He recorporealized on the moon. Most moons were not, per say, known to be all that interesting in terms of spiritual treasures. Unless they had their own thriving ecosystems, that was— it didn’t take a lot of imagination to think that the silvery orb hung above the world in the heavens was full of immortal treasures, but… no, that was rare. Or! If there was an immortal who’d decided to take over the moon instead of living on the planet below for whatever reason— whether that be high property prices, or a hostile local dominion or what have you, then… Or, if there were certain species of void life, or—

The number of qualifications was actually really long, but no— Aurelia’s moon was extraordinarily boring. There were a few small little things, artefacts of visits from curious high-level cultivators in the past, but they either hadn’t stuck around for all that long, or had hidden their base of operations far better than Mingtian bothered to search.

No, he was there for other things. The simple resources that a stellar body tended to have, that an Immortal Ascension cultivator wouldn’t care about collecting. He loosened his seals, luxuriating in the feeling of being… equivalent to a core formation cultivator. Fourth step. It was kind of pathetic to be glad about such a tiny increase in power, but compared to his usual mortality, it felt incredible. Empowered by boundless qi— at least that part of him wasn’t something that could be so easily taken away— he strode quickly across the face of desolation, sliding between vast cracks and fissures with effortless ease. After a moment, he tested whether he could fly without a technique and— even though he was pretty sure the fourth step was too low to fly on Aurelia— the decreased gravity on the moon made it almost effortless. Soon after that little experiment, he was shooting across the landscape like an arrow of light.

Was it the best technique, when he could have just transformed into sunlight and searched that way? No. Was letting loose with a bit of old fashioned power relieving in the extreme after so long cooped up— yes, obviously. The enormous stack of seals still weighed heavily on him, but they weighed on him just that tiny bit less. It was a meaningfully meaningless amount.

After a few minutes, he alighted on to the top of a ridge, watching with bated breath— not that he could breathe in the void, per say, but the emotion of the gesture still remained— as he watched the sun rise slowly over a bleached landscape of rock and stone and primordial ashes of Aurelia’s creation. The blinding whiteness of the sun, the way it glinted off the oceans of Aurelia beneath him…

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It was quaint, compared to the alien worlds of the Celestial realm, to the ecumenopoli of the Heavenly realm or the great constructions of both… but even in that quaintness, it was almost singularly beautiful. It called to him, all of him— that which was sunlight, radiant, boundless and eternal

, and that which was simply Leng Mingtian in all senses of the name.

Also, there was some strange treasure buried beneath the ridge, but if he didn’t stop and smell the roses then what even was the point of sojourning out for the day? It was only a few minutes later when the sun had risen just a little overhead, its burning light starkly illuminating the pock-marked and cratered face of the moon, that he focused his attention on the ground beneath his feet. Now, he could take things slowly and carefully, but…

That was boring, and it wasn’t like a seam of lunar cold iron would even be damaged by some small explosions, so… with a single leap, he ascended a thousand feet over the vast and rugged plain, a sphere of brilliant energy coalescing in his hand as he pumped more and more qi into its. Any normal fourth step cultivator would have struggled to hold the sheer amount of energy he was handling… but he wasn’t a normal fourth step cultivator. He was so much more than that.

For a moment, the burning star in his hands outshone the sun. A mirror in miniature of its far more powerful sister technique… but he didn’t dwell on that. Silhouetted by the blazing light of his own technique, he held his hands out and—

Fired.

Watching the molten crater as the ground cracked and buckled… watching, the silent shards of regolith drifting off into the blackness of space… he smiled. There was just something special about making explosions. Hopefully nobody had seen that…

Anyways. A wave of his hand saw all the lunar cold iron— ironically very hot now— swept up into a cube in front of him. There was actually quite a lot of it— enough that… hm. Well, no point in not taking as much as he could. Shuffling around the space in his storage ring, he shoved in as much as he could, then turned the rest into a massive twenty-foot tall needle and buried it as far into the depths of the lunar crust as he could. Violently.

That’d been fun.