Perhaps a little unsurprisingly, Mingtian didn’t actually go shopping all that much. He didn’t really need to, given that he only very rarely needed stuff, the vast majority he could make by himself with relative ease. One did not become an Immortal Sovereign smith without getting pretty good at crafting things.

There were still a few things that he couldn’t just… make for himself. Previously, that had largely revolved around experiences— taking Lily and Avyr out to restaurants on the rare occasion being the largest of his expenditures. Other than that, he’d more or less just… let his wages pile up in his bank account. Very fiscal, very savings, yes, he knew.

The new thing he couldn’t just make was a computer. Not that he couldn’t— he wasn’t an expert on computer technology amongst the Immortal Sovereigns— that would be Daoist Coruscating Mist’s job— but he had worked with her on some projects. Even that much put him on a level so infinitely above anyone in this small realm that it wrapped all the way back around to being useless. He didn’t want to design another spatially-resistant divine-grade planet sized data core for the Order of the Fathomless Codex, he wanted a nice, appropriately capable personal PC, which he might as well just go out and buy.

He was kinda starting to regret letting Aimi tag along, though… Janus sent him a slightly smug look from where he’d been expecting various less mobile PCs down the aisle. Aimi… Mingtian sighed, quickly grabbing Aimi by the collar of her shirt before she could run off again. “What did Janus say?”

Aimi crossed her arms. “Don’t remember.”

“He said it literally less than a minute ago.”

She pouted up at him. “Why won’t you believe me when I said I don’t remember? I don’t remember!” She lied, transparently. Mingtian didn’t even have to respond to that— all he had to do was affix her with a slightly disappointed glare and a couple of seconds later she was grumbling out a halfhearted apology. “He told me not to run around in the aisle ‘cus if I broke anything I’d have to pay for it.”

It was a very precariously set up aisle, granted. “Alright. Don’t run, or else we won’t take you out next time.” That managed to do it, thankfully, allowing him to go back to searching. They’d had to take a short trip to the neighboring precinct to find the nearest computer store of any decent size, and even then there were some… dubious things about.

He paused in front of a decent looking, if somewhat blocky PC. It’d need to hook up to a monitor, but it should be fairly robust, if what his spiritual senses were telling him was correct. Plus, if he ever had to, it'd only take advancing to… fifth? Sixth? Step to let him tinker with the microscopic components of the circuit. “What do you think about this one?”

Janus glanced up from the monitor he’d been inspecting, stalking over to inspect it alongside him. “Hm… It looks a bit rough, but solid. As long as you don’t drop it or something, it’ll probably keep working for a long time. It’s not a supported model though, which could cause… problems.”

He blinked. “Supported model?”

“Troubles with the various interest groups and how strictly they want to control their technology, you know.” Mingtian did not, actually, know. He didn’t have the mental capacity of a powerful cultivator at the moment, which meant he’d yet to catch up on every aspect of the local politics. Given that the local politics included its own powerful cultivators, that’d probably be impossible unless he really pushed the realm’s limitations anyways, which would defeat the whole point of being a hidden master in the first place. “…which means that you could have some trouble repairing unauthorized, even if the authorized vendors don’t exist. Worse, I’ve heard there’s been mutterings that the network engineers are going to make some of the new bandwidth features they’ve been working on destructively incompatible with some of the non-standard tech.”

“Ah.” He frowned. “It’s the same price as everything else. Another scam?”

“Yippee! Janus, Janus, we found another scam!” Janus just rolled his eyes as Aimi danced a little dance, and nodded, which put an end to that inquiry. He had no interest in wasting the money he’d scrupulously saved as a mortal. Even if pretty much anything he made or did was worth wildly more, there was a certain principle to the matter…

So the search continued.

It took another two hours, a thoroughly bored Aimi, and a shopkeeper increasingly nervous at the two of them managing to see through all his various devious little schemes for him to walk out with a computer he was satisfied with. It was a large but not clunky thing— and had been priced appropriately. At least, though, it wasn’t a scam.

They stopped by a cafe on the way back— tea for himself, coffee for an evidently tired Janus, and the most over the top sugary drink for Aimi. She was busy gobbling that up on Janus’s side of the table, kicking her legs and smiling like she’d been given the key to immortality.

The propensities of children… he smiled softly. So it went.

