Takumi had only meant to enjoy one peaceful private meal with Klee. Guili Plains never slept, but at least the inn could offer the illusion of quiet.
The illusion broke three knocks and several polite bows later.
An Adventurers' Guild representative—Sister Lan herself—had already come and gone. Merchant after merchant had slipped into the private room, all of them bearing the same look: equal parts excitement and alarm. The rumor mill had done its work. Guili Plains' new street and the upcoming property auction promised income, prestige — and opportunity.
Now, with a fresh tea steaming between them, Takumi watched Xingqiu sit down across from Klee and make the face of someone who had just been complimented with an insult.
"Who's this?" he asked, in the tone of a man who'd been called 'Second Miss' one time too many by Takumi's sharp tongue.
Klee bounced, showing off the last chunk of fish she'd smuggled from the Wanmin kitchen. "I'm Klee! Hello big sister!"
Xingqiu's face performed an entire tragedy in three beats: confusion, offense, mortality.
"Not a—" he began, and then, because he'd never perfected the art of staying mortified for long when presented with cuteness, he melted half a degree. "I—uh. Hello."
Klee, oblivious to gender politics, offered him a fried fish. He accepted. Takumi smirked.
Visitors, Deals, and Elevator Promises
Merchants continued to arrive. Lan had already returned with plans for an Adventurers' Guild branch in Guili Plains; she'd been focused, professional, and oddly practical about storage needs for reward items (fans and lost swords took a lot of shelf space).
Then came three more delegations in quick succession:
A consortium seeking a logistics hub for food distribution — Xiangshan Foods (they wanted refrigerated space and quick ship access).
A small group representing a troupe of performers and innkeepers eyeing the entertainment district (they wanted land near the harbor and assurances that roads would lead audiences to them).
Feiyun Commerce Guild's representative — Xingqiu — polite but clearly calculating.
Takumi listened to them all, then drew a line in the air with the tip of his teacup and began outlining a simple but radical concept:
"Buy property here and you're buying a full infrastructure package. The plot, the road to it, electricity stub, a sewer/light connection, and a module-ready building core. We'll deliver the shell. You finish interiors. Want cargo elevators? We'll install mechanical lifts. Want automated storage? Cloud Retainer's team can adapt the same mechanism logic as the excavators."
He said it casually, but his fingers moved like someone tracing circuits. Syllables became specs, specs became commitments. The merchants' eyes widened. Real estate in Teyvat rarely included mechanical lifts. In Liyue, "luxury" had traditionally meant a good jade interior or a strong geomantic foundation — not mechanized freight elevators.
Xingqiu asked, cautious. "You mean… elevating goods between floors? That's feasible locally? Wouldn't mechanisms be expensive to maintain?"
Takumi nodded. "Feasible. Expense is why I'm offering it as an inclusion: a proper logistics hub increases your throughput and downgrades labor needs. The Feiyun Guild could underwrite a pilot building and use it as a depot. The elevators run on elemental batteries — replaceable electro-crystals or, for Vision holders, a direct Vision link. Maintenance costs are known quantities. We train mechanics locally."
He pictured the future in his head: warehouses stacked vertically, conveyor-guided carts loading trucks and barges with the day's harvest, Klee contentedly detonating an old boulder into gravel that gets shoveled by a bulldozer. The image warmed him more than the tea.
Xingqiu allowed himself the smallest smile. "I'll take it to Father and my brother. If we invest… logistics through here could speed up half our southern route."
That was the pitch done right: practical, concrete, and designed to reassure the cautious Feiyun House.
The System (A Little — But Not Too Much)
At one point a merchant asked a delicate question in a low voice: "Whose blueprints are you using? The designs are—unlike anything I've seen."
Takumi folded his hands. He couldn't tell them everything. The "system" — the strange blueprint cognition that lived in him — was secret, only his to manage. But secrets had layers. He gave them the practical layer.
"The blueprints are modular," he explained. "Think of the city as a set of prefabricated modules. Foundations, vertical cores, plumbing runs, wiring ducts — they're standardized. That lets us build faster, which lowers cost. We marry alchemy and mechanics: simple element-based energy cores, slime-assisted composting for waste, and dedicated manufacturing cells to churn out parts."
Lan's eyebrows raised. "Slime-assisted—?"
Takumi chuckled. "Yes. Rock slimes for waste conversion, hydro slimes in the filtration plant, electro slimes for small nodes. We're not capturing them to extinction — we cultivate them in managed facilities. It's an industry in itself: sustainable, and it keeps costs down."
He described the blueprints in layman's terms: templates that fold into different shapes depending on site topology, adjustable conduit channels that accept either wire or elemental piping, and pre-tested junction modules so electricians and alchemists could finish installations without field redesign. He pitched the system as "Blueprint-as-a-Service," and the merchants loved both the phrase and the promise.
He left out the mechanic no one needed — that the system could anticipate loads, splice wiring schematics on demand, and produce optimized cut-lists with a thought. The public didn't need that particular wizardry. Only he needed to know.
Klee's Interlude: Two Bombs and a Bargain
Klee had been quiet for much of the negotiations. That lasted until a lanky man in embroidered linens asked lightly, "Who will handle demolition for the Stone Gate clearing?"
Klee's eyes lit up. "KLEE!"
