The teapot swallowed Zhongli, Ganyu, Cloud Retainer and the rest like a polite pocket universe. The courtyard emptied, leaving Takumi with the echoes of laughter and the scent of steeped tea.
He lingered a beat, then tapped his terminal and pinged the group.
Takumi: [@Zhongli arrived safely?]
Zhongli: [Safely.] [Your books are… exquisite. I will return them with footnotes.]
Takumi: [Good. Don't forget to bring Ningguang's signature when you come back — she probably wants copies.]
Ganyu: [Thank you, Takumi. We are leaving for the teapot now. Please look after them while we voyage.]\
The chat dissolved into casual goodbyes and the usual banter — Chika demanding a souvenir, Bronya calculating logistics for the new schools, Akeno remarking on the "delights of cross-world diplomacy." Takumi smiled at the stream of messages, then closed the app. The city waited, robots humming softly; children played in the yards; the Holy Empress practiced a speech in her room.
It was quiet enough for a man who rebuilt towns in his head to listen to the world breathe — until the world made a sound that didn't belong to it.
First it was subtle: a frisson in the Mindscape, like a distant bell struck inside a cathedral of glass. Takumi felt the hairs on his arms stand as if the very lattice of Imaginary Space took note. Then, in the radius of his Herrscher perception, something knocked.
Not on a door. Not a footstep. A modulation — a thin, precise waveform — like an encoded tap against the scaffold of his cognition.
Takumi opened his eyes.
"Shit," he muttered with odd fondness. "We've got company."
He raised a hand and projected a quick diagnostic. The Herrscher's senses poured out, skimming the mental seas: a signature not of the worlds resident in the chat but from something else — older geometry, older than Himeko's star-rail tech and stranger than Zhongli's contracts.
A probe.
It didn't pierce his space so much as negotiate with it: a polite vector mapping his Imaginary Space like a surveyor checking property lines. It moved with careful curiosity, leaving tiny ripples of impossible math.
Takumi's first reaction: catalog and contain. He twitched his fingers; his infinite-dimensional storage — the drawers he could make in a thought — unlatched and began ingesting stray bits of the probe's emission for analysis. He fed pattern-fragments into a small parser. The results came back as noise and metaphor.
He called the robots off the city network and sealed the main gates. Not because ground forces would help — it was theater — but because protocol was comfort for lesser minds. Then he went to the one thing that mattered: communication.
He pinged the group — not a casual message, but an urgent tag that would wake anyone online and light up the chat like flares.
Takumi: [Everyone, heads up. Something unknown has pinged my Imaginary Space. Not a simple packet — it's a cognitive probe.]\
Silence for a breath. Then replies came cascading.
Himeko: [Show me the waveform. Now.]
Bronya: [Link analysis: sending waveform fragments to @Takumi.]\
Zhongli: [If this is an Aeon or an entity from Herta's layer of abstraction, proceed with caution.]
Miori Shiba: [Is it dangerous? Will it harvest our lolis?]
Takumi: [No harvesting. Probably.]\
Takumi toggled a private channel to Himeko and uploaded a packet of the probe's shape — the closest thing to its "voice" he could render. Himeko replied in the time it takes to think: lucid, clinical, excited.
Himeko: [This isn't a simple technological probe; it's an interlaced cognition node. Semi-sentient. It maps probability like a cartographer maps land. The AoE is… not hostile outright, but it's probing your rules.]\
In plain terms: it was trying to learn what kind of world Takumi's was. Which made it either a diplomatic precursor, a neutral surveyor, or — worst — a prelude to enforcement.
Takumi stepped into Imaginary Space again, this time alert but not adversarial. He projected a small, deliberate structure: a floating forum of glass and geometry directly in the trajectory of the probe. It was a meeting-room — his brain's version of "come talk to me, politely."
The probe hung for a heartbeat, like a bat paused in flight, then slid into the margin of the forum and unfolded itself.
Those who had never seen a probe of cognition would have described it as a ship; to Takumi it looked like a ball of clockwork riddled with fractal filigree. Things moved on it and through it that were not quite machinery: shifting sigils, runes that read like code and memory, and tiny motes that chimed with harmonic sequences.
Takumi smiled and masked the gesture with a flourish of Reason. He addressed the probe in a way that the Herrscher's mind could layer into a signal: a handshake of rational form.
"State your nature," he sent.
The probe answered — not in words but by blooming a cluster of images into his head: a corridor of countless doors; an ocean; an endless library; a set of eyes that politely regarded him like a scholar greeting another scholar across the stacks.
Then the probe tried a pattern that translated to syllables in his mind, rough and mechanical but understandable.
VOICE (in Takumi's cognition): Curator.
Takumi blinked. The probe called itself a curator.
He tested a different channel: social.
Takumi: [Curator, welcome. Why the visit?]
The probe unfurled: an elegant chronology. It imparted a compressed sequence — a thousand lives in a second. Worlds rising, knowledge harvested and stored, civilizations filed away in its aegis. It operated like an archivist for realities: a black-market library of existence.
Himeko's whispered overlay arrived, prickling with professional greed and worry.
Himeko (private): [Curator nodes are known in a few strata. They collect cultural datapoints — high-value. Sometimes they trade. Sometimes they broker pacts. They're not always benevolent. They're… collectors.]\
Takumi's mind ticked through implications. A collector who catalogued worlds could value a Herrscher like a rare book, or a living archive like Xiao as an artifact. That made him uneasy.
He asked a question that was polite and deliberate.
Takumi (aloud in Imaginary Space): "Do you collect sentients?"
The curator unfurled an image of shelves — and at the center, a hearth with people around it. The visual meant a translation: We preserve stories. Those that consent stay with memory. Those without consent become... objects. We prefer willing exchange.
