On the other hand- if one took his character’s propensities aside, this was a world rooted in cultivation. And in that case, the usual answer was to completely eradicate your enemies - not even leaving their chickens or dogs alive.

But, Tang Ze was a normal person from Earth and committing what nearly amounted to cold-blooded murder was not something that he could stomach.

Then again, this world might have different mores on what was acceptable or not than the ones he’d read of. Perhaps there was someone they should hand over these people to? And it might even be possible that it would cause even more trouble for someone like Zhang Long if they were to execute these people.

Kindness or cruelty - which path was it?

“Um, Zhang Long,” Tang Ze said. “What should we do with them now?” Given the fact that he had no real idea how to proceed, he was fully willing to trust Zhang Long here, who would know better than him what the right answer would be.

“Alright,” Zhang Long said. “Given that you came into our territory and tried to steal from us, I think it’s fair that you give us everything that’s yours.”

“Of course! Of course!” Li Wei said, turning out his pockets, and throwing various things onto the ground that Tang Ze did not recognize, but looked to be important.

“And we’ll be taking your horses too,” Zhang Long said.

“It is my great fortune that my sect’s animals will be taken care of by such talented fighters!”

Tang Ze sighed. He was used to reading about such shameless turnarounds from characters in the web novels he had read back on Earth, but to see it in person gave him secondhand embarrassment. “Of course - tell whoever sent you here that if I ever spot you on this side of the mountains again, I will find whoever sent you, and they will indeed be a victim of my technique. Even if they’re a woman, I’ll shove Yin-Yang Pills down their throats and then use it!”

Once again, he was bluffing as he didn’t even know if such pills existed in this world, but based on how Li Wei’s face paled, he figured he had hit the mark.

Li Wei was shuddering - it was normal for rival sects to hurl insults at each other. ‘Courting death!’, ‘I will slaughter your family till nine generations!’, ‘I will turn your women into cauldrons!’ - these were all standard things that Li Wei had heard and would wash over him like water off a duck’s back.

However, what were these lunatics saying? Filling his sinuses with cow urine? Turning the female members of his sect into men and then using [Monkey Stealing Peaches]?

How had he found himself in such a situation?

Regardless, the important thing was that he could leave with his life.

So long as his life was safe, Li Wei could always plot revenge later on in the future.

As he went to grab some of his unconscious comrades and carry them away, a voice yelled out, “Stop!”

He froze.

What did they want now?

“We said give us everything and that means everything,” Zhang Long said. “That includes your clothes- you can walk back to your sect naked!”

With all of that wrapped up, Zhang Long and Jin Zhen mounted their freshly stolen liberated horses with the rest of the horses trailing behind them. These horses had been reared as a group, and by instinct chose to stick to each other.

“Ah, will you not take a mount?” Jin Zhen asked Tang Ze.

“I uh, actually don’t know how to ride a horse,” Tang Ze said. It wasn’t like that was something that was useful back on Earth, and he didn’t fully trust them as it was.

These horses were more intelligent than horses back home, it seemed, but that also meant that they were more crafty. Who knows what kind of horseplay they might be planning? What if they tried to take revenge for their original masters?

He would honestly just rather fly alongside the other two, though at a low enough altitude so that he could easily speak to them.

“Oh? That’s rather odd…” Jin Zhen said. In this world, a man who didn’t know how to ride a horse was like a man who didn’t know how to ride a bicycle back on Earth.

“I doubt it,” Zhang Long said. “Think about it - if you could fly, why would you even want to know how to ride a horse?”

“Ah! That explains it!”

Tang Ze took some time during their journey back to try to learn a bit more about this world.

At first, Zhang Long was a bit wary - why was someone at his level asking these kinds of questions? Was this some kind of test to see how good that Zhang Long was?

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"Oh, I'm not a cultivator yet," Tang Ze explained, when Jin Zhen just asked him straight up why he didn’t know the basics when he was supposedly so powerful.

"What?! But then - how did you...?" Zhang Long mused. "Are you a mage?" He had heard of people known as mages who used something called 'mana' to warp the world around them. They were quite different from cultivators - though Zhang Long had not met one before. However, cultivators and mages generally did not get along very well from what he had heard.

"Ah, no," Tang Ze said. "Actually - maybe what I said earlier wasn't fully right. I am a cultivator, I guess, based on my talent, but.... not in the normal sense I guess?"

Tang Ze tried to tell Zhang Long a bit about his talent (though not too much, he didn't fully trust Zhang Long as of yet). Zhang Long didn't understand it very well, so instead the topic shifted to how normal cultivation worked in this world.

Tang Ze had some idea already about things based on the names of what he'd heard up till now - like Qi Condensation which was a realm he'd heard of many times in some of the web novels he used to read, but he wanted to actually know what they meant and if there were any gaps in his knowledge.

Cultivation was divided into major realms with each major realm being split into ten minor realms - that was rather standard.

