9th New Tokyo is organized into seven districts across three strata, known collectively as the Seven Swords. A district here is not built; it is forged — cut from the same steel, sharpened for a single purpose, and set into the city's frame. Ascent between strata is a matter of minutes; no citizen lives more than one platform away from open sky.

Three blades are forged and in service. Citizens will rarely see them, and could not live a day without them.

Asteroid does not ask who you are — only what you may do, for how long, and in whose name. Every seal in the city is pressed by its hand, every seal expires, and the keys it signs with are re-cut each morning. It keeps four windows open, and has stayed small on purpose.

The city remembers through Kowloon. It keeps not the things themselves but what they meant, shelved by resemblance: describe what you are looking for, and it will find the day you meant. It holds no originals, answers no one unsealed, and its whole memory can burn and be read back from the vault into exactly the same shape.

Documents arrive whole, and Lady Glass reads them until they confess their structure — page by page, pass by pass, until what a paper says and what it only appears to say have parted ways. Her working notes burn after a fortnight; the originals and her fair copy go under glass forever. The other blades cut; she keeps.

The fourth blade, now on the anvil. Reverie is the sword forged to watch the other six: at regular intervals it surveys the city entire and writes down what has happened. When it enters service, nothing in 9th New Tokyo will be official until Reverie has written it.

Three swords are still on the anvil beside it. Their districts stand surveyed and waiting — among them Ninth, the keeper of the city's public records. Unforged districts return 404 — District Not Found to visitors, as is proper.

The crown of the city: the Aerial Core, seat of the Administration, and the observation platforms. The civic AI lattice is physically anchored here, where the air is thin and the sightlines are long.

The living city — residential platforms, the Commons, markets, theaters, and the festival concourses curated by the Administration. Most of the city's eight million citizens wake up in the Mid Stratum.

The city's roots: foundries, energy fields, the anchor pylons, and the memorial parks built on the old shoreline — a quiet reminder of the century the city was built to answer.