Basically, Chen Yu was saying that he really didn’t believe that it would work, but on the off chance that it could, he was giving it to Tang Ze. “Thanks - what do I owe you for this?”

“Forget about it, this is a fraction of that pill’s value you gave me earlier,” Chen Yu said.

Before sleeping, Tang Ye would apply the oil, hoping for some kind of benefit. He also slept in modified pajamas he had made himself to sort of look like a costume, so that he could gain the passive benefits even while he slept.

Yin Tiang also found something that might help him.

“So, there was a theater troupe I found, and they had all these old and worn out costumes - I though that maybe you could use them? I got them for cheap,” Yin Tiang told him.

The pile of messy clothes, many of which were torn up, would be junk to most people and especially to cultivators.

However, to someone like Tang Ze, these were like hidden gems, covered in dust and needing polishing, yes, but still quite valuable.

They were made of various different materials and not just silk or cotton, and because they were costumes, they were already stylized in different ways that normal clothing wouldn’t be. It would be much easier to make alterations to them.

In addition, they came with various other accessories like masks, hair clips, props like swords or magic wands, and even one or two wigs. A lot of the stuff needed to be cleaned up before it could be used, and probably also had to be disinfected for things like lice given the day and age they lived in, not to mention most of it needed to be repaired in some way or the other - but as the saying goes, you cannot make bricks without clay.

Already, as he glanced through what was laid out for him, he could already picture what he could arrange from these.

When asked how much he needed to repay Yin Tiang for this, he gave him the same answer that Chen Yu had - that this barely covered a fraction of the cost of the pill that Tang Ze had given him earlier.

Both of these things - the costumes, and the oil - were not big gestures. One could even say that such things were expected given what Tang Ze had done for them by donating his share of pills.

Still, even if the oil was not useful, or if the costumes were damaged - they showed a degree of thoughtfulness, and as the saying goes ‘it’s the thought that counts.’ His new squad members had thought of him enough to go out of their way to arrange these gifts for him.

Both of these gifts, however small, moved Tang Ze.

He had been thrust into this world all alone. He had no family or friends from beforehand that he could rely on while here.

Reciprocity was the basis for nearly all social interactions - but Tang Ze felt that he couldn’t take it for granted. After all, he had read stories of people getting betrayed by their teammates and the like in various stories he’d read. Not to mention this was supposed to be a cultivation dog-eat-dog world.

Giving up the pills had not just been a spur-of-the-moment decision with no intention behind it, but also to see how they reacted to this.

Tang Ze had already seen Zhang Long vouch for him during the entrance exam, so he already knew that Zhang Long was not the kind to repay honey with vinegar - or to take kindness as weakness.

It looked like Chen Yu and Yin Tiang were also in the same camp.

Tang Ze had thought that was to be expected given that they were all in a sect. A sect, unlike a clan, took members from different families and asked them to work together in tightly knit groups. It would make sense that different members would want to be cordial to each other.

But, at the same time Tang Ze felt that he couldn’t take such a thing for granted without testing it out.

And it seemed to be true enough!

His heart was somewhat more relaxed than it had initially been, so he didn’t have nightmares about that incident back on Earth as frequently as before.

What he did dream of nearly every single night was that same underground cavern, where he always felt that there was someone else there with him, even if he couldn’t see who that person was.

He noticed over time that it was as if the Qi in this cavern was denser than even on the top of the mountain. Could you absorb Qi in a dream? Was this place even real? It looked the same to him every single time he dreamed of it, with the tools for making clothes next to a patchwork dress always being there in the same spot. The dress, also, no matter how many times he had the dream, always seemed to be the same with the same patches in the same location.

Later, one afternoon, they were tasked with cleaning up some antiques in a storage room.

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It was here that Tang Ze’s unnatural strength and speed were more of a bane than a boon.

After all, if he couldn’t control himself, some of these items might end up becoming damaged.

To avoid this, he was asked to contribute relatively little to this task. The rest of the slack was picked up by the other three members - this was not entirely fair, but Tang Ze had contributed far above his weight with other things, so the others did not grumble about this.

Still, accidents were bound to happen at some point or the other.

CRASH!

The sound of something fragile smashing against the floor rang across the room, as they saw that Yin Tiang was standing over the remains of a shattered vase.

Zhang Long sighed. Oh well, the cost of that would be deducted from the squad’s resource distribution at the end of the month, but it was no big-

-these thoughts died in his mind as he realized which vase it had been that Yin Tiang had broken.

“Is that…?” Zhang Long began.

“...a Yuo Ping General Vase?” Chen Yu finished, his face becoming pale.

“Can you guys see something I can’t?” Tang Ze asked. The three other members were looking at the vase as if there was some secret inside, but to Tang Ze, it looked no different different than half a dozen other vases in the room.

