Every time Anton returned to Ceretos, he basked for a while in the feel of home. He might choose to spend time elsewhere for a stretch of time, but home was home. It was never exactly the same as it had been when he left, but Anton thought that was a good thing. Even back in Dungannon his children and grandchildren had always been picking up hobbies. Animals were born, others were slaughtered for food, crops and other plants changed with the seasons. Year after year, nothing was precisely the same.

Ceretos also changed, nearly unrecognizable compared to when he first became a cultivator. The mountain tops of the One Hundred Stars were covered in tall towers- it was not the only sect grounds they held on the planet, but it was the greatest among them. However, as much as things changed, they also remained the same. The towers sloped upward until the very tallest of them, which had an observatory atop it. Each tower could see a great distance.

Vincent ran the sect well. Each parcel of land was practical and usable, and while the traditions of connected individual huts had faded with time and space requirements the disciples still kept their own rooms, as well as having space for isolation and an area for plants. They also dwelled in a number of towers, but every room had an outside balcony. The sect had kept itself devoid of many of the changes that came with technology. Transport was still done on a disciple’s own two feet, though the actual pathways themselves were more defined.

Edelhull, however, had grown into a metropolis sprawling beyond the sect’s eastern border. It was a city of many millions, but unlike before Anton could sense the cultivation within each and every one of them. The city was also arranged such that natural energy would flow through it. Open places were left for parks where natural things would grow, both drawing in and supplementing the natural energy. There were some ups and downs in the balance of individual regions within the alliance, but with Rutera’s guidance from a more technological perspective they had sufficient experience to maintain a sustainable planet.

With that said, there were certain limits humans could expand to before they simply consumed too much. The ease of mobility between planets- both in and out of the system- allowed the population density to remain somewhat modest compared to how it might have ended up. It was a lot of work to maintain a group of many planets working together, but they had people just for that. And for the most part, Anton found them to be decent fellows.

Obviously there were some bad eggs, and he knew Ceretos was not without its own corruption… but there were certain secrets it was difficult to hide in a world of cultivators. But that too was a balance with personal privacy to some extent. Anton had doubts that things would ever be perfect, but it was certainly better. And at least he was not concerned about the prospect of civil wars. Not without negative outside influence, which they still had to watch out for as they added people to their alliance.

Anton dropped in on Vincent just to say hello. “Have you been busy?” Anton asked.

“What even is busy?” Vincent shrugged. “I settle the critical matters of the sect in a few hours, most of the time. Occasionally there is some mess I stay up for a week dealing with. But overall, it is quite a tolerable amount of work.”

“Still keeping up with everyone’s names and faces?” Anton asked.

“On Ceretos, at least,” Vincent said. “Same with Weos and Rutera, though they’re not directly under my jurisdiction. We’re nearing a hundred thousand disciples locally, but that’s less than one per day. With support staff,” Vincent shrugged. “It’s not an issue.”

“It’s hard to comprehend so many people,” Anton said. “I feel like I’m losing touch with reality.”

“Well, it’s my entire cultivation,” Vincent pointed out. “You’re not going to lose track of your stars, I won’t lose track of my people. We have different paths, and our goals are not all the same either, despite them being aligned.”

“We both want people to grow,” Anton reminded him.

“I want people to grow. The sect… grows as a result of that. You want everyone to be empowered, to the point that individuals are merely propagation points for the spread of a growth phenomenon. And that’s not bad. You care about those people. But you couldn’t have personal investment in every person, because you’re not limited to a single sect. Or planet. Or system. Or even just the lower realms.”

“Not a lot I can do about the upper realms,” Anton pointed out.

“And yet, you do what you can,” Vincent smiled. “Ah, Lev’s coming.”

“How did he know?” Anton asked. “Did you tell him?”

“You think that half of Ceretos doesn’t take note when you show up? You try not to cause too much of a disturbance, but unless you fully hide yourself someone will notice you. If nothing else, the sun changes. Not that I’d usually notice unless I was paying attention, but there’s hundreds of sensors that are prepared to adjust for your presence so we don’t assume there’s something weird going on with the sun.”

“... I didn’t think about that,” Anton admitted. “Do you think I’m influencing it too much?”

“That would be like me saying you influence everything else too much. I think your influence is good,” Vincent shrugged. “And if you’re worried, I’ll have to puncture your ego. A few hundred years of you? You’d have to accelerate the aging of a sun by a factor of a hundred for it to even be measurable throughout your lifetime.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“And you make things more stable,” Lev said, not bothering to hide that he was listening from afar. “Trust me, if anything upsetting happens with a star, there will be many people who try to contact you and ask you to make adjustments.”

“Speaking of upsetting things involving stars,” Anton grinned. “I’ve been thinking about new travel options. And I intend to test them on my way out.”