A good start to a new chapter in his mortality.

………

Mingtian waved his hand, summoning the computer— gently— out of his spatial ring and onto his desk. It almost looked out of place on the neatly polished wooden table— he’d spent so long with the thing bare, used only for writing up Lily’s worksheets or the occasional bit of paperwork that the bulky monitor felt distinctly wrong, just standing there. It kind of clashed with the decor of the room… and, perhaps more importantly, kind of clashed with the qi flows of the wuxing array he’d made all that time ago.

That would be a problem if he let it. The whole thing was a rather delicate arrangement, relying more on the general topography of his room than any specific formation channels. A crude way of controlling it, but a natural way— pure and untainted, allowing it to grow in a way it otherwise wouldn’t have been able to, contained. For him, it was nice. To Janus and Lily, and even occasionally Avyr, he had the slight suspicion that its impact had been rather a little bit more outsized…

He sighed, not quite able to muster up the will to fix the array right then. It was a melancholy feeling he been expecting and yet still didn’t really expect when it washed over him— the quiet realization that Lily and Avyr were well and truly moving beyond him. Perhaps he’d still hear from them, occasionally, but Lily wouldn’t be coming around every day to talk about formations theory she laughably thought she understood, and Avyr wouldn’t be that quiet, comforting presence in the library anymore.

Gone. Not lost, but gone. It was a surprisingly crushing feeling for a figure who’d created universes in his hands, to see two mortals so leave the nest— but they were his mortals, in so many ways, and they were soon going to be gone.

For a long moment he just sat back in his office chair, letting the sunlight stream in through the window and so gently play its steady warmth over his room… before, with a little mote of exhaustion, he set to fixing up the space. First things first, the monitor really needed to be compensated for. It was seriously interfering with the qi flows of the array, which would be bad for both the array and the monitor.

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The solution to that was complex

, involving seriously shifting the entire layout of his room. The artworks he’d hung up needed to be moved around according to the variously arcane but mostly just annoying rules of both the array and the items themselves. Ultimately, the entire thing had only worked because he’d carefully hammered a few nails wrought out of semi-refined lunar cold iron into specific places in the wall, which would definitely not cause any problems to anyone later ever.

Then there was the matter of the actual computer. Getting everything properly wired up and connected was a pain, especially because the decorations had been placed without much care to electrical outlets he’d thought he wouldn’t need… anyways. If he’d abused his vast cosmic powers to help straighten out the horrible he’d mess of the wires, nobody would have to know. He blamed it on the mortal body. Definitely.

He sat down, and turned on the computer, listening intently as various delicate parts spun up with a soft hum and a few pleasantly placed lights. Then, he turned on the monitor.

…LIANGTECH LLC. E. SAF

SETUP: USER1

Hello User1! This is the setup Jade for your new PC. First…

And so on and so forth. It was… disappointingly functional. He’d been expecting either something a bit more pleasant to use— like what he was used to from the Heavenly Realms— or something utterly kludged together, but it was just a simple, functional little process. Mostly just filling out some fields, setting some passwords— typical stuff. The rest of the operating system was similarly boring, which— while disappointing— was more or less something he’d expected from how Lily described the network. It was a disorganized, largely disunified thing run by mortals grasping at the formation techniques necessary to make it function. It was always going to lack the polish and more importantly, the flourish of something designed as a tool for cultivators.

The more interesting part was the network chit that Lexi had given him. It was a little hard to believe that it’d been made entirely by mortal manufacturing techniques in such a primitive society, but they clearly were quite clever when they put their minds to things. The chit was just one example of that.

There was a slot for it in the computer— a very satisfying slot that slid out with a nice click and interfaced neatly with the chit after he carefully emplaced it. The moment he slid the chit back in, a new prompt appeared on the screen.

