Tang Ze was no longer back on Earth, and there was no crowd in this new dream.

He was in the middle of a large cavern, and there was an eerie presence around him.

He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was as if he was being watched.

He looked around constantly - now being free to not only move, but to call out, “Is anyone there?”

Only he didn’t get a response, and on top of that, he didn’t see anyone either.

There was a large lake in the cavern, which was perfectly clear, though there was nothing at the bottom.

As he walked towards it and saw nothing, not even his own reflection, he turned around to see something that hadn’t been there before.

There was a large dress made up of patchwork materials - it was sewn together out of various pieces of cloth which did not mesh with each other at all.

Whoever had started making that dress looked like they had no idea what they were doing as it was a mess of clashing colors, textures, and materials. It was like someone had decided to make food in their kitchen by dumping all the ingredients that were in there into a pot - which would’ve resulted in an inedible mess of course.

Next to it were a pair of scissors, sewing needles, and threads - arranged in a neat workstation that Tang Ze wanted to replicate for himself at some point.

It would be useful to have something like that set up.

Still, the eerie feeling that told him that he was not alone down here remained until he felt someone shaking him.

“Get up! Time to go!”

That abruptly ended the dream.

Breakfast wasn’t being served in the mess hall this early, but Zhang Long made something for the whole group.

“This tastes pretty good,” Tang Ze said, his rather poor mood at having been roused so early mildly improving as he tasted breakfast.

“Yeah,” Yin Tiang said. “He’s a great cook - unfortunate that it’s kind of a useless skill.”

“Useless?”

“Well, eventually useless, right? When he marries Jin Zheng it’s not like he’s going to cook for the two of them - and later on, they’ll have a team of servants to cook for them.”

“Uh… right,” Zhang Long said, though his face twitched unnaturally when this had been said, as if there was something he wanted to say at this point but didn’t.

Come to think of it, as Tang Ze recalled, Jin Zhen hadn’t made a single meal back when he had been staying with her family. Her family always dragged her away from the kitchen whenever she tried to enter through some excuse or the other.

Breakfast was finished rather quickly though as they moved on to their job.

Their squad’s task was to fill this building’s water reservoirs for the day. As it was located high up, and rainfall was not consistent enough to fill them, people were required to carry water up to these reservoirs whenever they were about to run dry.

This task fell to the Initiates - though thankfully, they did not have to travel all the way down to the mountain’s foot to get water. There was a stream a ways down from the peak, but it was still quite the climb to take water from there all the way up. It was tedious and back-breaking work.

At least, it would be normally, given the climb and the steepness of the path.

For one like Tang Ze who could fly, the task was completed before the sun could fully crest the horizon. He was wearing only his cape right now, as he didn’t want to be scolded for being out of uniform, but that in itself was more than enough to make short work of things.

“Alright, we’re done, do you want me to report that we’re done-” Tang Ze began to say, before he was interrupted.

“No, don’t do that,” Chen Yu said. “Let’s just stay here by this stream, and we’ll tell them that it took us till noon to get this done later on.”

“Yeah,” Yin Tiang said. “We don’t want them thinking we’re too good at this, or they’ll ask us to do this every single time the water runs low.”

The prospect of having to wake up this early stung Tang Ze like a swarm of bees. “Alright - but won’t we also get something for a job well done like this?”

“Pfft,” Zhang Long said. “They might give us ten percent more rewards for double the work. Trust me, we won’t make a name for ourselves by being good at carrying water. It’s not like we killed a beast king or anything impressive.”

“Alright…” Tang Ze said. He personally felt different, but he had just been here for a day. He wasn’t about to go against the group. “So then what do we do?”

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“Relax,” Chen Yu said, finding a nice spot to lie down. “You were complaining the whole morning about having to get up early- get some shut-eye then?” The reason they had to wake up so early was because the reservoir had to be filled by noon, and it was assumed that they would need a head start to get it done on time. That had not been the case, however, because of Tang Ze's little talent.

“Yeah but…” Tang Ze said, trailing off.

It was true that he hated to be woken up early, but now that he had woken up, gotten ready, and worked on something like this, he didn’t feel like he could drift off back to sleep so easily.

The others though, seemed to have a similar idea as to Chen Yu.

Tang Ze was a bit disappointed at their lack of ambition, though he guessed that these people must’ve known what they were doing.

“You’re not going to take a nap?” Chen Yu asked, seeing Tang Ze just standing there.

“Don’t you all feel that we should be doing something… I don’t know, more productive with our time?” Tang Ze asked.

“Like doing what?”

“I don’t know- cultivating, or making pills or… if that feels like work, why not try to go on some kind of adventure? Like, trying to impress jade beauties? Or fighting arrogant young masters?” Tang Ze suggested.

