At first, Mingtian had thought that his d— students were merely settling into the University of East Saffron. It was a big change, certainly, and it was plenty understandable why they hadn’t quite gotten around to sending a letter yet.

  Then, the first two weeks passed, and he readjusted his analysis. It wasn’t merely just the busyness of having one’s whole life uprooted and settling down in an entirely new place, but rather that they were taking Zhihu’s advice to focus on their education seriously.

  Then, a few more weeks passed, and he started to doubt that, too. The suspicion was a small thing at first, nurtured in the space between work and his personal time. Day by day, he continued doing not much of anything at all— really just waiting, and avoiding Yuxan’s pitiful attempts to bring him back to the Academy, and…

  Yet, it did grow, nourished by the simple certainty that his students wouldn’t have abandoned him altogether. He’d been… close, he could admit, to both of them— Lily more of the two, perhaps, but he’d been on friendly terms with Avyr from the start too. That they wouldn’t have sent anything…

  After just over two months, when the first chill of fall had begun to transform into something entirely greater— the harbinger of winter, and fall color, and the true depth of that darkling season peering out at them from beyond the horzion— he finally had enough.

  It was a mystery now— why wasn’t he receiving letters? And mysteries deserved investigation.

  He sighed, tapping the edge of his desk with subtle impatience. He’d had a long day at work— Yuxan’s fault, mostly, sending a bunch of problematic bureaucracy his way. As though by leveraging the Academy’s petty weight against the library, he’d somehow get him to change his mind. Worse, it had been annoying. The precinct depended on the cooperation between the academy on the library to have their voice heard in the greater arenas of East Saffron’s bureaucracy, and the division Yuxan was trying to drive between them was seriously hindering them both in a time when neither of them could really afford to be so hindered. Resources were scarce enough as it was, and it wasn’t like the students had even been getting particularly good education to begin with…

  He shook the thought out of his head, picking up the stack of paper he’d been working on for some time and dropping it into the little tray behind his computer with a heavy thump. That could be a problem for a later time— thankfully, he wasn’t bound to the library until the work was done like Lexi. He could still leave when the day was done.

  Standing, tiredly… a very mortal feeling, he couldn’t help but think, as he trudged over to the window, raising a hand and pressing it against the cool glass. The view beyond its crystal pane was much the same as it’d always been— rooftops, and building facades, plaster and construction, the bone-deep, scraped raw face of humanity on the face of Aurelia. The sun shone down over it all, stark, and placid— late evening gold, scouring shadows in long slants across brickwork where it was cut by air conditioning units and unsightly metal tubing—

  Still sunlight, either way. The generic sunlight of a fall afternoon in East Saffron— no more grand than any other average night, but still so beautiful. He smiled, softly, enjoying the so very mortal sight for a second… before dissolving into that self-same illumination and disappearing.

  He… expanded. Or not— or rather, he simply became what he’d always been, the boundless and endless, fathomless and ungraspable, intangible radiance. The whole city spread out below him, his domain touching on it like an old friend, seeing, unseeing, a strange and indescribable mash of knowledge the mortal mind had no chance to grasp.

  Instead of trying, or loosening his seals, he instead refocused, skimming over empty streets, glinting off sharp metal and gleaming off the side of crushed glass, shattered bottles and cracked windowpanes, and all the grand shimmer of a modern city.

  A single moment took him to the University of East Saffron, and he couldn’t resist checking in on Lily and Avyr while he was there. The two of them were together in a nice-ish house— though, it was hard to judge these sorts of things, by the standards of an Immortal Sovereign, of radiance itself— leaning against each other and chatting about… something. Nothing much. Lily had a sword, bared, held steady on her lap— the gleam of it catching pleasantly off the sunlight over the river. It clearly wasn’t a decorative thing, either, if the slight tinge of her qi towards the first stages of sword intent was any measure. Depending on how long she’d been practicing, that was either fast, or slow…

  Well, either way, it wasn’t that impressive in the grand scheme of things. He’d seen geniuses before who’d been practically born breathing sword qi. The Divine Immortal Heaven-Scouring Affray Sect had been so bloated with talent that those sorts were practically dime a dozen. Still, despite that… he could not help but feel a rare and deep pride in her accomplishment.

