Tang Ze got up so quickly he nearly knocked over everything kept on the table. "No way... Xian Yue?!"
"I go by the name Shen Hui in this life actually, but yes, you can call me Xian Yue if you want," she said. "And, I know you're shocked, but please keep your voice down. How much attention do you want to draw to yourself?"
"What... how...?" Tang Ze asked, a million questions going through his mind.
"Ah... well..."
Back In Zhang Long's World, A While Ago
"So it's like that huh," Xian Yue said. She had been keeping a close eye on Tang Ze - he didn't seem like the type of guy who would renege on a promise or run away, then again, people weren't always what they seemed like. She had trusted that man who had left her at the altar so long ago, hadn't she?
As such, she felt that it was prudent to keep some countermeasures if he chose to run away. After all, he was her best hope of ascending to the Hinayana realm.
But, he was gone now. Not willingly at least, but that didn't change the fact that Tang Ze was gone.
And with it, her best chance to advance to the Hinayana realm.
She sighed.
'Idiot,' - she thought.
Truth be told, he had had little choice but to do what he did. That Asura Emperor, though she had never seen one before, was something she realized was beyond her capability to beat even if she became a Hinayana realm cultivator this instant.
As a matter of fact, even if she somehow reached the tenth and final minor realm of Hinanaya stage cultivation, she would probably only have a ten percent chance of beating it as per her own estimates.
Even the Emperor of Five Attributes, who was said to be able to punch far above his weight, kudos to said Five Attributes, would only have around a thirty percent chance of beating the Asura Emperor. He wasn't around anymore - and unfortunately, there had not been a cultivator in the Raswatian Empire till date who could come anywhere near him in terms of fighting prowess.
Tang Ze's choice had been the right one.
Although she understood why Tang Ze had to do what he did, this still meant that any hope she had of having that dress finished or of ascending to the Hinayana realm was now gone.
It was rather unfortunate. She had spent so much time and resources to set this up in anticipation for the day when he would come, and when Tang Ze finally appeared before her, he had been unable to come through for her.
It couldn't be helped though - all she had seen was the series of events that would most probably have succeeded in helping her ascend.
The future was not set in stone, after all. It was the road with the highest chance of succeeding, but she did not know what the exact odds were. So say, if it only had a ten percent chance of succeeding - those odds were bad, but they might be the highest chance of succeeding.
She hadn't bothered wasting any lifespan on trying to divine the exact odds, after all, she just wanted to know what the best path forward was.
But, clearly something had happened that wasn't supposed to happen to cause things to diverge from how she had predicted they would go down. What was that? Without somehow going back in time and doing things over a dozen times, experimenting with various variables along the way, there was no surefire way to determine what that was.
What would even be the point of that if she could do that, which she couldn't?
She had tried her best, but that had not been enough.
She had hitched her wagon to Tang Ze, only for him to crash and burn, both literally and figuratively.
What next?
Her gaze turned to the dress, which still was there, unfinished. She still had no epiphany on how to fix it, and so that remained unchanged.
She had no real 'Plan B', so to speak.
However...
'I wish I had gotten to know him better,' Xian Yue lamented.
Strangely enough, the fact that she hadn't been able to jump up to the Hinayana realm didn't bother her that much. She knew that the odds of doing so were slim.
Out of a hundred Golden Core cultivators, only about a single one could reach Nascent Soul. There just weren't enough Nascent Soul or Eternal Soul cultivators to reliably calculate what the odds were of ascending to the next realm, but one could only imagine that they were vanishingly small given how ascending became more and more difficult the higher the major realm.
With that, how hard was it to ascend to the Hinayana realm? Only four people in the Empire's one hundred thousand years of history had reached that level, and one of them was the genius Emperor of Five Attributes himself.
She had failed to ascend to the Hinayana realm - an outcome most anyone could've seen as the most likely outcome. She had still struggled nonetheless, trying to find the best way to move forward.
