A solid "end of the beginning"! I still enjoy the overall tone of feel of this, and am actually pleasantly surprised all this was only a first chapter and it's done well enough to go beyond the end for once.
Surprised that this wasn’t the end. I wonder if the red mist is gone for good? Are there still those funky plants that some of the new denizens of the world need to survive? Did the people corrupted by the mist revert? And will Yakone’s mutations remain?
It feels like our main characters are a lot more powerful and the environment has become a lot less threatening, so the story will need to adapt to another antagonist or to a more dangerous natural environment. But some spacecraft landing on earth after centuries and failed regimes? That’s a nice plot that I’d like to see more often. Well maybe it’s a bunker instead, but same difference.
I'd be more than fine with a "day after"
without there necessarily being any massive "antagonist" or new danger vs just the regular struggle of living and rebuilding. There is plenty of work at this point for all the characters to do in just day to day growth and regular disagreements, the high tech legacy of old humanity, etc. If there really are humans on the moon (beyond Ney) they'll probably play a role too at some point, but I hope it's a generally positive one and the author doesn't fall into the trap of old=bad. I'd love to see some hopeful fusion of old and new.
As far as the little teaser we're given, lots of post-apocalyptic stories, both in manga and Western fiction going back ages, have dealt with the idea of "seeds" as one of the possible responses a high tech society would take, along with "direct survival" and "direct escape". Autonomous systems or full AI capable of waiting centuries or millennia, stocked with DNA, massive knowledge banks, etc, that can then attempt to resurrect humanity even following total extinction.