  Happy that they were doing well enough, he turned his attention away from them and searched, instead, for what he’d actually come looking for— the precinct’s post office. As— technically— the University of East Saffron was the city’s sixth precinct, they should have a central post office along with all the other various government establishments— and if there was anywhere he was going to find an answer about his post, then it’d probably at the very least start there.

  It took him a fair bit to find it— it was very different compared to the 32nd Precinct’s. Pleased, he flowed through a slanted shaft of sunlight into a high office building, exploring all the nooks the sunlight could see— before he recorporealized, once more manifesting into his physical form.

  Sound— sight, even, touch and smell and thought, the mortal rush of the world crashed back into him— seamlessly, though. Even if mortality threw a bit of a wrench in the usual workings of things, his nature was not so easily denied. Like donning a new coat…

  He looked around the office. It was… office like, for the most part, eerily quiet as most offices abandoned for the night tended to be. A few papers had been left strewn about on the desk, knocked over from a stack of very familiar forms and slumped across the desk— and Mingtian could not fault whoever’d worked there for failing to put everything back into its proper place before they’d left for the night. There was a special kind of soul-crushing aspect to the bureaucracy of East Saffron that he’d never thought he’d find himself appreciating… but, a messy office would do him well. Easier to find what he was looking for, and harder to trace his presence.

  Raising a hand, he traced out a circle in the air in front of him, golden light trailing out, so many glittering sparks swirling around, paint into water. With a twist of will and his domain, he seized control over the uncountable thousands of tiny runes, forging them again into something greater— then, with a simple motion, he spun the ring out wide and let it drape over the entire office.

  Using formations to search for something was… not hard, but not easy, either. Annoying, definitely. Mingtian smiled fondly at the time-crystalized memory, so long ago, when he’d first gotten mad that tracking was so much easier through a technique.

  Using formations to search for something non-specific, however, was vastly more difficult. Was he overcomplicating things by doing so? Yes, obviously— but that was half the fun! If anyone noticed his tampering, they’d see signs of an impossibly muddied formation instead of any sort of technique— and find not even the slightest residue of a cultivator on the scene.

  The formation circle shrunk slowly as he watched, twisting and writhing as it passed over the room— but not quite breaking. It was only when it passed over the desktop tucked away beneath the desk that its energetic thrashing finally proved too much, the golden circle shattering into pieces and coalescing into a single agglomerate almost instantly— exactly what he’d designed it to do. So, the thing that’d been in closest contact with the letters was there. Also, there had been letters in the first place— the formation would have failed if there hadn’t been. He’d been pretty certain there were, but… well, it was good to have it confirmed.

  He hummed thoughtfully, pulling out the postal worker’s chair and sinking down into it. That was pretty fascinating, actually… whatever storage medium they used, it left enough of a physical imprint that the spell could track onto it. That was interesting…

  Now, to hack into the computer. He didn’t know the password, unfortunately, but fortunately, he didn’t even need to painstakingly figure out how the computer architecture of the realm functioned— rather, it was much more easy to rely on something he’d learnt long before; human nature. A quick perusal through all the various notes scattered about the desk and pinned up to the corkboard on the wall behind him, and he found it buried between a picture of the postal worker’s husband and a rather cute looking dog.

  Smiling— at least that one thing had held true through the realms— he settled down and typed in the password and began his search.

  Before heading out for the night, the office worker had clearly been working on something of exceeding importance— a puzzling program which required one to match hexagonal tiles together to tessellate out a 2-D plane according to a set of simple and…

  He snorted, pulling that window over to the side. Very important work, he was sure, and the remarkable similarity to one of the popular dataslate games he’d seen the Academy students glued to was coincidence, certainly. Instead, he navigated over to the file settings and started pursuing through several tediously long lists. Lists of lists, at that… he was starting to regret not having spent a little more time on his own desktop back in the office. Then maybe this would’ve made a bit more sense…

  Sunlight faded to moonlight as he worked— golden light replaced with silver luminescence, a smooth and slick light, redolent in a gentle and deep yin. Wan, sure, compared to the light of some celestial phenomena he’d seen… but it was Aurelia’s little yin-star, and that was special in and of itself.