“I’ll help send out the warnings when it’s time,” Lev said. “What brings you back anyway?”

“The Tides of the World,” Anton declared dramatically. “Specifically, seeing how well I can predict their flow, and if I can trace the route from here to the border. I know our same stream passes Weos, but I don’t know if that’s the case for the Sylanis Cluster. Though I supposed that’s a little less well defined now, with them slowly expanding.”

Lev shrugged, “They haven’t been enemies in forever. We’ve been growing closer due to the upper realms, ironically. Their ascension cultivators basically have to join up with the Scarlet Alliance. Or try their hand as an independent with no connections. I wouldn’t rely on them first for anything, but we have the solidarity of the lower realms in common throughout our whole alliance.”

“The upper realms did this to themselves, really,” Anton shrugged.

“I mean, we did it. But only because of them. We’d barely be in contact with anything further than the Sylanis cluster if you hadn’t made friends with Rutera early and pushed exploration.”

“Wouldn’t have been a war with Ekict, either,” Anton frowned.

“They’re the ones who made that choice,” Vincent said. “The results were unfortunate. But you’ve done a greater good for them and many others already that could not have happened without your initiative.”

“I appreciate the kind words,” Anton said. “I appreciate the two of you and many others for holding things together here. I couldn’t do much if I was worried about my home falling apart.”

“We all have our paths,” Lev nodded. “And for some reason, the path of the Grasping Willows is less popular.”

“You’d think more people would want to live under the world’s largest tree,” Anton frowned.

Lev laughed, “Nah. They just want to take pictures around him. But mostly they do that at a distance because they’re afraid he will kill them.”

“Would he?” Anton asked.

“Of course not. But we do let some people get half strangled by some of the smaller ones. People need to learn to be careful around plants, disciples of our sect or not.”

-----

Anton settled for a few weeks in the area. It wasn’t just the matter of disciples back on Akrys, but also how long it might take to get back. And the potential of other trips back and forth. He could count on Ty and the Great Queen to keep the world from falling apart, but one might turn everyone into sword cultivators and the other… well, she had her own ideas.

Traveling past stars in the past, Anton had made use of various gravity assist measures. It siphoned only a small amount of momentum for a planet or star to greatly accelerate a human sized mass like himself, but the potential of such things was rather limited with standard methods.

Normally spinning around a star a few times wouldn’t actually result in greater gains, and might in fact offset the initial value of the slingshot if done wrong, but Anton still thought there was value to be gained for him personally. Near a star was where he was strongest, after all, so he could accelerate himself significantly.

This was just one attempt of various ideas he had the intuition for. This one should be the least concerning to the various orbital stations around the star, and he’d already gone through with the necessary warnings. That meant there would probably be an uncomfortable amount of eyes on him, directly and indirectly, but Anton was too old to get embarrassed at the thought of messing up. And only his friends would dare say anything to his face if he did something stupid. Everyone else would have their messages filtered before they would reach him, through one means or another.

He began his rotations… and acceleration. After a few rotations, he realized that he would inevitably spiral further outward- forcing himself back inward closer to the star would likely diminish the benefit he gained. Thus, he settled for a simple dozen rotations before flinging himself in the direction he wanted to go.

As movement techniques went, it was hardly more than a line on a page, unrefined and of little use. It was a slight boost to his early speed, but he still needed to continue picking up speed as he left the system and dove into subspace. He was never going to turn down a small amount of time saved or efficiency, but he knew this required more practice- and perhaps it might be a dead end. Many techniques were, but that was what experiments were meant to determine.

-----

In another couple centuries, Anton thought he might gain some benefits from traveling along the stream. As it was, it was more like chasing after a ghost. It meandered back and forth in a somewhat predictable manner, through and around systems. It was much like an actual river, with restrictions on the severity of curves and the like. Except there wasn’t anything filling it. Perhaps an empty riverbed, which made Anton wonder if it would change sizes along the way.

He could imagine it growing, somehow, as it picked up energy from what it passed… or shrinking, as the upper energy flowing through the area got further from the upper realms. Both were feasible options he hadn’t had the luxury of exploring during the second invasion after the shortened cycle.

Anton wasn’t the only one who wanted to know these things, of course. Many others were curious, and a portion of them were actually capable of finding something out. So Anton would compare notes with them, later, after he established a sufficient amount of knowledge on his own. It wasn’t just a stubbornness for independence, but also to avoid early influence leading him down a different path than his insight might otherwise result in. Such insights were important to a cultivator, and missing out on them could result in frustrating periods of missing something simple. Or something that seemed simple, once it was revealed. Either way, he had the ability to travel far and wide as he pleased, so there weren’t many others who could accomplish this task.