With the food street framed out and mostly empty, Ari decided the fastest way to fill it wasn’t to wait for volunteers to wander in through the gate on their own.
System.
Send out shopkeeper invitations.
Somewhere with good food.
You know the type.
[Understood, host.
Drafting invitation.] The card that went out a moment later carried a message with rather more flourish than the standard one, which Ari hadn’t actually written herself and only fully read after it had already gone out.
[You are hereby invited by the most beautiful, most powerful City Lord of Void City — located in the center of all worlds — to open a shop, a restaurant, or anything you wish.
Do you agree?] [⟨Yes⟩ ⟨No⟩] “…The System added adjectives,” Ari said, flat, staring at her own panel.
[The System felt it was accurate, host.] She didn’t argue the point.
[Note: shopkeeper rules will imprint directly upon acceptance.
No verbal briefing required.] That part, at least, she approved of without complaint.
• • Komatsu found the card waiting on his cutting board one quiet evening at Hotel Gourmet, long after the kitchen had emptied out for the night — the sort of evening that had become almost routine for him lately, though routine meant something very different now than it had years ago.
He’d earned his sixth star since then.
He’d cooked for presidents and gods alike, in one form or another, and he still very nearly dropped his knife at the sight of a golden card simply appearing on his prep station.
He read it twice.
“Most beautiful, most powerful,” he murmured, blinking at the words.
“That’s…
quite a lot of confidence for an invitation.” He didn’t destroy it, mostly because destroying things had never once occurred to Komatsu as an available option in any situation, ever.
He pressed Yes instead, half out of curiosity and half because a chef who’d traveled into the stomachs of literal monsters for a bowl of soup wasn’t about to be rattled by a floating card.
The moment he did, a quiet wave of information settled into him — tax rates, ingredient restrictions, staffing limits, all of it simply there now, the way a recipe he’d memorized years ago was there.
He blinked, startled by the sheer efficiency of it.
“Well,” he said.
“That’s one way to skip the paperwork.” Toriko showed up at the kitchen door less than a minute later, drawn by some instinct he couldn’t have explained even if asked, grinning the moment he saw what Komatsu was holding.
“That smells like an adventure,” he said.
“It’s an invitation, not a smell.” “Everything’s a smell if you think about it right.” Toriko peered over his shoulder at the card, eyebrows climbing.
“A whole shop?
In some other place entirely?
Count me in.” “I haven’t agreed to bring anyone,” Komatsu said, already knowing it was a losing argument.
“You will, though.” He would, as it turned out, and Sunny — arriving a moment later, alerted by absolutely nothing except his own uncanny sense for anything involving both food and the word exclusive — invited himself along with equal confidence, on the grounds that a restaurant without proper presentation was simply an unfinished restaurant.
• • At Totsuki, the card arrived somewhere considerably less settled.
Joichiro Yukihira found it tucked between two knives in his own kitchen — the small, worn-down restaurant kitchen that smelled permanently of soy and old grease — and read it standing in the doorway with a cigarette he’d forgotten to light.
“Huh,” he said, to no one in particular.
He didn’t destroy it either, though not out of any restraint so much as simple professional curiosity.
A cook who turned down a strange offer without at least tasting what it was made of wasn’t much of a cook, in his estimation.
He brought the card, unread by anyone but him, straight to Senzaemon Nakiri’s office the next morning — a meeting that raised more than a few eyebrows among staff who still hadn’t fully worked out why the old headmaster tolerated Joichiro’s presence as well as he did.
Senzaemon read the card slowly, turning it over once as if checking for a seam.
“An entire city,” he said at last, dry as old paper.
“Beyond every world.
Run by a self-declared beautiful, powerful ruler.” “That’s the pitch, yeah.” “And you intend to accept.” “I intend to see what’s cooking there,” Joichiro said, which, to anyone who knew him, amounted to the same thing.
Senzaemon considered it a while longer, weighing something Joichiro didn’t fully catch the shape of, before finally waving one hand in something close to permission.
“Go, then.
Report back what’s worth knowing.” Joichiro pressed Yes without any further ceremony, and felt the same quiet imprint settle into him a beat later — tax, rules, restrictions, all filed away somewhere he hadn’t consciously stored anything in years.
He grunted, mildly impressed despite himself.
Joichiro didn’t go alone.
He collected his son on the way out — Soma, a full head shorter than his father and considerably louder about the whole situation, dragging his knife roll along without needing to be asked twice — and Erina Nakiri besides, whose curiosity about an unknown culinary frontier outweighed, just barely, her lifelong suspicion of anything her grandfather approved of this easily.
The three of them stepped through the city gate together, and headed straight for the kitchens once they were through it, eager to see what they’d be working with.