  Finally, with the injudicious use of a few overly complicated formations and after he’d begun to fear that he actually wouldn’t be able to find it without… extreme measures… he located what he was looking for. It was little more than a footnote in the system— a list of names, addresses, return addresses… all the sorts of things that a post office would’ve needed to know anyways.

  Ward, Lily,

  Ai’er Avyr,

  Both of the University of East Saffron, both letters sent to the library in the 32nd Precinct— and both of them directed to the Post Office in that same district. At last, a lead. He grinned widely, leaning back for a moment. Now that he knew where to go, he’d make whoever thought messing with his mail a good idea pay.

  Or something. He snorted at how very melodramatic and young-master-eque that thought had sounded, even to himself.

  Maybe he really was bored, without anything to occupy his mind? How marvelously strange— from spending long ages in the heart of stars, forging weapons to overturn heavens and shatter universes, to getting bored in a matter of weeks…

  He rose, silently, putting the office back to perfect order as best as he could— before dissipating once more into that luminescence, gone without a trace.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  ………

  The post office for the 32nd Precinct was like night and day to the University’s. Where the latter had been a grand affair— large and somewhat automated, even, filled with entire rooms filled to the brim with various machines whose purpose Mingtian could divine only from context, the 32nd’s was a much more humble affair. They did have a single automated sorting machine that could read little printed codes on the packages and letters, but given that he could see only about half of them even had that, he suspected that most of the work was largely done by hand.

  It was a much smaller building, too. Instead of the multi-story affair that the University’s had been, it was a simple two story building far enough off towards the side of the Precinct that it would have been a decently long commute to it from anywhere of note. A messy mat of mats and pinned up posters covered the wall, edges curling, colors fading— an echo into years past, joining haphazardly stacked boxes and wheeled bins scattered in scattering eerie shadows throughout the room at midnight.

  There was no movement but his own, and the faint hiss of air conditioning and machinery, pipes and all the trappings of modern life in East Saffron buried in the walls. This time, he didn’t even bother with a formation circle— instead, he made his way straight to the sole office in the building, opening the computer and delving into the familiar depths of its files. It didn’t even have a password, and with the instructions pinned up on the walls… the budget cuts, it seemed, had hit the post office even harder than they had the library. How they managed with such… he had no idea. He wasn’t even sure if he really wanted to know.

  It only seemed that the more he looked, the more East Saffron seemed to fester. It was not a bad city, really… but it was not perfect.

  Then again, it’d never been perfect from the start. He wondered how mortals could stand it. The uncertainty…

  It didn’t take him long to figure out that the letters had been marked as delivered. Clearly, that was untrue… but, the letters had been properly catalogued. It was right there, in the data— there was nothing more than that innocuous little mark, telling him that he’d reached the end of the road. It would’ve been too easy, he supposed, if the letters had just been held back at the post office…

  Which meant that someone had lied. Be it the postal office, or one of the post workers, or… he disappeared, reincorporealizing in front of his mailbox, inspecting it— the lock and especially the hinges— for any sign of recent use. There was nothing— not even down to the molecular structure of it, as he ran his qi through the rust with a classic refiner’s technique, searching for breaks in the pattern that would’ve shown him recent use. So, nobody had stolen his mail at the final step…

  He sighed. So far, he’d managed to keep the matter… impersonal. There was a certain division between interrogating a computer, and…

  No choice, though. Or well, there was always a choice— if he decided that he’d had enough of subtlety, and started drawing massive formations around the city to exhaustively search for where his mail had gone, he could— but that was just dodging the problem. The problem, and the source of it, too. He rematerialized again on a dark street, the moon high overhead, silver radiance catching off him, and the street, and every other little thing until the whole world seemed to be rendered in monochrome and silver patina, slick off the cool night air. Nothing moved, nothing stirred.

  He was a mortal, now, limited to a mortal’s means… well, even mentally, he knew that was a lie, but he was at least trying to pretend. Yet— mortal, immortal, divinity itself, it did not take a genius to understand what was happening.

