The Cosplay Cultivator

The next morning, Tang Ze came back into the common area after finishing his costume.

"Ah, Tang Ze, is that… are you dressed up as a mage?" Zhang Long asked.

"Yes," Tang Ze replied. He had finished the fake beard and tied it around his chin. The robe had been easy enough to make - it was not hard to get a set of black robes. As for the hat, he had initially made it using paper, but managed to find a more durable one made of felt in the market. Overall, this was still only about thirty-three percent good per his talent, but that was more than enough for what he wanted to do.

"Be careful," Yin Tiang said. "Some people might beat you up if they see you wandering around like that."

"Yeah, I might've been one of them if I didn't know who you were," Chen Yu added.

"Oh, I could tell," Tang Ze said. He was coming back from the mess hall just now. "The people at the mess hall told me 'We don't serve your kind here!' and told me to get lost when they saw me in this costume - and I got more dirty looks from people than I ever have before."

Tang Ze was aware that mages and cultivators did not get along very well. Common jokes or sentences he'd heard regarding cultivator's opinions of mages included: "Mages are just baboons wielding sticks thinking that they can play god.", "The only thing more fragile than a mage's spells are their egos.", and "What use are spellbooks when they cannot save you from the tribulations of heaven?"

He had not expected things to be as bad as he had just experienced though.

He had wanted to test out some of its abilities outside, but had greatly underestimated the amount of disdain cultivators had for mages; having never witnessed it for himself and being a newcomer to this world.

With the benefit of hindsight, it had clearly been a mistake to go around wandering about in his new costume.

"Ah, sounds bad," Zhang Long said. "Wait - let me make breakfast today then. But - why are you dressed up like that? Is that also a character?"

"Yeah," Tang Ze said. This costume was that of a famous and powerful spellcaster back on Earth. "He can teleport, which is how I'm going to visit Ling Yuan mountain." He could've tried flying, but it was a considerable distance away even then, and this character had several other abilities that might come in handy in case he needed to make a swift exit from there.

"You're going to meet this imaginary girlfriend of yours?" Yin Tiang asked.

"She - she's not imaginary," Tang Ze said. "She's just not in this sect is all. And she's not my girlfriend."

"Keep telling yourself that."

"Anyway," Chen Yu said. "Be careful that she doesn't suck the Yang energy out of you, 'kay?"

The other three laughed gently at Tang Ze, who sighed.

Whatever, Tang Ze thought. Once he was done with breakfast, he visualized that place he kept seeing in his dreams, and then teleported there.

"Ha! So this does exist," Tang Ze muttered to himself. The cavern looked quite different in daylight, with some luminescence filtering in, though it still had a quiet, haunting feel to it. The walls merged towards each other until they met at the top, though there must have been some sort of side passage along the way which let some light in. The small lake in the center was surrounded by grass, and the lake water itself was perfectly clear. Tang Ze couldn't see or feel that there were any major life forms like fish inside of it, however.

He turned around to see that same patchwork dress. As he approached it, he also noticed Xian Yue approaching him.

"Ah, hello," Tang Ze said. "You look just like you did in my dreams." He only realized how corny that sounded after he had said it - even though he had been intending it in a different context.

He could see her more clearly now devoid of the mental haze that dreams had, and it was even more obvious to him that she didn't seem like any of the ghosts that he had seen up till now. She was far too solid for that to be the case, it was as if she was a real woman and had simply spray painted herself with glowing blue paint. Though, some things did give her away, like the lack of color in her skin and clothes.

He could see more of the details on her clothes, including the individual fibers that wove them together. Not only did she have lilies embroidered into the edges, but there was a pattern of a long vine tracing from her left shoulder to her waist that he had missed as the design was very light. She was wearing sandals - though it made Tang Ze wonder why she needed those if she could float. Could she float though? Xu Feng's ghost had been able to, but maybe the souls of Eternal Soul cultivators were different from ghosts in that aspect?

"Well, this place is real after all," Xian Yue said. "I've been waiting for you here for so long - what took you all this time?"

"This place is far from where I am," Tang Ze said. "Also, I um, am sorry about what I asked about you disrobing back when we first spoke, I thought it was a dream and I didn't really think it had any consequences and I'm not really like that at all-" he began rambling out an apology, half of which was nearly incoherent.

"Forget that," she said, waving an ethereal hand. "It's good that you're finally here." Her gaze, though revealing a trace of annoyance, still carried quite a bit of warmth, despite her lifeless appearance. "I had a favor I want to ask of you."

"If it involves waking up early in the morning, forget about it," Tang Ze said.