Joichiro just laughed, low and easy, already rolling up his sleeves.
“Well.
Guess we’re all sous chefs today.” • • “Wait!” Nami’s protest about profit margins died mid-sentence.
“Is that the same Void City?
The one Robin went to?
Where she got those pretty dresses and the pills?” “She said,” Usopp pointed out.
“You weren’t listening.
You were doing the thing with your fingers.” “That’s not the point.” The point, as far as Nami and Chopper were both suddenly and loudly concerned, was that wherever Robin had been quietly disappearing to for cake and gossip apparently came with an actual economy attached to it, and neither of them intended to let Sanji have that discovery to himself.
“I’m his sous chef, obviously,” Chopper said immediately, practically vibrating.
“You don’t even cook,” Usopp pointed out.
“I could learn!” “I’m going,” Nami said, already counting something on her fingers that looked suspiciously like projected profit margins.
“Someone financially responsible needs to be there, and it’s clearly not going to be any of you.” “Rude,” Zoro said, entirely unbothered, from the spot where he’d been napping through most of the argument.
“You’d get lost between the kitchen and the dock.” “I would not.” Luffy, predictably, wanted to come purely on the grounds that it involved food and sounded fun, which Sanji shut down within seconds — someone needed to stay behind and make sure the captain didn’t eat the entire shop’s inventory before it opened — and after a solid ten minutes of increasingly loud negotiation, the matter settled itself the way most things on that ship eventually did: loudly, and not entirely fairly.
Nami and Chopper won.
There was, naturally, one more piece of business before anyone left the ship.
“We’re not showing up empty-handed,” Sanji said, already halfway into his coat.
“Whatever this place pays for, it’s not going to be short on seafood once we’re through.” It wasn’t a long detour.
A handful of Sea Kings, hauled up from the depths over the better part of a day with Zoro grumbling the entire time about being volunteered for hunting duty he hadn’t agreed to, coiled and lashed down along the deck until the Sunny rode noticeably lower in the water than it had that morning.
“Try not to bankrupt an entire dimension,” Zoro called after them once the haul was finally secured, already settling back down for the nap he’d been denied.
“Try not to get lost walking to the mast,” Nami shot back, and the three of them — Sanji, Nami, and a thoroughly delighted Chopper, already clutching a small satchel of his own medical supplies just in case — stepped through the gold light together, leaving the rest of the crew already arguing about who’d get first pick of whatever they brought back.
• • Komatsu, Toriko, and Sunny stepped through the city gate first, and Void City had never seen anything quite like what came through with them.
Toriko carried the better part of a Regal Mammoth haunch slung over one shoulder like it weighed nothing at all, Jewel Meat still glistening faintly gold beneath torn hide.
Sunny followed with an entire crate of Meteor Garlic balanced one-handed, humming to himself, while Komatsu brought up the rear pulling a cart stacked absurdly high — a coiled length of Billion Bird, sacks of BB Corn and Golden Wheat, bottles of Mellow Cola clinking together, and, cradled with the particular reverence of a man carrying something genuinely irreplaceable, a covered pot that could only be Century Soup.
The square went silent.
“…Is that meat glowing?” Sheldon said, very slowly, from somewhere near the front of the gathering crowd.
Komatsu said cheerfully, entirely unbothered by the stares.
“We brought a bit of everything.
Seemed rude to open a restaurant with an empty pantry.” Naruto’s jaw had dropped somewhere around the Billion Bird, and he wasn’t being quiet about it either.
“How is that thing still moving?!
Is it gonna peck someone?!
Somebody should probably—” “It’s very fresh,” Sunny said, with immense pride, as though that answered the question at all.
“Fresh doesn’t mean awake!” Naruto shot back, already circling it at a cautious distance, equal parts terrified and thrilled.
Anya, perched on Harry’s back and craning for a better view over his shoulder, pointed at the crate of Meteor Garlic with wide-eyed solemnity.
“Anya wants that one.
It’s sparkling.” “That one will probably kill you,” Harry said.
“Worth it,” Anya said, entirely serious.
Even Luke had abandoned whatever he’d been doing to gawk at the Century Soup, Halcyon perched on his shoulder mimicking his exact expression of open-mouthed astonishment.
The crowd had barely recovered from that when the city gate lit up a second time, and Sanji, Nami, and Chopper came through hauling something that made even Toriko pause mid-step — tens of meters of Sea King, coiled and dragged in sections behind them, scales catching the light in long iridescent ripples across the square.
“THAT’S BIGGER THAN THE MEAT THING,” Naruto shouted, already abandoning the Billion Bird entirely for this new, more terrifying attraction.
