Cultivation was not a safe or reliable path to travel upon - that was one of the first lessons that had been imparted to Tang Ze. One would have to take risks at multiple points, and there were never any guarantees. At Qi Condensation and Qi Refinement stage, it was relatively safe, but there would come a point in every cultivator's journey where they would have to take a leap of faith of sorts. They might end up clearing the chasm and soaring on forward, or failing and smashing against the chasm's floor.
But, if they did not choose to leap at all, they would never advance.
Xian Hue knew that success was not guaranteed even if she bet on Tang Ze, but it was still the best of her available options.
Tang Ze examined the dress for a while more before getting up. "Sorry, I have to get back to my sect, but I'll look into trying to fix this."
Xian Hue had a lot of things set up to work on the dress, but they were old and not the sort of things that Tang Ze was used to working with. He would also need far more time to go over the mystery of how the dress had been made. "I can't promise I can do this, but I can try," he attempted to reassure her.
Xian Hue nodded. "Let me know if you need my help in any way."
"Out of curiosity, what do you intend to do after reaching the Hinayana realm?" he asked her.
"I - honestly haven't thought of that yet," she admitted. He chuckled but did not ask anything further as he prepared to leave.
One thing had greatly surprised her - something that had not gone as per her expectations during their meeting.
Why had he agreed to help her out so quickly?
She had prepared various things to bargain with him for his aide. Threatening him wasn't likely to work, simply because threatening people when it came to art rarely if ever succeeded.
There was a famous story about a poet who was so renowned that an enemy warlord spared his life but demanded that he write a new poem every day under punishment of death instead. The poet attempted to do so for a week, but further than that, found that he could not continue.
The warlord, in a stroke of mercy that was unlike him, recognized that art could not flourish under duress and let the poet go free.
One could catch a songbird and keep it in a cage, forcing it to sign on command, but it would never sing as freely as it would were it soaring through the air.
And this dress was a work of art, Xian Yue realized that.
If Tang Ze was going to find an answer, Xian Hue felt, it would be of his own accord. She could not force him to find an answer by holding a sword to his neck. If she had wanted to enslave or imprison him here with her until he found a solution, she had plenty of methods to do so - she simply realized that doing so was counterproductive.
She had prepared rewards in advance for him though - her hand in marriage was only a last resort (as it was in her current form she had little to offer a man); she knew the locations to various inheritances and some lost techniques that even a Nascent Soul cultivator would've killed for.
And yet, despite preparing all of those things - none of them had been necessary at all.
He had just agreed to help her.
Tang Ze was helping her for a simple reason- because he had been moved by her story. Much like her, he had been stuck at a bottleneck with little hope of succeeding at the time, only her situation was so much worse. And he had managed to overcome this due to an unexpected act of kindness from the Komainu. Given this, he was more than willing to give it his all when it came to this kind of project.
And putting that all aside - he just thought it was a fun challenge. Even something as simple as that was enough to motivate him.
And so, he put his fake beard back on, and then teleported back to the sect.
Once he was back in their common living quarters, he opened the door to his room to find another copy of himself sitting there.
That was because the Tang Ze that had gone to meet with Xian Yue had been a clone created by magic - his original body had been safe here back in the sect.
This was one of the precautions he'd taken while going to meet with her. After all, following the incident with Xu Feng, he wasn't going to immediately agree to help everyone he ran across. Not to mention this situation had been far more suspect than the one with Xu Feng. He had created this clone and allowed it to wander around the sect, even having it speak with his squad members first; in order to make sure that it was indistinguishable from his original self.
Another precaution that he'd taken was to cast a spell that allowed him to detect lies. Xian Yue had not lied to him, but this was not enough for him.
Tang Ze snapped his finger and his clone disappeared, with all the knowledge that the clone had accumulated being transferred to his memory.
Before he made any further moves to help Xian Yue, he would need to dig further into her background to make sure that he wasn't helping some kind of demonic cultivator who would slaughter half the country once they had reached the Hinayana realm. He was fine with helping her for the sake of helping her, but he was not going to help someone evil.
That didn't seem to be the case, but it made sense to verify some of what he'd heard from other sources. Since she had passed away two thousand years ago, he now had a lead that he could follow to learn more about her.
The Raswatian Empire had stood for over a hundred thousand years. Although the Imperial Family had maintained the line of succession up till this point, things had not always been rosy in the empire.
There were times of peace, and times of turmoil. Oftentimes, though the times of turmoil were times of great suffering, these were also time in which heroes rose up, in which star cultivators were born, and new techniques and treasures were discovered.
