He had to actively resist the urge to go check up on Lily and Avyr. He’d known that it would do them no favors to constantly watch over their shoulders, micromanaging their every action. He knew that to truly excel as cultivators, to turn their unbridled ambition into the perfect, honed arrow that could see them spear the skies and continue onwards to the very uppermost echelons of existence, they needed to experience life, and the vicissitudes of being a cultivator. He also knew they weren’t his disciples. Not even in-name disciples, which meant they technically weren’t his problem to deal with anyways.

It was still hard.

With reassurances Janus would take care of the library for the day, he’d retreated through radiance to a spot far above the surface of Aurelia, looking down on the planet as it turned below him. It would be so easy, to just… transform into liquid sunlight and watch his two favorite kids from above as they explored one of the most dangerous— and thus, obviously most exciting— places on Ca Cao.

He had his restraint, though. He’d hadn’t advanced to Immortal Sovereign due to a lack

of self-control, that was for sure. So, instead, he simply… took in the world below, and tried not to think of how emptier his schedule was now that he wasn’t spending most of his time either training Lily or helping Avyr with something or another…

It was really a beautiful place. Only a few tiny bits of harsh climate existed— the northern and southern oblivions, capped with ever-frozen ice and aglow with auroras, as silver-bright as the moon that hung so far above him. A bit of desert on the southernly tail of the northern continent, west of Xianghua but it wasn’t a vast and sandy thing; it was in its own way just as alive as any other part of the world. The jungles, of course, spread out across the island subcontinent between the two larger ones and all across the north of the southern. A bit of harsh weather towards the northern tips of each continent, but compared to even the calmest of the Celestial Realm’s Exclusion Zones, they were practically paradises.

It deserved its name, truly, as the Peach-Blossom World. Now, if only the people who lived on it were quite as nice…

He stepped into the streaming sunlight, burningly white above the sky, and descended in the space of a second to a truly enormous city sprawled out near the southernmost edge of the world; one he’d heard of extensively but never more than seen in passing before. New Soli, the capital of the empire. For a few minutes, he walked along its streets, beneath those towering street trees and beneath its heaven-stretched spires, before dissolving once more into sunlight and flitting away to Fenfeng.It’s broze domes caught the sun in a pleasant way that reminded him of the Divine Immortal Heaven-Scouring Affray sect he’d been a member of in his Heavenly Realm… which, now that he thought of it, unlike all the smaller sects he’d been a part of in the lower realms, might actually even still exist.

He hovered over the city for a long moment, reflecting off its domed brass roofs and still shattered walls, and the forests that had been burned back away from the city proper, before darting away and not looking back. He sped over the waves, that glint of sunlight reflecting off the cerulean vast, passing cargo ships and their massive draft, speeding past sailboats in coastal waters, and even a few flying battleships on patrol, the shadow of their majesty passing over the deep yet unable to quench his boundless light.

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It was exhilarating, in a way, to let loose like this after even only half a local year of holding back. He kept his veils in place, just in case— he didn’t want to get another visit by an angry Immortal Ascension cultivator, that was for sure! But… as he skipped over the waves and raced up cliffs, and twirled through the dew as the first light of dawn, he could not help but appreciate the world’s beauty in another way entirely.

One day, maybe, Lily and Avyr would get to experience this— and that thought could not but make him smile, giddy and alight again.

Finally, after a day of doing nothing and everything, he returned to East Saffron. Even compared to the other cities he’d visited, East Saffron held up— it was deserving of its position as one of the world’s most important polities. For a moment he looked down on it from above— his gaze capturing everything, from the ports in the north to the river that ran through it, and the islands, and even the university that his students would one day go to… then, he dove into his room and rematerialized—

And froze. It was subtle, but to someone with the sort of qi senses he had, obvious. His perfectly arrayed wuxing formation had been disturbed, the lotuses moved by something. His furniture was slightly shifted, and his papers ruffled, and his pens all tussled about in their cup. Nothing had been taken, but…

Frowning, he waved his hand and drew on his qi, and activated one of the security formations he’d woven into the grain of his desk’s wood. A mist swirled out as he accessed the records, forming a revolving disk that clarified into a mirror, which clarified further into an image of his office the day past. Forming a handseal, he quickly sorted through the recording, skimming across it until he—

There.

He watched attentively as a figure snuck in through the window, deftly unlatching it with mortal lock-picking techniques before closing it behind themselves with perfect precision. The clothing they were wearing— whatever it was— had clearly been enchanted, and the formation was having difficulty getting much of a read on them. Their spiritual signature was obscured, and even their form was rendered more difficult to observe.

Mingtian slightly regretted not scribing a better formation… but only slightly. Everything of any importance was in his spatial ring, so it wasn’t like it was a particularly big problem that someone had broken into his office anyways. Besides, the way the formation had failed told him almost as much as if it hadn’t— whatever the enchantment was, it clearly used shadow qi of some kind. Probably a high-yin variant, and not the more yang-related essence of actual shadows…

An assassin’s garb, or the sort of thing a spy who really didn’t want to be caught would wear. He couldn’t help but laugh at the deduction— if they’d been targeting Lily or Avyr, it would’ve been a different story entirely, but him?

He grinned— and it was not a kind grin. They could certainly try.