I woke up standing on the outskirts of Lynoria. Its multilayered membrane glistened with energy in front of me.

It took only an instant for me to regain my composure, and even then I was still a bit dazed. I slept on occasion, just for the fun of it, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had ever passed out.

It must have been eons ago, and even then. I had passed out due to exhaustion, not… whatever Wukong had done.

But regardless of all of that, his message was pretty clear. He had told me what his favors were as I was passing out, but I was too delirious to comprehend it then. But now, now it all made sense.

I was weak. I had been moving around, doing things while thinking I understood the abilities of those above me. I had been wrong. Wukong’s six favors could be summarized in two words. Cleaning up. The man had cleaned up all of the trails and hints I’d left behind along the way, four separate times. The first was at the fight with Kin Jey. The second and third were at Ah-Marin and the fourth right as I met Wukong. Traces of qi, no matter how unimportant they seemed to me, were left behind at each of these spots. There were things I couldn’t see, concepts I couldn’t imagine. It was childish of me to think that I could hide my presence from a God-Imperium.

I turned to look at the tail behind me. That was where the fifth and the sixth favors took place. Wukong had hidden us, both me and the child from further divination attempts, and he had even given me a false identity to work with. The tail was a bit of his qi, and it would make divination almost impossible for anyone below a God-Imperium’s rank, or at least I assumed that was the case.

And that thing at the end, that was my seventh favor. It was a wake-up call. He was telling me to keep my head low and stay the hell away from God-Imperiums. I was nothing compared to them, and I was a fool to even think myself capable of hiding from them.

They were inconceivable from where I stood, absolutely unfathomable.

Even Wukong, as benevolent as he had been, was terrifying. Not terrifying in a living way. It wasn’t his actions or intentions that scared me, no it was the sheer scale of him. It was like staring down the edge of a cliff, or the idea of floating untethered in outer space.

I pushed away the thought, not willing to contemplate it any longer, and I stepped through the realm membrane and entered Lynoria.

Light shone down on me at the entrance and as my voidwalker and voidseeing techniques fell, the light of Lynoria shined.

Lynoria was a collection of celestial realms, having hundreds of thousands of higher realms wrapped through and around it to create the core of the place and an infinite amount of lesser realms blossoming in between.

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Of course, infinite universes filled with infinite space meant the possibility of infinite souls would arise, and for security reasons, that was generally a frowned upon thing within any celestial realm.

So they managed it through a bureaucratic system that threatened my own arrays in complexity. A web of rules and enforcers, trained directly by Ma’at herself, were present everywhere within the realm, making sure the rules were followed and that order was not disturbed.

It was quite taxing actually. Governing over infinite realms meant you needed near-infinite personnel. As for the three main celestial realms, each of them was governed by the factions that ruled over Lynoria.

That was to say, entering this specific realm meant that there would be a decent amount of paperwork and questioning.

I was in a room, one that didn’t look too large, and in front of me sat a little stone monkey at a desk. The desk looked far too big for the creature and its head barely peaked over the edge. It must have been the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and the little monkey’s small pebble of a head peaked right on over it at its edge. The entire table was full of jade tablets, each of them about the size of a man’s palm and some floated in the air, interacting with the stone monkey’s divine senses as they did so.

“Please provide the reason for your visit, as well as the estimated length of your visit, and possible enemy forces you wish to avoid. Also, please make sure to mark which realm and/or service you plan to visit.”

A jade tablet flew towards me and hovered in front of my face. Ah yes, the bane of traveling, whether on earth or in the cosmos, customs.

I moved my senses through the jade tablet, only to find it full of thousands of questions, each requiring detailed answers, and sighed. It wouldn’t take me time to complete it, not at my level. But still, nobody enjoyed paperwork, unless you were one of those bureaucratic gods or something.

I finished my filings and the jade tablet went floating back to the stone monkey.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” the monkey replied with a monotone voice.

“Tough shift?” I asked, feigning sympathy.

The stone monkey nodded with feigned emotions in response.

“A couple more centuries and I’ll be done though. A whole million years of vacation. Might even go up a realm.”

“Oh wow, fourteenth realm?” I asked with genuine surprise.

“Indeed. Then I’ll be free of this post and moved into the inner dealings. Something nice and cushy.”

Normally cultivators wouldn’t be so open about their ranks and planned improvements, but this was a native of Lynoria. It was an understandable sentiment for their kind. They rarely had threats and death was as rare as primordial qi for someone as strong as him.

“Plan to leave then? Explore what lies beyond.”

“By the Virtouse Ape no,” snorted the little stone monkey.

“A year here is like a month out there. I’d waste the entirety of my vacation in an instant.”

I nodded understandingly, as he finished reading through my paperwork.

“Makes my time in here a whole lot more enjoyable though,” I replied.

“Indeed. Well, here’s your pass. Make sure to meet your exit crew at the proper exit point and do well to respect those around you. Have a nice visit.”

“Have a good vacation,” I replied as slipped out of his room and into one of the many higher realms in the place.