Gojo let out a low, delighted whistle, circling the nearest coil with his arms crossed.
“Okay, I take it back, this is the most unhinged delivery of the day.
Genuinely impressive.
Terrifying, but impressive.” “…Okay,” Ari said, watching the whole scene unfold from her sofa through the private feed, sitting up properly for the first time in a while.
“That’s a lot of fish.” [Technically several fish, host.
Sea Kings are frequently misclassified.] “Not now.” • • It didn’t take long for the Toriko contingent to notice exactly what had just been dragged in behind them.
“That,” Toriko said, circling the nearest coil of Sea King with the focused, hungry intensity of a man recalculating his entire trip, “is not something I’ve ever hunted before.” “You’d need a boat the size of a building,” Sanji said, lighting a cigarette, clearly pleased with the reaction.
“Or several.
We’ve got a whole crew for it.” “We should talk,” Toriko said, already grinning.
They did talk — at length, ingredient by ingredient, the two groups sizing each other up with the particular mutual respect of hunters recognizing genuinely worthy prey in each other’s hands — and the conversation ended, predictably, with both sides wanting a piece of what the other had brought.
There was just one problem.
“We can’t trade it between us,” Komatsu said, frowning at the rule now settled permanently into the back of his mind.
“No private trading.
Ingredients only move through the system shop.” “Not exactly,” Mary said, arriving in time to catch the tail end of the conversation.
“That rule’s for guests trading with each other outside the shops.
Shop to shop is different — you’re both vendors now.
I can arrange a transaction tax between you, same as any other shop sale.
Everything else still has to go through the exchange.” Toriko looked at Sanji.
Sanji looked at Toriko.
“I like her,” Toriko said.
“Deal’s a deal, then,” Sanji said, and the two of them shook on it before Mary had even finished pulling out her ledger.
• • It was Mary, Ai, and Tsukasa together who finally led all three groups down to the food street once the haggling over Sea King and Regal Mammoth had settled enough for anyone to think about where all of it was actually going to end up.
Soma was the one who stopped dead partway down the row.
“…Tsukasa-senpai?” Tsukasa, walking a step ahead with the calm authority of someone who’d clearly been here a while, glanced back without any particular surprise, as though a first-year turning up outside the known universe was simply Tuesday.
“Yukihira.
Nakiri.” A beat, then, with the faintest trace of something almost like humor, “This is going to take some explaining.” “You’ve been here this whole time?” Soma said, delighted and thoroughly betrayed in equal measure.
Erina had gone very quiet somewhere back at the gate and hadn’t fully recovered since — a city suspended in the dark between worlds was one thing to hear described and an entirely different thing to stand inside, and the sight of a mammoth haunch and a live Billion Bird hadn’t exactly settled her nerves either.
She recovered her composure the only way she knew how.
“Well,” she said, chin lifting, “I suppose I’ll simply have to see whether the cooking here lives up to all of this.” Komatsu, arriving a step behind them with an armful of Meteor Garlic, grinned at the exchange without asking any questions.
“Ah — more chefs.
Excellent.
There’s plenty of city to go around.” Toriko clapped a hand on Sanji’s shoulder, grinning wider than anyone.
“Feels like a festival.” Tsukasa led them the rest of the way himself, down past rows of half-finished storefronts to a stretch of open plots still waiting for someone to claim them.
“Design however you like,” he said.
“Interface handles the rest.” The Toriko group claimed theirs first, and within the hour a broad, elegant dining hall had risen in its place, all clean white stone and vaulted ceiling — a smaller cousin of the ten-star hotel Komatsu still technically ran back home.
Gourmet Table, the sign read, once Sunny finished fussing over the lettering to his satisfaction.
Joichiro claimed the plot beside it without much deliberation at all, sketching the layout from memory rather than imagination — a small, worn, welcoming counter with mismatched stools and a hand-painted sign that could have been lifted straight out of the back alleys of home.
Restaurant Yukihira, it read, exactly like the one he’d left behind, right down to the crooked lettering.
Erina studied it with open skepticism.
“This is what you’re going with.” “It’s what people actually want to eat in,” Joichiro said, unbothered, and didn’t change a thing.
Sanji took the last plot, and needed no time at all to decide what it would become.
Weathered wood decking rose around the edges, railings and rigging climbing up in unmistakable shape, until the whole storefront sat there looking, for all the worlds it technically wasn’t part of, exactly like the deck of the Thousand Sunny.
Baratie, the sign read, in his own careful hand.
“Named it after my old man’s place,” he said, when Nami asked, lighting a cigarette to hide however he actually felt about that.
“Seemed right.” Nobody pushed him on it any further than that.