There are four kids now, and the guest count is climbing steadily enough that Mary had started keeping a second ledger just for arrivals.
Ari looked at the numbers for a while, turning the pages slower than she needed to, and then looked out toward District A, where four children currently had entirely too much energy and nowhere appropriate to put it.
She let the thought sit for a moment before she finally reached for it.
System.
A pause, unhurried, the way she did most things.
Let’s finally do something with the newly expanded area.
Let’s name it District A.
Add a new facility – a training ground.
[Confirmed.
Deducting Void Points.] The open field she’d claimed during the last expansion had sat mostly empty since — three stories of buildings ringing a stretch of unused ground nobody had quite gotten around to assigning a purpose to.
She left the buildings where they were and simply carved a section of the open ground into something built for exactly this.
Low training walls rose slowly around its edges, the rest of the district left untouched, quiet under the same pale sky it had always had.
• • The rules, once the System laid them out, were simple enough that even Sheldon couldn’t find much to complain about, though he certainly tried.
Inside the training ground, guests could use their abilities freely — full power, no restriction, the way the rest of the city never allowed.
Any injury sustained there healed the moment they stepped back out through the gate.
Mental overload didn’t heal that way.
Neither did plain physical exhaustion.
Sheldon walked the perimeter twice before he said anything, hands clasped behind his back, inspecting the low stone walls with the particular scrutiny of a man convinced there had to be a flaw somewhere he simply hadn’t found yet.
“So it’s a video game,” he said finally.
“With the safety rails still on.” “More or less,” Mary said, watching him from a few feet away.
“I have several questions about the underlying mechanism.” “You always do.” He didn’t ask any of them, in the end.
He just kept walking the wall a third time instead, muttering to himself.
• • Gojo volunteered for the kids before anyone thought to ask him, which surprised absolutely no one who’d spent more than a day around him.
“I’m technically a teacher,” he said, stretching his arms overhead with the easy confidence of a man who considered the matter already settled.
“Back home.
I’m extremely good at it.” “You let two of your students almost die last week,” Levi said, from somewhere behind him, not even looking up from whatever he was doing.
“They didn’t, though.” Gojo grinned.
“That’s the important part.” Nobody found this especially reassuring.
It didn’t stop him anyway.
The next morning, he marched all four kids — Harry, Naruto, Anya, and Luke, the last of them still faintly bewildered by how quickly he’d been folded into the group — out into the center of District A, and waited, arms crossed, until he had their full attention.
“Taijutsu,” he announced.
“And endurance.
That’s the plan.” A beat passed before anyone reacted.
“What about magic?” Harry asked.
“Or my chakra?” Naruto added.
“Or my dragon?” Luke said, Halcyon perched hopefully on his shoulder, wings half-spread as if volunteering on his behalf.
Gojo looked at all three of them for a long moment, unhurried, letting the question sit exactly as long as it needed to.
“Great questions,” he said finally.
“All useless right now.” He tapped his own chest, once, slow.
“Your wand’s not always going to be in your hand.
Your dragon’s not always going to be next to you.
If something goes wrong and none of that’s around, this is what’s left.
So we build that first.” Nobody argued with that either.
Anya, who had been waiting patiently for her own turn, finally spoke up.
“What about me?” Gojo turned to look at her.
He took his time with it, the way he’d taken his time with the others, and Anya waited, hands folded, entirely not caring at all about the delay.
“You’re the mascot,” he said at last.
“Very important role.
Morale.” “Anya agrees,” she said, immediately, and sat down in the grass to watch, apparently satisfied that this had always been the plan.
• • The Exchange Center got its own upgrade around the same time, though it took Harry a few days to fully understand what that meant.
“No more waiting on a clerk,” Ari said, watching Ai and Mary review the new interface with expressions that mixed relief and something quieter underneath it — the small, unspoken thread of does this mean we’re obsolete now that neither of them said out loud.
“Items display automatically.
Guests browse themselves.” “That does free up quite a lot of our time,” Mary said, after a moment.
“Good.
Use it for something else.” Harry found out what that actually meant purely by accident, wandering past the crystal on his way to find Naruto, when a small notification caught the corner of his eye — something new, filed under his own name, that hadn’t been there the last time he’d looked.
He slowed.
Stopped.
[Remnant Soul — Assessed Sell Value: 12,000 Void Points.] [Dark Magic Encyclopedia — Assessed Sell Value: 10,000 Void Points.] He stood there for a while, just reading it.
Both sat under his own name the same way Naruto’s chakra fox had sat under his — priced the way a thing gets priced when the crystal has decided it’s yours to sell, not the shop’s to offer.
Harry didn’t recognize either phrase.
Remnant Soul meant nothing to him, and neither did Dark Magic — no more than any other strange listing in a shop that sold dragon bloodlines and lightsabers in the same breath, since as far as he knew, all of this was still brand new and slightly unbelievable to begin with.