Many cultivators had deep philosophies when it came to how they lived their lives - these were usually developed after profound reflection upon the nature of human existence and the Dao.

One cultivator famously said as his last words, "Let it be known, that I never had a friend who helped me or a foe who wronged me that I did not pay back in full." Another said, "So long as I can obtain enlightenment in the morning, I will have no regrets if I pass away in the evening." Yet another would say, "A cultivator who would give up the pursuit of the Dao for pursuing a woman instead, deserves neither the Dao, nor the woman."

Much like them, Tang Ze had his own philosophy: "If obtaining immortality requires me to wake up early in the morning, then I am content simply dreaming of obtaining immortality."

He really hated having to wake up early.

"What? No, I need your help with this," Xian Yue said, leading him towards the odd dress.

Now that he was closer, Tang Ze could feel the threads of Qi holding the parts of the dress together. This was no ordinary dress. There were a few patches missing, as if it was a puzzle that had not been solved.

"I need you to finish this dress," Xian Yue said. She then frowned. "But before that, please take that ridiculous fake beard off."

"Um… sure?" Tang Ze said, after taking the beard in question off. There were only a few spots missing in the dress, and if she didn't care what he filled them in with, it would take a few hours at most to sew it in. Even if he didn't have much experience sewing things using Qi, he had heard that it wasn't too hard of a skill to master.

"It won't be as easy as you think," Xian Yue said, noticing how nonchalantly Tang Ze agreed to this. "This dress is sewn together with Qi, and there are specific things that need to be fixed to it in a certain order."

"Oh," Tang Ze said. He thought it would be as simple as just sewing a few pieces of cloth in. "What do you need it for?"

Xian Yue shook her head. "It isn't about the dress itself - it's what the dress represents."

"I… don't follow?" Tang Ze said.

"I know you come from a different realm," Xian Yue said, shocking Tang Ze slightly. The only people who were sort of slightly clued in that he came from a different world were Zhang Long and Jin Zhen since Tang Ze had sort of hinted at it when they first met, but neither of them knew the full backstory and might've interpreted what he had said at the time in a completely different way. "But have you heard of my name before? While in this world?"

Tang Ze shook his head.

"So you don't know who I am. Let me start from the beginning then," Xian Yue said. "It starts before I was even born - at least, before I was born as Xian Yue. I remember several of my past lives before I became Xian Yue. Thirty thousand years ago, I was born as a young girl in a small town in this country. This dress you see before you was initially supposed to be my wedding gown - though so little of that original part remains for it to still be called that. On the day of my supposed wedding, my to-be husband abandoned me for another woman. I was distraught, though I found an inheritance later on and began cultivating, hoping to forget those worldly sorrows."

"I did not get past Qi Refinement during the first two lives that I remember," Xian Yue said. "However, I had a fortuitous encounter with another inheritance during my third life - it was right here under this mountain as a matter of fact, and was able to reach the Nascent Soul stage. It was then that I actually began to remember the details of my past lives - and I remembered this dress. I had intended to burn it at first when I had been jilted, but I ultimately decided to bury it outside our house in a small box - thinking perhaps I would use it sometime in the future? Out of mere curiosity, I went back and dug it up. Very little of it was usable, and I began to repair bits of it with other fabrics I had from my other lives."

She started pointing to patches of fabric on the dress. "This? This was from my sect uniform that I wore on my first day when I had joined during my third life. This is what I was gifted when I finally reached the Eternal Soul stage by the Emperor himself. This is from the wedding dress of one of my former friends - she has passed away a long time ago now. Ah this, is from the uniform of a general I defeated."

Like that, she traced over the various patches of fabric used to make the dress. Some of them were in a very sorry state, but Tang Ze was a bit surprised that some of them had held up till this point given how old they were. Perhaps it was the Qi stitches?

The dress told the story of her many lifetimes, though there were doubtlessly pieces missing given how long ago she still remembered.

These were just bits and pieces of the lifetimes that she could recall, probably less than even one percent of the total picture. "Twelve thousand years ago, I reached the Eternal Soul realm. And I have been stuck at the same ever since - even after another lifetime and one more, I had hit a bottleneck that I could not get past."

Tang Ze could understand that such a thing was quite difficult, to put it mildly - in the Raswatian Empire's one hundred thousand year history, there had only been four Hinayana realm cultivators.

He remembered how frustrated he had been at not being able to get past the Zeroth Realm, even though that process had only taken a few months. To be stuck at the same bottleneck for twelve thousand years over the span of three lifetimes- he couldn't even imagine how frustrating that must feel like.