  A slight smile crept onto his face. It had been so painfully, so very, very long. The vast wilderness of the Celestial Realm lacked it, where nothing felt permanent and even the greatest works of Immortal hands were sandcastles to the tide— but he still remembered, from his and Baixue’s clawed ascent through the realms—

  It was not merely a problem of missing letters, and points of data, and formations—

  It was a very human problem, now.

  ………

  The sun rose over East Saffron. A very typical occurrence, really; it did that every day without fail, and would continue to do so for a few eternities hence, or until some passing power decided they didn’t like the look of the place and blew it all up. All that, Mingtian supposed as he sipped his cup of tea, was far beyond the matters of mortal concern. They lived in the shadow of those forces, were the shadows of those forces, and the footsteps that heralded their arrival… all unwittingly, each one of untold numbers, grains of sand moving forward.

  It was all a matter of perspective.

  The sunlight sank in through the window, deep and golden, and almost heavy as it cut through dusty air. A cultivator would have been able to feel that the very air in the room was charged with qi. A subtle charge, carried on the weight of not technique but aura, a pure presence that filled the room just by its presence. A seasoned cultivator would have ignored everything else, recognizing that effortless threat as the work not of a lesser practitioner, but a true cultivator. The sort of cultivator that got called Master Daoist, or Elder, or perhaps even Sect Master, and whose whim seemed to warp reality and break physics, and reveal the impossible from the possible.

  They would fear.

  The door creaked open as someone stepped into the office, with its shaft of sunlight and old PC and rules pinned up on the wall— and froze. Terrified. The mortal who walked into the room was afraid, too, but not for any of that. The perfect features, the immaculate yellow silken robes, the hair that seemed woven from sunlight itself and the gaze that burned with the power of a star— all of that was far more than enough to scare a mortal.

  “Well.” A smile crossed Mingtian’s lips as he leaned back, enjoying even if only for the short moment he had the sensation, the empowering and invigorating solidity of becoming more. Sixth stage. Powerful even by the high standards of East Saffron. “It’s nice to meet you.” He didn’t move, or raise a hand, or anything so crass, but the man was pulled forward regardless, the door shutting behind him with a soft click of mechanisms latching. He’d left it unlocked, but there were no pretenses about the man ever managing to escape. “Well?” He sipped at his tea again. “Join me, won’t you? No point in being impolite.”

  “Y-yes, of course, most honorable Immortal.”

  “I’m not immortal.” He was. “Merely… beyond the scope of normal cultivators. Tell me, mortal, what was the most powerful cultivator you ever saw?” He was what— some thirty, forty years old? Not a cultivator, so there was no added confusion from that, though he seemed to be in relatively good health. Older than Janus, certainly— old enough to have seen the war.

  “In, in person? I once stood on the same street as an Outer Elder of the Bloody Saffron Sect.”

  “Do you think that Outer Elder would come to save you?”

  “No.” The man didn’t even hesitate to respond. A fair response, too— powerful cultivators were quite often busy cultivators. “She wouldn’t.”

  “If the Sect Master came to save you,” he said softly, “perhaps only then I would be forced to retreat. Maybe.” He fought to resist laughing— oh, it was fun to be the one making suicidally bold claims. Who didn’t like to be a young master-esque figure running off of pure bravado and arrogance? “Until then, you are mine. Body and soul, mind and heart— you belong to me in every way that matters. Understand?”

  The man’s eyes widened. “U-understood! This lowly one will sing of your grace for a hundred generations—”

  “Imagine my surprise,” Mingtian continued, speaking over the man, who at least had the good sense to shut up, “when I learnt that one of my… associates… had been made prey to some… petty game. All he wanted to do was live in peace and receive his letters, but someone stepped in to make sure that didn’t happen. I came to investigate, and what do I find? Someone has been tampering with the post—”

  “It was me! I admit it! Great Immortal, spare this lowly one’s life!” He threw himself down onto the floor, sobbing with such theatrical intensity that Mingtian was momentarily taken aback from his whole ‘arrogant elder’ persona. That had been… quick. He hadn’t even needed to threaten him particularly badly. “Please, all I did was give the letters to him! He told me I had to, if I didn’t want to end up like the library! Please, I don’t, I didn’t, I promise to never cross you again!”

