Far removed from everything and anything of note, still in the endless inky black between the stars, and Chaos Sea, and strung amidst the vast quietude of all things, Mingtian stood in the center of an array which stretched out for endless leagues in every direction. A calculated sphere, icosahedron vertices, rune-scrawled planets he’d dragged over and set in careful orbits for this, precisely. As the deep qi of the void rushed through the channels of his formation only ever accelerating, faster and faster blurring until he could all but see the faint lines of luminous light they traced out across space, he sank in side his spirit and traced the pathways of one of his few Immortal Sovereign-rank techniques.
He drew on the full breadth of his qi, and the mere act of that caused the world to tremble beneath his sheer presence. Looping, and looping, swirling and whirling together until it settled into rhythm-in-counterpoint against the grand formation that spun around him, and he could see—
Heaven and Earth Revolving All Surpassing Eye— his vision flashed brilliant gold, and then, he could see the realms themselves. He dared not look up— or whatever up meant, when direction was ordered by the stacking advancement of the seething multiplicity of realms beneath them, into the infinite nothingness that had never been pierced. He dared not face the dread of it— not least because he didn’t need to.
Instead, he gazed in the opposite direction, down— looking past the heavenly realms that hung like glittering stars, heavy dewdrops in his perception. Past the greater realms in their profundity, and even further to the lesser realms, uncountable infinities of them ever shifting dancing to their strange not-quite comprehensible in view of spatial relationships dance. There were an infinity of them he could choose from…
His gaze flicked over to one in particular, of no particular outstanding notability, yet despite that instantly recognizable to him. For a moment, he considered it… the old Jade Continent, his first sect that had all but certainly crumbled to ruin by now, the grand natural wonders he remembered from his youth that he’d been so foolish as to perceive as valuable…
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But, no. That realm hadn’t been kind to mortals— or cultivators, really— and it’d have been too obvious a choice besides. No… he discarded that thought, instead scanning through the multitudes upon multitudes, searching according to a few criteria…
A few thousand discarded realms later, his gaze settled on one of note. Or rather, one of no particular note— it was further down in the order than most, weak for a lesser realm, but large— at least a dozen planets, maybe much more. For a lesser realm, that was actually quite impressive— but not so impressive as to be truly notable to an Immortal Sovereign searching from above. That, and it was hidden beneath a few other higher-rank realms, shielded from divine retribution of his peers by its foundational position. Perhaps only the sword saint would have been able to strike out at it from the Celestial Realm…
Then again, if he’d somehow drawn the Sword Saint’s ire he’d be screwed anyways, so no point in entertaining hypotheticals.
It wasn’t the perfect realm, by any means… but he’d be pretending to be a mortal, so— what did it even really matter? It was good enough.
Enshrined within his grand formation, he switched techniques, diverting the qi flow through his spirit from the Heaven and Earth Revolving All Surpassing Eye to a different and equally pretentiously named Drop of Starlight Descending: Divine Realm Piercing Subtle Aperture Formation Activation. A hundred and nine hand seals, and then a pulse of his domain later, the void around him for a second filled with light. Perfect and opposite, the grand formation he’d built around himself jerked to a stop and collapsed inwards, twenty planets collapsing into a single infinitesimal point as his self was dragged with them, crushed to a tiny point—
The world warped as he fell into a black hole, and was pushed out of the Celestial Realm.
Like a comet descending, he plummeted, shooting past the heavenly realms in a blaze of light as he wove careful bindings and veils around his soul, pulling back his power such that he didn’t shatter the realm when he arrived. So much of himself restricted and tucked away, his expansive spirit restricted to that of a mere immortal, his strength the same, his soul tucked inwards on itself until it resembled some strange geometric and sunlight, or both—
He felt so small, as he fell past the greater realms, and the lesser realms in turn, and with nothing more than a ripple or impact—
He passed through into the realm, and woke up.
Gotta love the goofily long xianxia technique names.
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