She leapt from her seat, knocked over a cup with surprising grace, and presented the man with a hand-drawn card. On it was a stick-figure explosion, a heart, and three stars for "Klee's Official Explosions."
"You must be one of Takumi's demolitions assistants," the man said, amused.
Takumi cleared his throat. "She's supervised."
Xingqiu watched, imagining guild liability clauses. "Supervised is a generous term."
Klee piped up, "Brother Takumi says I can do controlled blasts! I'll help!"
The man laughed and extended a hand. "All right, child engineer. I'm Jin, from the Stone Gate Traders. Do good work and I'll give you the first batch of dried fish."
Klee's face positively shone. "DEAL!"
Xingqiu, watching this exchange, muttered to Takumi, "You're making it harder to resist investing here. Why did I even come?"
Takumi: "Because you like beautiful buildings and the sort of plans that lie between commerce and poetry."
Xingqiu blinked. "I do not like poetry."
"Noted."
Budget Worries and Ningguang's Quiet Calculations
The room's upbeat barter eventually hit an economic question that made even the merchants hush: who pays for the first wave of infrastructure? Guili Plains would require roads, sewage, a power backbone, and worker housing. Ningguang had promised funding for critical parts, but her resources were not infinite. She approached any big bet like a chess master, always three steps ahead.
Takumi saw that practical reality had to be faced. He pulled out the broad strokes from his mind and put them on the table:
"Phase the project. Start with the pier and basic roads, power lines along major arteries, the water plant, then factories. Use public bonds — Ningguang approves the bond prospectus — and private developers take on building lots by pre-purchase. Offer tax incentives for early industrial investors: a ten-year exemption on manufacturing tariffs in exchange for building the first generation of workshops."
Lan piped up. "Adventurers will need contracts. Road clearance, early security, salvage. We can supply labor and supervision."
Jean's old-school sense made a cameo through mutual lines of duty: "Mondstadt will send a core team — the most disciplined we can muster — under Captain Jean's supervision."
Ningguang steepled her fingers, already doing the arithmetic in microseconds. "Feasible. Takumi — draft the bond framework and the industrial tax lift. Yanfei will codify the law to enable it."
Takumi's chest tightened. This was the part he already knew would come: the need to marshal capital, align legal frameworks, train people, set up schools and factories, and make sure the new industries had supply chains. Once the economic scaffolding was secure, the rest would be a mechanical process of repeatable builds.
He sipped his tea, feeling the weight of a hundred future deadlines fold into each small sip. Guili Plains was already becoming his child — a sprawling, noisy, dangerous thing that would keep him awake for nights.
Closing the Deal (Kinds of Deals)
By evening the room had thinned to a few resolute figures. Xingqiu promised to consult his family and send emissaries. Lan booked a site visit for Guild shelves and a training room. Xiangshan Foods left a down payment for a refrigerated ground floor. The troupe asked for space near the docks and adequate lighting (Klee waved and offered to test fireworks on opening night; Jean politely took note).
Takumi drafted a schedule on a napkin, which Yanfei immediately turned into a legal-looking memo. Keqing took responsibility for zoning, while Keqing's terse scrawl on the margin read: Do not let Klee decide zoning.
Klee pouted. "Why not?"
Keqing's smile was all teeth. "Because 'Klee-booms' is not a recognized land-use category."
Klee sulked but forgave Keqing as soon as Takumi promised to let her design the festival pyrotechnics.
Nightfall — The City in Waiting
That night, Takumi stepped onto the balcony of the Wangshu Inn with the taste of Xiangling's chili oil still on his lips, and Klee's pattering boots behind him.
The harbor stretched below: cranes, piles of materials, a dozen lanterns already wired for takumi's new bulbs, and the distant silhouette of the newly stone bridge Zhongli had wrought. A fleet of small delivery boats bobbed in the harbor, and a single excavator idled like a giant insect.
Klee hopped onto the balustrade and looked up at him with a solemn expression for a child.
"Brother Takumi," she said, "when Guili Plains is finished, will you… stay?"
He blinked. The question was not naive. It was a quiet thing, a child asking if she would keep a family.
Takumi rested a hand on the little head. "I'll be here for a long time. We have a lot to build. Together."
Klee smiled like the sun.
Above them the first electric bulb in Guili Plains hummed and glowed, soft and warm. Down in the street, an alchemist tightened a connector and a mechanic tested an elevator's cable.
The blueprint system idled in Takumi's mind, humming with plans he could deploy tomorrow — but for now he kept it locked behind the ordinary curtain of engineering.
Tomorrow would bring auctions, contracts, more staff requests, and, inevitably, more people saying "I want a building." But tonight, Takumi allowed himself the rare permission to feel satisfaction: brick by brick, wire by wire, Liyue was shifting toward a different future.
And across the sea, in Mondstadt, a small group would be packing up to travel for the roadwork. Jean would select the most serious volunteers she could coax out of the taverns, and somewhere a bard might argue a song into being about a city that learned to glow at night.
Klee yawned and curled up at his feet. The fireworks only waited for her seal of approval.
Takumi closed his eyes and let the plans spin one soft layer deeper in his mind.
People. Tools. Blueprints. Systems. A place to become industry.
That was all it would take.
For tonight, Liyue dreamed in electric light and the faint echo of distant explosions that sounded suspiciously like progress.