LIANGTECH LLC. E. SAF NETWORK ACCESS CHIT 2.173

PARSING…

WELCOME TO THE LIANGTECH MULTICOMMUNICATIONS VFN

Then there was another round of setting up passwords and the like, this time for a network account, which would be tied to the chit— an obvious anti-theft measure that made him wonder what had happened in the past to necessitate it. Once that was done, he had access to the LiangTech MultiCommunications virtual formations network… or just the network, as he gathered. If he’d thought the operating system had been bad, then the network was…

If he was being charitable, he’d describe it as charmingly makeshift. If he was being honest, he’d call it a heinously kludged together disaster of different protocols and difficult to search catalogs of what essentially amounted to random stuff. And that was only for East Saffron! There were some inroads to other networks in Ca Cao and on the mainland that were either ridiculously slow due to distance and all the difficulties that came from interfacing different large-scale, amorphous formations like they were doing. If he had to guess, there were databanks somewhere that were responsible for the large part of the translation, and the rare direct inroads looked like a great way for someone without deep technical experience fo the networks system to cause irreparable damage to their network chit.

All that, and he’d told Lily he’d learnt everything on the network. He dropped his head into his hands, chuckling weakly for a moment. What a mess…

There was still one more thing, though. He closed the clunky network interface and withdrew from his spirit ring a jade of an entirely different quality. This jade… reality trembled at its presence as he brought the full weight of his domain to bear against the will of the realm. The full bearing of an Immortal Sovereign, the full dominion of boundless radiance— the power to shape reality as he so deigned, by will or whim— so vast as to be essentially infinite to the little realm he was in. And still, he could feel tribulation clouds threatening to coalesce over the library.

For obvious reasons, allowing that would be bad. So, he went further. Vaster— his domain spilling out of him and blanketing first the sky then the city, then the world

, caressing the sun and dancing with the flows of burning plasma alight. It was light— light itself, subtle and essentially unnoticeable, yet against the realm its demands were perfect and powerful.

It would’ve been difficult to stay in the realm as even a regular immortal, much less the Immortal Sovereign level his codex token resided at, but there was a loophole. The same one he’d used to bring the codex token with him in the first place— the very same essential subtlety that allowed the tokens to connect to the fathomless codex across every reality barring the separation between realms could also be leveraged by someone with sufficient mastery of formations to disguise it from the realm. By making it of the realm, layering restrictions and seals overtop it. The same thing that let his own power exist in such a small realm. So long as one understood things that didn’t make sense, it made perfect sense.

He commanded the realm not to ascend the jade with the fullness of his power, and— barely, managed to disperse the slow gathering of tribulation energy. The Immortal Ascension cultivators had probably seen that, but they were off busy being important, and it had been the entire realm gathering— as was always the case for tribulations. It was a subtle process right up until it wasn’t. Nobody else had noticed.

Probably.

The newly not jade but still basically the same thing codex token pulsed with a visible power, rippling across the runes that slid over its surface like so much cascading water. Mingtian collapsed back into his chair with a huge sigh, wiping sweat from his brow. That had been strenuous. The most strenuous thing he’d done since entering the realm. There was a reason Immortal Sovereigns didn’t often mess with the lesser realms— even the smallest of them had an almost incomprehensible level of power wrapped up in their boundaries— a power more akin to domains and… well, the specifics weren’t necessary. What was necessary was connecting the codex token to his PC. Was this like connecting a nuclear warhead to a literal paleolithic rock? Yes, though that was a bit inaccurate— the difference in technology level was much, much larger. Was he going to do it anyways? Also yes.

Creating an interface was a difficult project— but one that he’d done before. The actual language of the codex token was always a marvel to behold— an invention of Daoist Coruscating Mists, and a potent reminder that while he was one of the best at formations he wasn’t the best at formations. It took a special sort of skill to take a language that could already describe all reality and then make it describe more.

While good for storing and transmitting even the most esoteric of techniques and bits of hidden knowledge, it certainly made it a pain when it came to translating it into data the computer could read. Luckily it was an infinite array of mortal-level runes, rather than a finite array of runes that would have prevented him from bringing the thing down in the first place so it was at least in theory doable…

If perhaps not in practice. After fiddling around with some makeshift connections reminiscent of how he’d use the token in the Celestial Realm, he found something that kind of worked, in that he was able to get the data to show up on the monitor. Some of the data. Just… infinite lines of gibberish slowly writing themselves out, never quite finishing, with no search function or usable UI in sight… he sighed. Of course it wouldn’t have been so easy…

He minimized that little useless— for the moment— program, resolving to return to it when he actually needed any information from the fathomless codex. For now…

He sat back in his office chair as the sun set over East Saffron and simply—

Enjoyed the atmosphere.

Strangely, sorrowed.