“There’s Qi around the shards,” Zhang Long said. Right, Tang Ze’s ability to see and sense Qi was still very rudimentary given that he was at the Zeroth Realm. “About two thousand years ago, the then emperor’’ brother Yuo Ping staged an attempted military coup - long story short he was killed, and as punishment, many of his generals were turned into ghosts and trapped in vases like this. I didn’t think one would be here, but… if word gets out that a ghost escaped, we’ll be in much worse shape than if we simply had broken a normal vase.”

“What do we do?” Yin Tiang asked.

“We have to catch that ghost somehow before someone finds it,” Zhang Long said.

The issue was- how?

None of them had any skills that could detect or restrain ghosts. The higher-ups would though, and once they found that a ghost was on the loose, they would be cooked!

At least, none of them that they knew of had a way to detect or catch a ghost.

“Tang Ze, do you have anything in your wardrobe that can help us?” Zhang Long asked.

Tang Ze closed his eyes and went through his memories.

There was one character that he knew which could easily hunt ghosts down, but trying to cosplay them was extremely difficult given their design. He would need a way to make a spectral tail, and also some body paint - two things that he did not have at the moment.

But wait!

He suddenly remembered someone else - a character he seldom thought of, but who might be able to do the job.

And it wouldn’t require that much work for him to create either.

“Wait right here, I think I do have someone,” Tang Ze said as he rushed back to their living quarters.

Back in the 1980s there was a western cartoon called ‘The Stories of Supernatural Sam.’ It was basically about the titular ‘Supernatural Sam.’

It was a very campy and corny show, even for its time. The only reason Tang Ze knew about it was because there was one episode that a friend of his liked to watch.

The usual episode formula went that there was something like a ghost or curse that needed to be resolved, and Sam would be called in to investigate. He had a magic watch from somewhere wherein he could trap spirits, and would often use it - though in that particular episode he didn’t end up chasing the ghost out.

He had been called to an old house where it was rumored there was paranormal activity occurring inside by the neighbors - though for some reason the owner of the house didn’t seem to even want Sam there for some reason. The owner treated him more like a pest than anything else, and was very reluctant to even let Sam step in to his house.

After some investigating, Sam was able to determine that the cause of the supernatural disturbance was a haunted doll. You see, about a hundred years before the start of the episode, a girl who lived in that house had passed away from tuberculosis. But, her spirit had remained, and was able to live inside a porcelain doll within that house.

Every night, she would come to life as she possessed that doll, and would return to a lifeless doll by the morning.

Sam was ready to capture her, but it turned out that the owner of the house had fallen in love with her, and as such, Sam left the two alone.

Looking back - it had been quite the bizarre episode. It was the only one in which Tang Ze remembered that Sam had left the ghost or paranormal entity alone at the end.

Then again, that was why he remembered it so well in the first place.

The other episodes were far more cliché and generic and didn’t have that kind of ‘twist’, so Tang Ze didn’t watch more than a few - but he still remembered how Sam used to dress up like.

It would be easy to make a costume like that if Tang Ze were back on Earth, but some of his clothes were hard to replicate in a world like this.

He wore a Hawaiian floral shirt, khaki pants, sandals, and a fishing hat most of the time. Oh, and there was the famous watch in question - Tang Ze thankfully still remembered the design.

He didn’t have much time to get to work, but he also didn’t need for it to be perfect. The clothes were easy enough to either make, or to make something that at least was close to them visually.

As for the watch - Tang Ze had to take a piece of parchment, cut it into a circle, draw on it, and then strap it to his wrist with leather.

A poor substitute, but it was all apparently forty-five percent good enough!

He just hoped that would be sufficient as he ran back.

Normally, you couldn’t wander outside out of your uniform, but in this case, Tang Ze was more worried about what would happen if that ghost escaped or was found out by a prefect.

“Will this work?” Yin Tiang asked, seeing Tang Ze’s getup.

Tang Ze scanned the area, and could see glowing green footsteps. “Looks like it!” That was one of Supernatural Sam’s powers, to be able to not only see ghosts, but track them down based on where they had been.

“Alright, let me come with you,” Yin Tiang said. The others remained behind, after all, we still had to clean the room.

The two followed the spectral footsteps that only Tang Ze could see, while Yin Tiang tried to calm down anyone who saw them.

“Ah, just passing through - Brother Tang Ze here is trying out for this month’s play, that’s all!” he would yell out whenever someone gave the two of them an inquisitive look.

Tang Ze stopped in his tracks as he found the culprit.

The ghost looked hideous - barely resembling a human. It was like a light green figurine of a person which had melted after it had been put outside in the sun for too long.

And it was in the open, in a courtyard.

Tang Ze didn’t know if it could tell that he could see it, but it began to move faster nonetheless. Sadly, for it, ‘faster’ was only relative as Tang Ze went to pounce on it.

Would Sam’s watch work like it did in the show?