His head was still full of thoughts of the web novels and other such things he had read back home. Even though this was his first day in the sect, he already expected something significant to happen.

Such ideas were highly unrealistic and just showcased his naivety - he knew this deep down, still Tang Ze couldn’t help but be swept up by them.

“I already have someone,” Zhang Long said. “No interest in courting jade beauties - Jin Zhen and I have promised to be together for seven lifetimes.”

This was an expression oftentimes used in this world - when two people really loved each other, they would promise to be together for seven lifetimes.

“Do you really think it works like that?” Yin Tiang asked. “Do you think that relationships can last beyond a lifetime?”

“I mean, doesn’t Tang Ze remember some things from his earlier life?” Chen Yu pointed out.

“Well, I don’t know if you can really call that reincarnation,” Tang Ze admitted. True, he had died back on Earth, but here - he still had his old body from back home. He even had his clothes from the time he died when he had spawned into this world, and to add to that, his shoes as well, though he hadn’t been wearing them at the time when he died. “But people do remember their past lives sometimes, right?”

This was only partially true - there were stories of people suddenly reawakening the memories of their past lives, but these stories were so notable precisely because of how infrequently they occurred when it came to ordinary people. Very experienced cultivators could do so by meditating as well, but they were also very few in number.

Take for example, a story that occurred in a village on the other side of the Raswatian Empire. A wealthy couple had lost their daughter at the tender age of six years in an accident, who had been their only heir.

The grieving couple gradually moved on from their loss, only for thirty years later, a woman to walk up to their doorstep. When asked who she was, she replied, “Ah, Mother, Father, do you not recognize your daughter when she finally returns home?”

This was a woman in her twenties, claiming to be their daughter in her previous life, who had just only reawakened her earlier memories one day when she tripped over a rock and hit her head on a tree!

Naturally, the couple were highly skeptical of her claims at first. This woman’s ‘new’ family she had been ‘reincarnated’ into was poor, and this seemed to be more of a case of a conwoman trying to fleece the two of them out of their wealth more likely than not.

They did not have any other children, so the allure of inheriting their estate must’ve been quite tempting for people who wanted to worm their way into their good graces.

Initially they assumed that this lady had simply found out a few clues about their daughter from some sources and was using them to masquerade as her, but as the weeks dragged on, and they continued to probe her, they could find no fault in her story.

Of the couple, the wife soon passed away, and the husband only a few months thereafter. As he was lying on his deathbed, however, he called the woman over and said, “Even today I harbor doubts in my heart… yet you have given me no reason to doubt you in all these years. I give you my blessing, and choose to think that you truly are the daughter I lost all those years ago… I wish to embrace her one last time…” He hugged the woman and from that point on only called her by his deceased daughter’s name, then made the woman his official heir before passing away three days later.

The woman in question, until her dying day, maintained that she was, as a matter of fact, the couple’s reincarnated daughter.

Even now, this story was talked about with people eagerly debating whether she had really been the couple’s reincarnated daughter, or was just one of the most successful swindlers in the history of the Raswatian Empire.

There was another famous story - in which there had been a couple who, two years after marrying, had both nearly drowned in a river in a tragic accident. When they recovered, they realized that they had both been brother and sister in their earlier lives!

While they had been extremely passionate lovers earlier, now they could only look at each other, even in their new bodies, as nothing more than siblings!

Both of them recounted the fact that they now had severe mental trauma whenever they thought of the intimate times spent together with each other in their new bodies, and were, for this reason, granted a swift divorce.

Even in this case, there were some who doubted the veracity of their claims and thought that they had simply fallen out of love and wanted an easy excuse to separate without causing any hassles; though this did not seem to be likely.

Nascent Soul and Eternal Soul cultivators were said to have techniques by which they could actually verify such claims, and even plan to take some memories of theirs into their next lives, but such people were rare enough that information on them was limited - at least, for people at the Qi Condensation level it was.

And given all the shenanigans awakening one’s prior life’s memories could cause, it was probably for the best that people don’t remember what happened before they were born.

Tang Ze could imagine several more strange situations that could arise as a consequence of that.

“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m fully willing to believe that we may have met each other in a prior life,” Chen Yu said. “Like, I think in a prior life, I was a hardworking farmer, and Yin Tiang was one of my donkeys. I could totally see that happening. But moving on, if you want to court jade beauties - it’s easy! Just tell them that you have the ‘Extreme Yang Physique’ and that you’re going into ‘Yang Crisis’ in front of them, and then collapse before saying you need an injection of their Yin energy to survive before pretending to pass out. Taking pity upon you, the jade beauty will ‘heal’ you by extracting your excess Yang with her Yin vitality. Naturally, she will grow attached to you as well after saving your life, and with that, your love story will begin!”