Many of these new techniques and treasures had long since been lost to time, however. Some people simply didn't see it prudent to share their learning and died, taking their knowledge to the grave with them. Some of them left inheritances which were destroyed before they could be discovered. Others were just destroyed out of spite.
It went the same for some plants and species as well. One hundred thousand years of cultivators trying to snatch anything that was valuable and throwing attacks that obliterated entire valleys at times was more than enough to cause many plants and animals to go extinct. As an example, the pandas were barely hanging in modern times.
One such treasure that had supposedly been lost to the ravages of time was Feng Shuiyu's notebook. She had been a very famous alchemist of her time, and had a habit of sailing out near a certain lake. Unbeknownst to her, the mermen who lived in the lake at the time had taken none too kindly to humans polluting their habitats, and as such, when she sailed out one day, they drowned both her and her boat.
Sadly, Feng Shuiyu had known nothing about this feud, and was an innocent bystander in this whole kerfuffle. Even after peace had been made, nothing really came of things other than people bemoaning the loss of a famous alchemist and then moving on with their lives.
Although heroes rose up all the time, they also fell all the time as well.
And it was to this specific lake that Yin Tiang and Tang Ze teleported one day.
Yin Tiang grumbled about Tang Ze wearing his wizard outfit to get them there, but then again, Yin Tiang didn't really have any better way to get to this place given how far away it was from their sect division.
The two of them were here for one simple reason - it was said that when Feng Shuiyu drowned, her notebook in which she wrote most of her findings was also lost with her. And they were here to see if they could retrieve said notebook.
"Are you sure her journal is even going to be intact - given you know, it's been underwater all this long?" Tang Ze asked.
"Yes," Yin Tiang said. "Alchemists usually write their recipes in books which have to be very durable in order to last for centuries - most of them are imbued with Qi and are impervious to the elements. Two years back a small fire broke out in our sect library and a single book wasn't charred - did you know that?"
"Hmm… so it might still be useful," Tang Ze said. "But, we're not even sure if she had it on her when she y'know… drowned? It was just a rumor it was with her, right?"
Alchemists usually kept several notebooks, and it made sense that she would have kept at least one with her on her person to jot down any sudden strokes of inspiration that she had. But, this was not a certainty. And even if she had such a notebook on her, if only a few pages of it had been filled it would be next to useless.
"Well, only one way to find out," Yin Tiang said. "We explore the lake!"
Even if the odds of finding it were low, the fact remained that cultivators had ventured into territories and sought treasures with far less likelihood to exist than this. Yin Tiang had heard the story from his father, and had been fascinated with the same ever since he had been ten years old. Why then would he back out from taking a chance to see if he could really find it?
Naturally though, there was a reason that few people had tried to do this before them. While cultivators were powerful, very few of them knew techniques for lasting underwater for large amounts of time. It wasn't just about holding your breath for long - seeing in the darkness of the depths, handling the pressure of the water itself - all of these required special techniques to handle which most did not see the point in specializing in.
Yin Tiang would've had little hope of discovering this himself for that matter, but he wasn't alone in this endeavor. He had Tang Ze and his talent helping him.
Of course, Tang Ze's talent had its own limits.
Since it was dependent on the integrity of whatever costume he was wearing, it meant that if he were to take a dive underwater, the clothes themselves would start to get damaged. As they got damaged, he would be able to rely on less and less of the character he was cosplaying as powers', and so on and so forth possibly leading to his demise.
As it was, this character he was going to rely on was a bit special in the sense that aside from some boxers, Tang Ze wasn't going to be wearing much at all, but he needed something else.
This character was called Deepcurrent. He starred in his own little superhero show back on Earth, and the lore went that he was the son of a group of sentient fish creatures that lived at the very bottom of the ocean. One day, he got interested in what lay above the ocean's surface, and then emerged onto land where initially people began hunting him down thinking he was some sort of sea monster. However, he saved a group of fishermen lost at sea and then became hailed as a hero.
The typical episode would go like this: humans or occasionally an evil race of some deep water creature was causing trouble, Deepcurrent was called to save the day, the enemy would narrowly escape, and then Deepcurrent would have to chase them. A final battle would ensue, and within twenty minutes the story would be concluded before the next villain of the week came around.
All in all, it was your traditional superhero fare, but as you might expect, Deepcurrent had a number of powers that were quite useful in this particular situation. He was said to be immensely strong and nearly indestructible while underwater - enough to lift up a mountain. He could naturally breathe and talk underwater, had a built-in sonar ability, and could telepathically control fish.