Alas, it was not to be.
Maybe that was why the failure did not sting her heart greatly. One would've thought that she would be far more upset after so much time spent on this endeavor only for it to fail, but she could only sigh deep within her heart at the thought.
No, what she regretted more was Tang Ze. There had been a third part to what she had seen, after all. He was the man, it was said, that she was likely to end up marrying.
She had thought of him as nothing more than a fool and a scoundrel when they first met, yet, seeing him work diligently for her, and watching his journey, she couldn't help but start to grow attached to him.
Though, right as the smallest flame of affection had been lit in her heart, it had been extinguished in the blink of an eye by his death.
'Again, if only I tried to get to know him better back then,' - she thought to herself bitterly.
There were many things she now wished she had brought up with him.
Who really was Tang Ze as a person? What drove him?
Forget that, she didn't even know some basic things about him like what his favorite color was.
How strange that she wanted to know all of this only after he was no longer there with her.
Perhaps, if they could've spent more time together, she really would have fallen in love with him.
The kind of man who would sacrifice himself like that for the world's sake was not the kind who would betray her - if only she'd seen that sooner.
Then again, she had thought that they would have far more time to get to know each other.
Who would've predicted that he would one day wander into a secret realm and then unleash an Asura Emperor out of nowhere when everything had been going smoothly for the most part?
Then again, he had a habit of getting himself into such preposterous situations.
"This is...!" she suddenly said, astonished.
She had attached a small bit of her soul to his when she had given him a soul ring, which was mainly how she kept track of him (though she had lost sight of him when he entered that secret realm because of its suppressive properties), and she now noticed something odd happening to his soul.
Normally, it would be cleansed as he finished his life cycle and his soul would be returned to the Wheel of Samsara to undergo another cycle.
Such a process would wipe his soul mostly clean of all memories and the like - and the tiny piece of her soul she had attached to his would be washed away as well during his reincarnation.
And yet - that had not happened!
No, her soul was still attached to his - and even stranger, it was as if his soul had not entered another cycle of Samsara. No, it had simply gone... somewhere else?
The feeling was weak - very weak; he was likely in a lower plane of existence.
But, he was still there.
He was still the Tang Ze she wished she could know better know now.
What was her next move going to be? She had no further plans on how she could attempt to ascend but...
She closed her eyes and pondered things for a moment.
An answer had immediately come to her mind, but did she really want to dedicate herself to that path?
As she thought about it, the only thought that kept pestering her about it was, 'what do I have to lose?'
Well, there were her memories.
If she wasted another reincarnation accomplishing nothing when it came to cultivation, who knew if she would be ever be able to find her way back to the Eternal Soul realm in the life after that one?
And yet, despite the risks, she could only think of him.
The most important part of cultivating is to be true to oneself - and she found that she couldn't lie to herself any longer.
She had desperately wanted to find love again, even if she tried to pretend she had turned away from seeking it after that incident in her first life that she remembered.
She wanted to fall in love with him. She wanted to know what being in love was truly like once more. She might've still been able to achieve that. If only she had had more time with him.
More time...
There was a way to achieve that, wasn't there?
And with that, she had made her decision.
She willed her soul to enter the cycle of Samsara, using all of her energy to influence both the location of when she would be reincarnated, as well as the time.
Such things were easier to accomplish when going to a lower realm, after all.
Ah, about twenty years in the past should work.
Since a piece of her soul was still attached to his, it was easy enough to make it so that they would definitely cross paths once she reached there.
Even if she couldn't reawaken her old memories in that lower realm, it would be nearly guaranteed that she would be drawn to him one day - not just on a physical level, but a spiritual one as well. Without a doubt, their paths would definitely cross!
And if their paths crossed, even if she lost her memories, she wouldn't regret it.
'Let me see if I can't meet with you in my next life!' Xian Yue thought, as blackness washed over her.
Her soul, which had been maintained without a body for so long, finally left this plane of existence.