Still, something about the words made the back of his neck prickle, in the vague, wordless way a person feels a draft from a door they can’t see.
He stood there a while longer, weighing it, though there wasn’t much to weigh — he didn’t understand either listing well enough to want to keep them, whatever they were.
He reached out and tapped the first one, then the second, quick and almost reflexive, the same impulse that makes a person pick at a scab they can’t explain wanting gone.
[Remnant Soul — sold.
+12,000 Void Points.] [Dark Magic Encyclopedia — sold.
+10,000 Void Points.] The prickle at the back of his neck eased somewhere around the second confirmation, like something that had been standing too close behind him had finally taken a step back.
Harry didn’t examine the feeling any more closely than he’d examined the listings themselves.
He pocketed the notification, told no one at all, and walked away lighter than he’d felt in days, for reasons he wouldn’t understand yet.
That lasted exactly as long as it took Naruto to wander past the same crystal five minutes later.
[Kurama — Assessed Sell Value: 45,000 Void Points.] “OI.” The reaction from inside him was immediate, panicked, and considerably louder than Naruto had ever heard the fox get.
“You would not.
You WOULD NOT—” “I’m just looking,” Naruto said, out loud, to the empty air, which earned him a strange look from Cinderella passing by with a basket of laundry.
“Do NOT sell me.
I refuse.
I absolutely refuse to be catalogued like some kind of—” “Forty-five thousand,” Naruto said slowly, doing the math with visible enjoyment.
“That’s a lot of ramen.” “NARUTO.” “Okay, okay, relax.” He grinned at the empty air, delighted with himself.
“Tell you what.
You pay rent.
Chakra, every day, and I don’t sell you.” A pause.
“…Rent.” “Rent.
Or I sell you.
All of you.” He said it with the easy, cheerful menace of a boy who had absolutely no intention of following through and every intention of making the fox sweat about it anyway.
A long, defeated silence stretched out between them.
“…Fine,” Kurama growled, at last.
“Daily.
And not a drop more than agreed.” “Deal,” Naruto said, grinning wider, and went off to find Harry to brag about it — entirely unaware that Harry had already quietly handled something considerably stranger that same afternoon.
• • Ari worked on the food street rules alone, curled into the corner of her sofa with a drink balanced against one knee and the shop panel floating patiently in front of her, unbothered by company for once.
It took longer than she expected, mostly because she kept getting distracted rewriting the same clause three different ways before settling, each time, on whichever version required the least explanation.
Employees weren’t the same as shopkeepers, and shopkeepers weren’t the same as guests, and somewhere in reconciling all three she ended up drafting six separate rules and deleting two of them twice.
She read back through the final list once, decided it was good enough, and didn’t bother polishing it any further than that.
[Notice: Food Street rules, effective immediately.] [1.
Shopkeepers are not employees.
No salary is paid; shopkeepers keep their own profit.] [2.
A 40% tax applies, settled monthly.] [3.
Only cooked food may be sold.
Raw ingredients remain restricted to the System Shop — no private trading between shop owners and guests.] [4.
One type of shop per world of origin.
This prevents internal competition and protects the economics of each guest’s home world.] [5.
Staff cap of three per shop, for now.
This will increase as Void City grows.] [6.
Each shop includes an intelligent interface for design and cleaning, plus dedicated storage that preserves ingredients indefinitely.] She sent it out with a single gesture, the notification blooming across the city all at once — every guest’s panel, every employee’s, chiming softly within the same second — and went back to her drink without waiting to see how any of it landed.
• • It landed, as it turned out, with considerable noise.
“Forty percent,” Sheldon said, reading the notice over Tsukasa’s shoulder outside the half-finished food street the next morning.
“That’s an aggressive rate.” “It’s fair,” Tsukasa said, without much heat, arms crossed as he watched the half-finished street take shape.
He wasn’t building anything of his own here, and hadn’t planned to — with proper shopkeepers finally taking over the public side of things, his own kitchen could go back to being exactly what it had started as.
Ari’s kitchen.
Nobody else’s.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t fair.
I said it was aggressive.” Mary, arriving with her own copy of the notice tucked under one arm, glanced between the two of them.
“She worked on this alone, apparently.
All of it.” “All night, from the look of it,” Ai added, joining her.
“There’s a crossed-out version of rule four in the margin.
She rewrote it twice.” “Democratic,” Sheldon said dryly.
“She’s the City Lord,” Mary said.
“It was never going to be a vote.” Nobody argued with that either, and by midmorning the complaints had mostly folded into planning instead — Sheldon loudly unconvinced by rule four right up until someone pointed out it applied to him too, and the food street filling in, slowly, exactly the way everything else in Void City tended to.
Tsukasa watched it come together with quiet satisfaction and no particular urge to join it, already turning his thoughts toward the next thing he intended to cook for a certain sofa-bound City Lord who’d never once had to ask him twice.