Lin Feng gazed at the full moon.

A single moon… unlike the twinned satellites back home.

He reclined on a bed of sand high above the newly built city of Suna as he did a bit of introspection.

The thing was: The Void is a lonely place.

No time, no space, no light, no darkness, no anything. A moment in it could feel like an eternity. An eternity, a moment. His stay in it after ascending to the Shattered Void realm had seemed like years to his mind.

To occupy himself, he had filled his head with architectural ideas. Concepts of what he might be able to build in the future with his enhanced capabilities.

After learning of Principles and Daos, the possibilities had expanded infinitely.

He had many fanciful thoughts of what he could build if he had the power to warp the fundamental principles on which the world worked. But knowing the difficulty of reaching the Grasping principles realm, he could only regretfully consign them to the distant future.

So, imagine his pleasant surprise when he had realised that in this low-level plane he had landed in, he not only had a shot at reaching the Grasping principles realm, he might very much reach the Dao seeking realm in a single bound.

Merging with Shukaku and gaining a basic control of the principles governing sand had only aggravated the situation.

It had made building several structures, that could only remain on the drawing board due to the unfeasible amounts of labour and materials required, suddenly very practical. And all this with just the basic level of mastery of the principle that allowed him to move sand without expending energy.

If he could fully master it… the possibilities were endless.

The very next day, he had received notice of the proximity of the four-tails and the first thing that had popped into his mind was a dust laden blueprint he had extracted from the box of blueprints his Master had left him upon his death.

That box was one of his most cherished possessions. He had tried to bring it with him but had lost it to the Void. In fact, if not for his efforts to protect it, he wouldn’t have been as injured as he had when he came out onto the desert.

The blueprint depicted a glass pagoda one that in his home world was extremely inefficient to build, mainly due to the cost of glass.

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But if he had the four-tails and with Shukaku already merged with him…

Basically, everything had fallen right into his lap.

He was like a poor man who had received a sudden windfall of wealth and gone crazy and blown it all at the brothel, partaking of wine and women, forgetting his wife and children who were waiting for him, dependant on his earnings.

In his case, the wife and children were his consideration for the people of Suna who he was uprooting from their homes upon a whim and without prior notice.

He cast his sensation over the room where the girl who had reminded him of it rested in a fitful slumber.

He waved his hand and a stream of sand began circling above him, morphing into various shapes.

He waved his other hand and the sand melted into glass. Pulling deeper on his powers, he called upon sands with different mineral compositions and as they too melted into glass, the minerals dyed it into various hues.

He lifted the swirling streams into the way of the moonlight and they shimmered with a multicoloured brilliance.

Such beauty with only two principles…

What if he had more? His heart grew fiery with ambition.

He had never been one to unceasingly seek for the next fight with a stronger opponent.

He had a post with the greatest amount of authority possible in his home plane handed to him at a very young age. He had always been content with the status quo. He had never had dreams of world domination.

Women had come and gone in his life but after an initial period of debauchery, he had settled down and found that any relationship based on his strength and authority was too shallow for him.

The only thing that he was truly passionate about was architecture. It was his reason for cultivation. He craved the satisfaction of turning dreams into reality.

Lin Feng: Architect of Dreams.

Yeah. It was a moniker he could grow to love.

But with his recent actions he had proven to himself that his self-control nosedived whenever it came to all things architecture.

He felt really guilty when he had exited the room after listening to the girl’s spiel.

The very first thing he had done was visit Rasa and ask for a record of the names of the heroes on the Monument of Martyrs so he could recreate a fitting memorial for them so the Tutelary Gods wouldn’t fade away.

He had been told that he had destroyed the document storage during the process of building the city. Upon further inquiry, he learnt that he had caused heavy losses to the library and disrupted all professions by ruining their supplies.

The houses didn’t have furniture, and several genin squads were on permanent salvage duty, trying to unearth remnants of Old Suna, so the villagers could claim them.

The more he heard, the worse he felt until he decided firmly:

He needed a public relations expert cum secretary who could ensure that the Architect of Dreams wouldn’t become the Architect of Nightmares instead.

He recalled a pair of fiery brown eyes and smirked.

He knew the perfect candidate.

Although her village had sold her off to him for human experimentation… he blushed with shame upon recalling how diabolically he was behaving in his uncontrolled state… she was still officially on their rolls.

He stood up on the sandy platform. He had to meet Rasa and get her assigned on a compulsory mission to be his secretary.

That way, if she refused, she would be a missing nin and as a criminal, he’d have every right to capture her.

Even if she didn’t want to after their rocky first meeting, she would have no choice in the matter.

He might be unwilling to delve into the black but morally grey was perfectly fine with him.

With a swirl of sand, he vanished.

One can only hope that Rasa isn’t engaged in anything private at this time.