The moment the door opened, Janus was attacked. Mingtian flinched back instinctively, half-falling into the combat stance he’d all but ingrained into his subconscious over the past few eternities, before he saw that their attacker was a little girl laughing as she clung onto Janus’s chest. “You’re back, you’re back! Mom! Janus is back!”

He breathed a short sigh of relief, stepping off to the side and quickly returning to normal before anyone could catch his… momentary indiscretion. It didn’t take very long for an older woman— Janus’s mother, he assumed— to appear in the doorway, smiling broadly as she observed the two of them for a long moment. “You’re home early…” then, she turned to him, her expression warm. It wasn’t the kindest expression he’d ever seen, or even the most homely, but for a mortal, it certainly showed her emotions rather well enough. “And you must be… Mingtian? Mingtian, right?” He nodded. “Well! It’s nice to meet you— come in, come in, my son’s been saying so much about you that I can’t help but think I already know you!”

Aimi gasped, suddenly losing interest in her older brother and dashing over to him, eyes wide. “You’re the one with the cat! Did he threaten to eat you? Did you use magic to control him—” and so on.

Mingtian glanced bemusedly at Janus, who looked mortified. “Aimi. Don’t…” he sighed. “Don’t imply that anything underhanded was going on, especially not to a guest’s face. That’s impolite. Besides, Mingtian is a nice person. He wouldn’t do any of that.”

“Oh.” Then, as children were wont to do, she immediately forgot about her faux pas and started badgering him for something else entirely. “You’re the formations guy, right? I heard from my friends that you’re secretly… an Immortal!”

He almost choked in surprise, but luckily Janus saved him from that awkward conversation. “Aimi, there are no immortals here. Immortals ascend, so they can’t stay in our realm, remember?”

Aimi nodded seriously. “Oh… I remember now!” Then she just as quickly turned back to him. “Can you show me an immortal trick, Mr. Immortal?”

“Sorry about her…”

Mingtian just laughed. It was so refreshingly simple that he couldn’t for the life of him— and what a long life that was— deny her the simple request. The only question was what… it had to be something awesome, because he had his pride as an Immortal Sovereign, but it also couldn’t be too awesome, because he was supposed to be a mortal. Hm…

He could do something simple, but what was the fun in that? No, instead, he much rather do something so heaven-defying that nobody even realized the sort of treasure he’d given her. That would be fun.

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The only question was— what?

He pulled a piece of paper out of his spatial ring— taking care to make it seem like he pulled it out of his pocket— and started folding it, deftly changing it from a flat square to something altogether more interesting. As he worked, he ran his qi through its structure, refining it— pulling on the sunlight around them as he not cleansed but reordered the impurities within its structure, steadily raising its rank from mundane to immortal ascension-rank; any higher, and the realm itself would reject it.

While he did that, he also traced invisible characters over its entire length— minute things, too small to see but present nonetheless. Qi retention runes, concealing arrays, protection arrays, even a self-repair array that he stuffed full of qualifications to make sure it wouldn’t be too suspicious. After a few seconds he finished folding it and pulled out a pen, scrawling a few complex looking but largely unimportant runes and handed the origami star to Aimi. “If you tap it twice, no matter where you are, it’ll always guide you home.”

“Ooh!” Of course, she immediately tapped it twice, making it glow and spin to point at the house behind her. “Thank you Mr. Immortal!” What she didn’t realize, of course, is that it would work from anywhere. Coding a location into a formation wasn’t all that difficult, but coding absolute location… no matter where she went, whether it was off-planet or into the depths of the chaos sea, or to another realm entirely, it’d always point the way home. It was the sort of treasure only an Immortal Sovereign could make, and they didn’t even know.

He resisted the urge to laugh to himself. It was just so much fun…

Aimi immediately ran off to play with her new toy, and Janus’s mother gave him a thankful nod. “I appreciate it. She can be a handful at times, but she’s a good kid… she’ll really treasure your gift, I’m sure.” With the sort of childlike innocence that only a young kid or a newly ascended cultivator could have, utterly unknowing of the treasures they’d been handed. “I’m glad that Janus has such a good friend. Would you like to join us for dinner? I’m sure the others wouldn’t mind…”

He was only half listening to the rest of it, struck as he was by one part of what she’d said— friends. Was Janus his friend? They had their disagreements, some of them larger than others, but other than that…

Mingtian the mortal librarian would have been friends with Janus, probably. Mingtian the Immortal Sovereign of Boundless Radiance, Daoist Bright Sky… to him, Janus would have been one of uncountable infinities, a lone face amongst all the realms.

The two of them were, fundamentally, intrinsically, one and the same.

He didn’t know.

Instead, he just nodded, and laughed slightly at Janus’s embarrassment, and stepped into the house on invitation twice over.

Maybe a friend.

Maybe not.