  “Hm. Satisfactory. I suppose. I might be convinced to let you live if you tell me who arranged all of this.”

  “Of course, of course! It was Yuxan! The Academy Principal! We have an arrangement— you know? Or, maybe you don’t know, for we lowly ones are of course beneath your attention, great immortal, and would never dare presume to have the honor of your gaze. The Councillor, Qin Guxi— she controls the great channels, the order and law of the Precinct, and Yuxan, he controls the little things. All the little things. Everything that moves beneath the surface of the 32nd Precinct of East Saffron is his.” Interesting. He’d had his suspicions, but… even with his cultivation advantage, he’d not noticed the extent of it. He wasn’t sure whether that spoke of how unobservant he’d been, or how meticulously Yuxan had planned his meddling.

  “Interesting.” He folded his hands together, leaning forward, the pressure in the room peaking to an almost feverish intensity— as his gaze settled on the man shivering in front of him, the whole world seeming to fade to that knife sharp, burning distance between them— “tell me more.”

  ………

  He placed the last lines of the mist dreaming formation together, folding his hands into a seal and activating it with nary a further gesture. He wondered what they’d think of that… but, not too deeply. After all, his mind was rather quite thoroughly occupied with a whole different set of thoughts.

  It was all rather complex, actually— he could see how someone could put their entire life into just the politics of the 32nd Precinct. He turned it over in his mind as he slipped out of the door, beginning his quiet walk through the early morning bustle towards where the letters were being stored. Guxi, who controlled the Precinct at large, and loomed large over everyone else. Yuxan, who controlled the depth of it, and held his hand firmly on the tiller. Lexi, and those few others, bravely or vainly sticking fast to the third path, other path, trying and yet besieged even in alliance… a real den of vipers they’d made of the place. No wonder it was one of the poorest districts in the city proper.

  A car rumbled past, driving through a days old puddle just shallow enough not to splash water on the passersby. A few flinched regardless. Mintian didn’t care. He wondered how many of them would live their entire lives and die here, bound to the petty games Yuxan and Guxi in the shadow of a sect that gave them authority because it was too lazy to exercise its own.

  A curious political structure. He thought with no small amusement that it’d probably been thrown into no small amount of chaos with how much time Zhihu was actually spending in the area now.

  Finally, he reached his destination. It was no opulent city estate like Guxi’s, but it was still nothing like the typical houses of the Precinct— a large manor for a family, much less a single person. Left empty, now, because Yuxan had better things to do than stay home all day… but it was a statement. Now that he understood the situation better, it was a statement that even made sense.

  Power, of the subtler kind. Unfortunately, Yuxan had chosen to mess with someone who had a far more real power. Weaving a slight anti-perception formation around himself from sunlight, he leapt over the low wall and stalked into the estate, flowing with a grace no mortal should have as he made his way straight to where his formation told him the letters were stored.

  Yuxan’s home office was a subtler affair than his office at school, but wealthy nonetheless. A rich wood, stained dark brown, made up the walls and floors both, a wide window taking up the back wall— patterned jaggedly to look more like shattered ice than glass. A few plants had been tastefully put about the room, and a very pleasantly shaped stone had been rested in a central location. It wasn’t perfect— any cultivator of decent skill would call it amateurish, even, but for a mortal? The feng shui of the room was exceptional.

  Mingtian stopped in front of the drawer and pulled it open, wood quietly rasping against itself— and finally, he found them. A stack of letters, among which were Lily’s and Avyr’s. They’d all been opened. He reached in to take what was owed to him— then hesitated, and shoved all of them into his spatial ring instead. Better to leave a bit of a false trail for Yuxan to stumble on. The more the man looked for shadows in the dark, the more Mingtian would be able to get away with before the man tried something stupid, like retaliating.

  He snorted a laugh, and then disappeared into sunlight, leaving behind the room, the desk, the open drawer, and a mysterious problem for his once-boss to deal with.