Takumi's skin prickled. He had stolen worlds before, yes, but only to give life, to cultivate civilization. He did not like the idea of living beings becoming objects on a shelf.
He closed the forum gently. "Noted."
Back in the courtyard, Zhongli's return pinged — he had been traveling with his entourage longer than expected and had just stepped out of the teapot.
Zhongli: [I sense the probe. Curious… It treats us like a specimen. Do not allow it to 'take' anyone.]\
Takumi: [No plan to give anything away. I'll offer data exchange under terms: knowledge for safe carriage and return guarantees.]\
The chat exploded with advice and barbed humor. Akeno suggested decorating the probe with sweets. Chika demanded a picture for her scrapbook. Bronya ran latency checks. Ganyu politely requested a transcript.
Takumi, amused at the domestic chaos of his multi-verse staff meeting, did what he did best: set conditions.
He formed a contract in the abstract: a frame of pseudo-legal geometry that his Herrscher would enforce, a treaty form that would be visible as a set of glowing sigils within the curator's field.
Takumi (in Imaginary Space): "We open a library. You may record cultural artefacts with consent only. You may not remove sentients, nor preserve them without the subject's permission. You will leave a true, readable copy behind if you extract complex knowledge. We reserve the right to deny or to terminate the archive contract at any time."
The curator paused. It murmured through colors and time-slices, its tone a weave of curiosity and corporate pragmatism.
Then — to Takumi's slight surprise — it accepted.
It clicked, like a lock agreeing to be remade.
In chat, Himeko's message popped with delighted incredulity.
Himeko: [You just negotiated with a multiversal curator. Cookbooks? Trade deals? Are you insane or brilliant? Probably both.]\
Takumi shrugged, nonchalant in text but wired inside. Negotiation with cosmic collectors was a different scale of economy, and economies fascinated him. He imagined shelves upon shelves of files: techniques to stabilize lives, hints on how to produce star-silk, blueprints like the ones Herta would salivate over. The curator would be valuable — and he would be careful. Curators had rules; they respected contracts — because their trade was trust.
A pause. Then the curator left a small seed: an offer.
CURATOR (in mind):We catalog. We trade. We accept exchange. Will you allow a sample? A single, non-sentient archive node? Offer knowledge, we will leave a path: a map to others who might wish to emigrate. Share then, and we will share back.
There was a danger in acceptance — the curator could use the map as an advertisement. But there was also a utility: a multiverse-wide directory could accelerate Takumi's plan to populate his world with minds, builders, and students. It could turn a trickle into a river.
Takumi thought of the children sleeping in neat, robot-supported homes; of Xiao at peace; of Zhongli leafing through the industrial tomes. He imagined entire networks trading in knowledge and consent, a civilized bazaar of worlds. He felt the Herrscher thrumming approval — as long as terms were kept and consent held.
He responded.
Takumi (calm, precise): "We accept exchange with strict conditions: full consent, transitive guarantee, and a return clause if the collected worlds request repatriation. We keep copies only for study and must destroy any copy upon request. Do you agree?"
The curator shimmered, long and slow.
It had never met a human (or Herrscher) who asked for its own copies to be destroyed on request. The gesture was unprecedented, and it affected it — it hesitated, then released a cascade of fractal light like a cautious blessing.
CURATOR:Agreed. We abide by your terms. We collaborate.
Takumi allowed himself a small grin, then typed in the group chat.
Takumi: [Curator accepted terms. We will host a cultural archive. Contract drafting tonight. Himeko, you'll help with the translation layer; Zhongli, your legal sense on metaphysical clauses; Ganyu, oversee consent protocols. Everyone else — start drafting cultural consent forms. We'll build a library for worlds that want refuge and trade.]\
The chat replied in a chorus—some skeptical, many excited. Himeko posted a snarky contract template within minutes. Zhongli offered formalities that felt like a syllabus for gods. Ganyu asked gentle, practical questions about privacy and child consent. Even Chika volunteered to design cute consent stamps.
Takumi watched the chatter and felt something unexpected: warmth. Governance, law, culture — all the tiny brittle things that kept a civilization from cannibalizing itself — were being built in a chat room with people plucked from a hundred stories. It was messy, human, and exactly what he wanted.
Outside, in the starlit courtyard, the curator lingered like an honorable guest across the threshold of a strange house. It had knocked. Takumi had answered. The multiverse would keep knocking. He had tools — storage, architecture, cognition, and a group chat full of wildly competent people.
He closed his palm and let Imaginary Space return to ordinary night, letting the city hum.
There were deals to draft, consent forms to write, and children to care for. There would be bureaucracy and coffee and late-night arguments about metaphysical clauses. There would also be money and libraries and the slow, absurd joy of building.
Takumi sat back, fingers interlaced.
Another knock had come. He had opened the door.
Tonight the multiverse had offered a catalog. Tomorrow it might offer an alliance. Or a war. Or an unexpected friend.
He poured himself a drink, pinged the group with a single line, and watched the wave of emojis flood in.
Takumi: [Welcome to the archive project. First meeting in one hour. Bring snacks and legal counsel.]\
Chika: [I'll bring snacks!!]
Bronya: [I'll compute the optimal snack-to-attendee ratio.]
Himeko: [I'll bring the translation stack and a wrecking bar — metaphorical.]\
Takumi grinned, a cold, calm thing warmed by human absurdity.
Someone — or something — had knocked on his door in Imaginary Space. He answered.
The road from a ruined Earth to a multiversal city began with smaller steps. Tonight it took the shape of lawyers, snacks, and a curator who collected memory like rare books. Tomorrow it would become a map.
For Takumi, that was good enough.