Compared to the violent vicissitudes that constituted the academy politic, the library was much more relaxing. With the academy once more in session, the library was once more full to the brim every day— even the weekends saw no reprieve from the increased patronage, merely spreading them out across the whole day instead of having them all flood the space in the lunch hour.

It was nice, to just return to stocking the shelves and returning the books and cataloguing which tomes were checked out and which weren’t, and keeping an eye on the reserved section… and so on, and so forth. Normal things, compared to formations, which reminded him almost a little too much of the Celestial Realm and all the projects which he’d left behind to come here. Sunforges, and galactic confluences, and…

No, he put them out of mind, out of thought, and focused on the simple repetitive task of putting the cart of books from the returns section into their proper places throughout the library. It was a simple task. Read the title on the back, clock the code, and sort out the proper section of the shelf. If you were lucky, there’d be another copy of the book there, or some other work under the author's name to make it obvious that you had it in the right place. If not, he just double checked then slid them in anyways.

Simple.

Easy.

He still had to write a test about formations by the end of the week. Writing a test meant that he’d need to know his curriculum, which meant that he’d need to decide on a curriculum, one rigorous enough it could stand up to peer review by people who— theoretically— knew what they were talking about. Maybe even proper cultivators, if he was unlucky…

He grimaced, letting the petty annoyance of all that shift through him for a moment, tangling into a complicated mess of— frustration, nervousness, mortal feeling in the center of his gut— roiling emotion. Then he pulled deeply on his domain, the one thing not even the all but inviolate barrier between realms couldn’t take away from him, and— pushed it away.

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It wasn’t a magic solution, of course, but… a reminder, for a moment, as it always had been before— that he was sunlight and sunlight was him. Its amber warmth shivered through his body, crystal glow of a flower’s petal, touch of honey… all things pale and golden, made perfect, reflected perfect in the heart of an Immortal Sovereigns domain.

Then, he pulled away from it— or it pulled away from him, or neither, the mere act of describing it failing when fundamentally he and his domain were so intrinsically similar, and went back to sorting books.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched two kids run through the stacks, giggling softly to themselves as they read the titles of science books they were far too young to even hope to comprehend. Further conversation caught her ear— just the sound of it, no details, soft and with that hint of contentedness-melodiousness, a touch of laughter, that sound of smiling. Far off, he could hear Janus moving another cart through the library, probably doing much the same thing he was, and amongst it all, suffusing it all, the patchwork aura of so many books. Of their readers, and their stories, all blending together into a background sense of knowledge, at the tip of a finger or a word, alone.

It was nice, and for a long while he just… put away books. Then he was done with that, and so he helped organize the back room— and then he was done with that, so he took over from Janus guiding patrons through the library and helping kids find the books they were looking for, or gently letting down parents who were hoping to borrow the library’s textbooks. Once, notably, he had to deny the impassioned request for a duel from a ten year old kid who thought that if he beat him, he could get access to the Lexi’s cultivation manuals.

And, throughout it all, almost unnoticeable for how silent he was, tucked away in a quiet corner out of sight… Avyr flipped through a book, and occasionally watched the comings and goings, and was watched in turn by Mingtian. Lily wasn’t there, thankfully— the two of them could get a little loud at times when they were together, but she’d taken the worksheet he’d given her outside to test the new amplification runes. Soon she’d approach the level of proficiency where he could start introducing her to the fundamental principles of the transformations and have her start designing her own runes. Or rediscovering, or whatever anyone was wont to call them, he couldn’t bring himself to really care…