The Cosplay Cultivator

"During the third lifetime during which I had not made any progress," Xian Yue said. "My frustration had reached such a peak that I visited a seer in a distant country. She was able to instill in me a technique that would let me peer into the possibilities of the future, though when I used it - the knowledge cost me dearly. I lost eight hundred years of lifespan in exchange for several points of knowledge. One, that once this dress would be completed - even though I had never thought of it as more than a curious side project - that I would ascend to the Hinayana realm. And two, that it would be completed by a certain person, and in a vision I had of said person - I saw them flying to the peak of a mountain wearing a strange costume. A costume I'd never seen before, with a red cape billowing in the wind behind them."

Tang Ze realized what she was talking about. "Was that me during the sect entrance exam?"

Xian Yue nodded. "And once I saw that, I knew that I had to reach out to you as I had finally chanced upon the moment I was waiting for. I've been trying to contact you via dream, but your cultivation base was so weak that you couldn't even detect my soul. I had waited so long for you that my body could not withstand the ravages of time after I had sacrificed so much of my lifespan for those pearls of knowledge, and I was left in this state. I have been like this for the last two thousand years."

Tang Ze couldn't feel a drop of Qi from her, though given the difference in their cultivation realms, that was to be expected. What was more odd to him was that he couldn't even see her before he had entered the first minor realm of Qi Condensation, though he guessed that might've just been how souls worked in this world.

"So, I'm destined to finish this dress one day?" Tang Ze asked. "Is that it?"

Xian Yue shook her head. "Destined implies that you are certain to do it - but the future is never certain. I only saw the most likely possibility that would help me break through. You may or may not actually be able to do it. As a crude example, I could kill you right now and then the future that I had foreseen would never come true, would it?"

Tang Ze understood. "Alright - but what are the criteria for 'finishing' this dress?"

Xian Yue shrugged. "I can only ask you to try to solve it to the best of your ability. I don't know what it will look like when it's finished, and I have no clues to help you - only that I have seen a future in which you do so. In other words, it is possible."

"So it's trial and error then," Tang Ze, trying to take a closer look at the dress.

As he examined it, Xian Yue bit her lip. There was a third bit of information that she had also gotten at the time, though she was withholding it for a good reason.

It was that she would fall in love with and marry the man who would finish that dress.

She had scoffed at that idea, because that memory of being left at the altar so many lifetimes ago was still engraved into her mind. Still, she had not completely written off the idea. Even if it was just a marriage of convenience - she would do it if it would help her ascend to the next realm.

That was how desperate she was to finally taste that higher realm of power after so many millennia. If that was what it took to motivate him, she would happily tell him that she would marry him once he was finished.

The urge to advance was like a constant itch in her soul - she could just barely taste the power of the Hinayana realm but could never make it her own. It was always just out of reach, something that she could scrape her fingertips against now and then but never grasp fully.

The higher one went in the realms of cultivation, the greater the allure of advancing became. Eventually, cultivators would forsake love, money, wealth, and happiness for the sake of advancing.

For someone like her, who had abandoned all other material pleasures for the sake of cultivating, such a draw was even greater.

It was as if there was a glass of water being kept just out of reach of a person dying of thirst.

Case in point, the second Hinayana realm cultivator who had emerged in the Raswatian Empire was a man by the name of Teng Ming. He had heard a prophecy, which had been deduced in much the same way that Xian Yue had, that the next Hinayana realm cultivator would be a woman.

He was also an Eternal Soul cultivator at the time - and when he heard of this, he made use of this knowledge by finding a way to turn himself into a woman. Once he had ascended to the Hinayana realm, he simply turned himself back.

That was how strong the draw of advancing was - Teng Ming had not thought for even ten breath's time before deciding that changing his gender was worth it if it gave him a slightly better chance of ascending.

In her previous lives, Xian Yue had not understood why demonic cultivators behaved the way they did. She had always followed the righteous path in every single lifetime.

Now though, she felt that she could somewhat understand what would drive them to commit such atrocities for the sake of advancing. It was oftentimes said that the only reason that righteous cultivators were righteous was simply because the benefits of becoming demonic at that time and place were not high enough for them to outweigh the downsides - she had scoffed at that idea in the past, though no longer.

