The building was done.
John dropped down from the couple hundred feet he'd been floating at and landed — actually landed, feet on stone — in front of the main entrance, and just stood there for a second.
The doors were enormous. He'd made them enormous on purpose but standing in front of them now, actually physically standing in front of them as a human-shaped person with human-scale proportions, he was confronting the reality of what enormous meant when you applied it without any budgetary concerns. Each door was probably sixty feet tall. The arch above them was carved — he'd specified carved stonework in a fit of aesthetic ambition — and the detail was immaculate in a way that made him feel slightly embarrassed, like he'd gone too hard on a first draft.
He pushed one open. It moved easily, perfectly balanced, which was good because if he'd had to strain against a sixty-foot door he'd built himself he would never have recovered emotionally.
He stepped inside.
The entrance hall swallowed him. Not aggressively, not in a haunted-house way, just — it was big enough that his presence barely registered as a disturbance in the space. His footsteps echoed. High ceilings, stone floors, the kind of interior that made you automatically stand up straighter not because anyone was watching but because the room expected it.
He pulled up the tablet.
It had switched to a scan mode he hadn't noticed before, a little icon in the corner that looked like a building with radiating lines coming off it. He tapped it.
The screen populated.
He read through it slowly, lips moving slightly.
Total property courtyard, 10,930,042 sq ft (Per floor)
"Ten million," he said out loud. "Per floor. Just the courtyard." He kept reading.
Total property size not including garden: 8,322,000 sq ft
Total rooms: 11,033
He stopped at that one. Eleven thousand rooms. Per floor. He stood in his entrance hall and looked up at the ceiling and said nothing for a moment.
Then he scrolled down, because some part of his brain said wait, but how much total, and the list obliged.
Total property courtyard: 52,740,000
Total property size not including garden: 46,740,000 sq ft
Total rooms: 51,033
Bedrooms: 7,569
Bathrooms: 3,200
Bathhouses: 359
Living rooms: 189
Offices: 1,109
Pools: 40
Kitchens: 22
Empty/unnamed rooms: 38,107
John stared at that last line for a long time.
"Thirty-eight thousand," he said. Then: "One hundred and seven." Like the one hundred and seven were important. Like the thirty-eight thousand weren't already completely deranged but somehow the extra one hundred and seven pushed it into new territory.
He scrolled back up. Forty-six million square feet. He tried to do the math on that in his head, converting it to something meaningful, some reference point that would make it feel real, and his brain just quietly refused to provide one and suggested he move on.
"Whatever," he said. "It's the size that matters."
He said this with the confidence of a man who had just built something that made most nations' capitals look underdeveloped, and then he stood in his fifty-something-million square foot palace in his personal void dimension and realized, for the first time since Zero had disappeared, that he had absolutely no immediate task.
The building was done.
He was here.
It was quiet.
"...Okay," he said, to the entrance hall, which did not respond because it was a room. "What's next."
He started walking, mostly because standing still felt weird. His footsteps bounced off the stone in that specific way that only truly empty large spaces produced, that clean echo that sounded almost musical in its loneliness. He passed through a doorway into what the scan had probably counted as one of the one hundred and eighty-nine living rooms, though calling it a living room was generous — it was the size of a sports arena and contained exactly no furniture because he hadn't furnished anything yet, which was going to be a project.
Thirty-eight thousand empty rooms. He was not going to think about furnishing thirty-eight thousand rooms right now. He was going to think about it later. Much later. At a time when the number felt less like a personal accusation.
He wandered into a corridor. Then another. The palace had a logic to it that he recognized because he'd half-designed it and half-let-it-generate, and the result was something that felt intentional without being entirely predictable, which he appreciated. Wide corridors with high ceilings. Stone that caught the ambient light — he'd put in ambient light without being totally sure where it came from, it just existed, the way light in dreams existed, sourceless and sufficient. Windows that looked out onto the interior courtyard from every floor, so wherever you were in the building you could see the tower rising from the garden's center.
He stopped at one of those windows now and looked out.
The courtyard was fifty acres and empty. The garden he'd vaguely specified had come through as a dense arrangement of something that looked like very dark trees arranged in wide concentric rings around the tower's base, their canopies brushing each other, the whole thing giving the courtyard a kind of depth and shadow that made it look less like a garden and more like a forest that had been very politely asked to arrange itself. The tower rose out of the center at twenty-seven floors, which from here looked genuinely absurd in the best possible way.
"Okay," John said quietly, looking at it. "Okay that's actually — yeah. That's good. I did that."
He said it like he wasn't entirely sure he believed it, which he wasn't.
He kept walking. He found one of the pools on floor two, which was empty of water and enormous and tiled in something dark that reflected the ambient light in clean geometric patterns. He found a kitchen — one of twenty-two — which was fully sized and contained absolutely no food because he had not thought to specify food, which was fine, he'd sort that out, he had god powers, food was solvable.
He found a bathhouse on the eastern side of the second floor that was bigger than most public spas, with tiered pools at different levels and arched ceilings and stone columns and the second his brain supplied the image of what a bathhouse that size could look like when it was staffed and running and there were people in it — specifically, the kinds of people he'd discussed at length with Zero, the kinds of people who existed on this planet in significant numbers across seven hundred thousand subraces — he had to physically stop walking and close his eyes and breathe through it for a second.
"Later," he told himself firmly. His voice echoed off the bathhouse columns. "Staff is a later problem. You don't even have furniture yet. You have thirty-eight thousand empty rooms. You cannot be thinking about you need to be thinking about furniture. Priorities."
He was not successfully thinking about furniture.
He pressed on.
He walked for a while without any real destination, which felt strange — he'd spent the last however-long in a state of constant urgency, always reacting, always being moved by circumstance from one bad situation to the next. Now there was no situation. No slavers, no goblins, no troll, no chain on his ankle. Just him and fifty million square feet of empty palace and a tablet with infinite creative range and the quiet that lived inside very large spaces.
He ended up back near the entrance hall, standing in the middle of it, looking up at the ceiling.
The scan number kept floating back up in his head. Fifty-one thousand rooms. Forty pools. Twenty-two kitchens. Three hundred and fifty-nine bathhouses. Seven thousand five hundred and sixty-nine bedrooms.
He had seven thousand five hundred and sixty-nine bedrooms and he was the only person here.
John Haisha, formerly of Sacramento, formerly of a goblin cave, currently sole administrator of a pocket dimension containing a palace that had no business existing, stood in his entrance hall and thought about what happened next.
The tablet was still in his hand. The cursor was still blinking in the description field, patient as ever, waiting.
He looked down at it.
He looked back up at the entrance hall.
"...I guess I need staff," he said, to no one.
His brain immediately supplied seventeen different thoughts about that, most of them extremely unhelpful, and he stood there in the echo of his own footsteps and tried to figure out where exactly to start.