Some of the names were unfamiliar to him though - Zhang Long knew of seven; Qi Condensation, Qi Refinement, Golden Core, Nascent Soul, Eternal Soul, Hinayana, and Mahayana. There might be realms beyond that as well, but there seemed to be no information on them.

It took Zhang Long a few times to explain things in a way that Tang Ze could understand.

While Tang Ze had been far from the ideal student back in his old world, he had been reasonably good at mathematics. It was one of the few things that he generally could understand somewhat without having to put in too much effort - which is ultimately why he had been somewhat fond of the subject.

As such, Tang Ze made his own summary inside his head which was easy for him to understand.

If each major realm was assigned a value of 'N' starting with Qi Condensation being N = 1, then each minor realm within that major realm would increase one's strength by a value of (10 x N/100) percent.

In other words, at Qi Condensation, going up a minor realm would increase one's strength by 10%. While this did not sound like much, there was also the fact that this was compounded, meaning that by the time one reached the final realm of Qi Condensation, one would not be twice as strong, but rather, about two and a half times as strong as they would be at the first minor realm.

Each major realm though, increased one's strength by a factor of 'N', as in, going to the initial stage of Qi Refinement from the final stage of Qi Condensation doubled one's strength.

So, the difference in strength between a cultivator at the initial minor realm of Qi Condensation and that of one at the initial minor realm of Qi Refining was: 1.110 x 2

Zhang Long had said that the value was about five times, which was correct once Tang Ze tried to do the math himself.

Then, at Qi Refining, each minor realm was a 20% boost compared to the last one, and going up to Golden Core was a 300% boost on top of that.

That led to a Golden Core cultivator being sixty times stronger than they had normally started out! And this number went up to over three thousand times one’s base strength at the Nascent Soul stage!

By the time one reached the Nascent Soul stage, a minor realm was equivalent to forty percent in terms of strength compared to the last minor realm. At that point, even a few minor realms would equal a significant increase in one's strength and the difference of a single minor realm could greatly influence the outcome of a fight.

However, going up the realms was also more difficult the more that one progressed, and this too increased in a cumulative fashion rather than linearly. It was said that it was almost harder to go up a minor realm of Golden Core than it was to get from Qi Refining to Golden Core in the first place, which was something that one of Zhang Long's sect elders had told him once.

Regarding mages, Zhang Long had very little idea whatsoever on that topic, so he couldn't tell Tang Ze anything regarding the same.

However, these 'power adjustments' in terms of numbers really didn't really capture the full strength of cultivators - it was more the floor of their abilities rather than the ceiling.

Starting at the Qi Refinement stage, they could use Qi in their attacks to a minor extent, and for other purposes like healing as well. According to Zhang Long, since the people Tang Ze had beaten were near or beyond the Qi Refinement stage, they could heal things like normal fractures in a matter of days, so long as the wounds had not also been made with Qi.

Tang Ze didn't know how to do that, so he guessed that they would soon be back in fighting shape before the week was over.

At the Golden Core stage, many... interesting things began to happen in terms of the ways that one could use Qi. To the point that a Golden Core cultivator could kill tens of thousands of mortals even at the initial minor realms of Golden Core - and if Zhang Long was to believed, a near infinite number at the higher minor realms of Golden Core.

"Infinite? Isn't that saying a bit much?" Tang Ze asked.

Zhagn Long shook his head. "At that point, they can harden their body passively through Qi to the point where nothing weak can even get through - or they'll heal faster than any mortal, heck, any Qi Condensation rank cultivator could even hurt them. So yeah, in theory, could take on a limitless number of such foes."

Regarding the Nascent Soul stage, Zhang Long belonged to an outer branch of the sect, and as such, there were no such people there, though at the sect's main headquarters you could find a handful of such people.

As for Eternal Soul realm, only three of the eight sects had even a single person at that level - neither the Rising Phoenix sect nor the Diamond Dust sect were among those three.

Both the Rising Phoenix sect and the Diamond Dust sect were middling sects in terms of power, they would both be ranked around four or five out of eight as per Zhang Long (though Zhang Long did say that he believed the Rising Phoenix Sect should be ranked higher, he was somewhat of a biased source so Tang Ze chose to take this with a pinch of salt). The Imperial Family also had one Eternal Soul realm cultivator among them, bringing the total number of Eternal Soul cultivators in the country to a total of four.

The Raswatian Empire had only had four Hinayana realm cultivators in its entire one hundred-thousand-year history - or put more simply, such an individual seemed to emerge about once every twenty-five thousand years; would wander the mortal realm for about ten thousand years, and would go down in the history books of the empire as one who had made great contributions to the country.

No such cultivator currently lived, however. As for the Mahayana Realm, it was said that it existed, but outside of stories and the like there was no evidence for the existence of a cultivator who had reached it. Extrapolating from what they knew about Hinayana Realm cultivators, however, it was estimated that one would probably arise every half a million to one million years or so.