The next morning, he built the garden.
Not a garden as in a farming plot — he already had that. A garden. The kind you sat in. The kind that existed for no reason other than being beautiful.
He'd been thinking about it since he transplanted the first flowering trees. Something about the pink blossoms near the house had triggered a memory — the garden at the shrine near his school, the one he'd cut through on the walk home. Stone paths, a small pond, a wooden arch over the entrance. Nothing grand. Just a quiet, deliberate space where everything was placed with care.
He wanted that. Needed it, maybe. Something that reminded him of home without being home. Something Japanese in a world that had never heard the word.
He chose a spot thirty metres east of the house, where a secondary canal ran close to the main water channel. Good water access. Flat ground. Close enough to see from the windows but far enough to feel separate.
The pond came first. He carved it into the earth with precise applications of force magic — not a simple circle or rectangle, but an organic shape with gentle curves and a natural-looking shoreline. About 100 meters across at its widest - he plenty of space. A small inlet jutted out from the northern edge, creating a peninsula of land that pushed into the water like a reaching hand.
He lined the bottom and sides with flat stone — smooth, dark, carefully fitted. Not the rough granite of the house walls. This was finer work. He spent hours getting the stones right, shaping each one to interlock with its neighbours, creating a sealed basin that would hold water without leaking into the dead dust beneath.
A feed channel connected the pond to the nearest canal, letting water flow in at a controlled rate. On the opposite side, a drainage channel carried overflow out to the irrigation grid. The pond would stay full, the water would stay moving, and the excess would feed his crops. Function and beauty. His engineering teacher would have approved.
He filled it. Water slowly crept in through the feed channel, dark and clear, spreading across the stone-lined bottom. It took most of the afternoon to fill completely. By evening, the surface was still and reflective, catching the sky like a mirror set into the ground.
Around the pond, he laid cobblestone. Not the rough, functional paths he'd put elsewhere in the homestead — this was deliberate. He pulled rounded stones from deep underground and shaped them into smooth, uniform pavers, fitting them together in a pattern that radiated outward from the water's edge. The cobblestone patch extended five or six metres from the shoreline in every direction, creating a clean, solid surface for walking, sitting, or just standing and looking at the water.
The wooden arch took trial and error. He'd been working almost exclusively with stone and metal — wood was a different material, and shaping it with mana required a lighter touch. He felled a hardwood tree from the forest, stripped it, dried it, and carved it into the components he needed. Two upright posts, gently curved. A crossbeam connecting them at the top with a slight upward sweep at each end. Traditional. Simple. The kind of arch you'd see at the entrance to a shrine garden.
He set it at the edge of the cobblestone, marking the transition from homestead to garden. It looked lonely standing there by itself, bare wood against grey dust and dark water. It needed something.
The inlet. The little peninsula of land pushing into the pond. That was where the centrepiece went.
He'd found the tree on his third scouting run — deep in the forest, growing alone in a shaft of sunlight between two massive hardwoods. It wasn't a cherry blossom. It couldn't be — this was another world, another ecosystem, another everything. But it was close enough to make his chest ache. Pale pink petals, nearly white at the edges, darkening to rose at the centre. Delicate branches that spread in graceful layers. A trunk that curved slightly, as if bowing.
He dug it up with more care than he'd used on anything else. Every root preserved. Every branch protected. He teleported it directly onto the inlet and planted it in enriched soil, surrounded by dark stones, at the exact centre of the peninsula.
It stood over the water like it had always been there. Petals drifted down and landed on the surface, pink on black, carried slowly toward the drainage channel by the gentle current.
Yuki sat on the cobblestone and looked at it for a long time.
It wasn't home. It was never going to be home. But it was the closest thing he could build, and sitting here — with the water and the arch and the tree that wasn't quite a cherry blossom — he felt something loosen in his chest that had been tight for months.
A flicker of movement in the water caught his eye. He leaned forward.
Fish. Small ones — dark-bodied, quick, darting between the stones at the bottom of the pond. A school of maybe a dozen, weaving through the shallows near the inlet.
He blinked. He hadn't put fish in the pond. He hadn't put fish anywhere.
The streams. The water feeding his canal system came from the forest. The fish must have entered through the feed channels — carried in by the current, or swimming upstream from the source. They'd found his pond and apparently decided to stay.
He watched them circle the base of the almost-cherry-blossom tree, silver flashes in dark water, and felt an absurd swell of satisfaction. Life was moving in. Not because he'd forced it — because he'd built something worth living in.
I can't stay here forever.
The thought surfaced uninvited. He let it sit.
This world is massive. There's likely a whole civilization out there — the people who summoned me, whoever they are. Cities. Cultures. Other humans, presumably. I can't hide in a walled garden for the rest of my life, no matter how nice the pond is.
But for the first time, the idea of leaving didn't feel like abandonment. He had teleportation now. He could tear a hole in space and be back here in seconds from anywhere on the continent. The homestead wasn't a prison he'd have to abandon when he finally ventured out. It was a base. A home he could always return to.
Explore the world. Come back for dinner.
He smiled at the fish. They didn't care.