If she could ascend to the Hinayana realm and was told that she had to kill ten million innocents to do so - could she truly say that she wouldn't do so? She would like to believe that she would have the strength to refuse, but on the other hand, she couldn't deny that her heart might waver at that offer.

More than even a drug addict seeking out their next fix - that was just how much she craved ascension to the next major realm!

Even if she had closed her heart off to the idea of love or ever marrying again millennia ago, in the face of increasing her odds of advancing, she would gladly throw those long-held principles away in a heartbeat.

The reason she held her tongue on this matter though was that part of that prediction said that the two of them would truly fall in love, and she feared that if she told him so, it would not come true even if it would've otherwise happened. Forcing people to fall in love rarely worked, and so she figured it was a safer bet just to not mention that part of things.

As it was, it was said that this would happen after he was successful, so it wasn't going to be an issue for now.

Tang Ze stopped examining it.

"Any ideas?" Xian Yue asked. She didn't expect him to solve it within an instant, but she couldn't help but feel her heart flutter at the slim prospect that he might've already seen a solution.

"If I'm being honest, not really," Tang Ze said. "I'm not even sure where to begin."

"No issue," Xian Yue said. Inwardly, she was quite disappointed, but she didn't let that show on her face. She had waited so long for his arrival, a few more years or even decades were nothing to her. "With time I'm sure that you'll succeed." She was reassuring herself more than she was Tang Ze with that statement.

"I do have a question though," Tang Ze said.

Xian Yue gave him the sweetest of smiles before saying, "If you ask me to take off my garments again, I'm going to break both your legs. You won't need them to fix the dress." Inwardly though, she was hoping that he wouldn't ask for that as a form of payment in exchange for helping her, because she wasn't sure if she could refuse.

"What - no!" Tang Ze said. How could she even break his legs in her current state anyway - he wondered? Xian Yue had said that she could kill him rather casually, and if she had her actual body he didn't doubt that such would be the case.

But did she have some way of attacking him even while she was just a soul? She was able to 'see' things going on outside this place somehow, so it was possible.

Anyway, he wasn't curious enough to want to experience that firsthand.

"I wanted to ask - why are you living like this? Like as just … soul? Even if you do climb to a higher realm, won't you still just be… well, this?" Tang Ze asked. He couldn't imagine someone wanting to stay like this for even a few years, let alone thousands of them.

Xian Yue replied, "When one ascends to the Hinayana realm, their body and soul are completely transformed as they fuse together. Were I to do it, my body would be reformed as that of a Hinayana realm cultivator. In other words, I would have a new body at that point in time."

"Still, doesn't this all seem… so elaborate?" Tang Ze asked. "Why not just reincarnate and try again?" Although this realm was called 'Eternal Soul' the 'eternal' part was a bit of a misnomer in the sense that it was not truly eternal.

Although it could survive much longer than her body had, Xian Yue's soul would still slowly deteriorate over time. A soul without a body was inherently unstable, it was only at the Nascent Soul and Eternal Soul realms that they could exist without one for any considerable amount of time.

"I have already failed over the course of three lifetimes," Xian Yue said. "And though we can peer into our past lives, this is still limited. I am one who specializes in the soul path, so my ability to peer at my past lives, and to recall them after I reincarnate is greater than my peers at the same level, but it is not failproof. Even before the first life I remember living, I must've gone through thousands of reincarnations which I do not remember. And reincarnation washes the soul before it is placed in another body - I can't be entirely certain that my memories will carry over into my next life. I can take steps to make it more likely that it will happen, but even a trained soul path cultivator cannot guarantee it. And even if my memories do reawaken - what if I don't reincarnate into a world where cultivation is possible - like your world for example? I can somewhat influence these factors such as where I will be reborn, but there is always an element of chance involved. I can't be certain that things won't go wrong in my next life. Compared to that, this is the surer bet."

For example, even if there was only a five or ten percent chance of failure, the more often Xian Yue would roll the die, the more likely it would be that she would eventually fail. And failure would mean all the effort of her recent past lives would be washed away by the river of time - she would essentially be starting on her next life after that from scratch.

And if she continued to do so over and over, she would certainly lose at one point in the future. Who knew if her next life would be more suitable for advancing than this one anyway?

That was why she had taken all of these measures and was placing her hopes on Tang Ze.

"Ah," Tang Ze said.