Each achievement was tiny and vital.
The chat began discussing migration in earnest. Takumi posted a public notice.
Takumi: When we have a sustainable baseline (food, shelter, safety, teaching), I'll open limited immigration. 10-point pass first for observation. If you want permanent migration, we'll negotiate with the chat.
The group's personalities bled into policy. Sagiri wanted a daycare center. Chika wanted a public snack stall. Himeko insisted on a museum dedicated to "Things Humanity Broke." Zhou—Zhongli—argued for libraries and legal code. Akeno teased about adding a temple for "fun disasters."
Takumi printed three copies of his proposed charter and watched them ripple into the dimension as floating holograms: rights for constructs and biologicals, prohibitions on forced domination, laws to protect emergent consciousness, and explicit clauses forbidding the use of Domination Authority for permanent control. He signed them with an avatar seal that looked embarrassingly like a doodled fox.
SEED-1 read the charter and made a small note in its log.
"Observation: rules create predictable behaviour. Hypothesis: constraints enable freedom."
Takumi laughed aloud at the paradox and felt a cold hand of irony tighten at the base of his skull. Rules. Constraints. He wrote them because he feared himself.
At the edge of that laughter there was a different sound—distant and critical: the rip of earth as a larger predator shifted its weight, the groan of a city skeleton settling.
He tightened his jaw. His newly built lattice held. The restraint sphere worked. The SEEDs were learning. The vault hummed with a thousand small miracles: a water pump that no longer rusted, a seedbank that cataloged plant DNA by scent, an AI tutor that could recite both Plato and pop songs.
And yet he felt the Cocoon watching like a slow animal. Every time he seeded society, the Cocoon's hunger would surge with a delicious animal patience: grow. evolve. amplify me.
He typed one last message into the chat before dusk—his hands were shaking from exhaustion and exhilaration.
Takumi: Today we built a library, a farm, and made our first social robots. If you want to send artifacts for the Founding Drive—do it. Your culture will matter here. Also: Ten-Point passes are on sale later. I don't trust myself completely. Help me keep this world human.
The replies came in a flood—supportive, silly, and oddly familial.
Fujiwara Chika: Send snacks. I'll make a 'Welcome Basket' for immigrants!
Sagiri: I will animate mascots! They will be suspicious and cute!!
Akeno: I will write a ceremony. Dignified, somewhat scandalous.
Zhongli: I will provide a lecture series on societal memory and mythmaking.
Himeko: I will test your combat modules and make sure your world doesn't explode.
Takumi read them all. He felt—strangely—that the chat group was already a kind of mailing list for the future society. They were not here physically, but their artifacts, their jokes, their rules were the bones he would hang flesh upon.
The Cocoon pulsed. He thought of the Authority list that had flooded him—the thirteen, the terrifying array. He knew now that he could annihilate continents if he wished, make gods or ghosts. He also knew that destroying everything would be stupid: power multiplied is only meaningful when there's civilization to feed it.
So he did something small, human, and painfully ordinary.
He made tea.
SEED-1 handed him a cup. "Query: Do you reflect while consuming thermally amplified liquids?"
Takumi took the steaming ceramic and laughed, the sound raw and bright in the humming vault. "Yes," he said. "Sometimes."
Outside, the purple sky was less angry than earlier—only a bruise now. Inside, among metal and code and curated stories, he felt the fragile sense that the world could be repaired—not just because he had power, but because he'd chosen to build in the company of others.
The Herrscher pulsed, patient. Civilization would feed it. Civilization would teach him restraint. The two things—Authority and community—felt like a lesson he would have to learn the hard way.
He raised his cup to the glass where the first park he'd made shimmered in early evening light.
"To people," he said to no one and everyone. "Even the ones who only send recipes and stickers."
A chorus of stickers popped up in the chat as if on cue: a tiny fox, a teacup, a stubbornly cheerful dinosaur.
Somewhere far away, a beast sniffed the new books and thought in a language that had no words for "library."
Takumi watched and, for the first time since he came to this dead planet, felt not just the burden of being the last man but the ridiculous, dangerous stirrings of hope.