Nothing more of interest happened the rest of the day, though the next morning, for the first time in recorded history, Tang Ze woke up on his own before anyone else - and before the sun had begun to rise as well.
He got up and knocked on Chen Yu's door.
Chen Yu stifled a yawn as he opened up the door to his bedroom. His eyes widened in mock shock as he saw Tang Ze. "You woke up before me? Did the sun rise in the opposite direction today?" Chen Yu then made a big show of looking out the window to check. "Nope - it rose in the west just like it always does. What got you up so early?"
"No, I remembered where it was that I'd seen that girl before!" Tang Ze said, ignoring the jab.
"Oh?"
"You see, a few months back - when I met with Xu Feng's ghost-"
"-are you still on about that?"
The others still didn't believe that Tang Ze had met Xu Feng's ghost; which Tang Ze had come to terms with - but to think that was related to this girl was something he never would've imagined.
Xu Feng had told him that he would pay Tang Ze back for his kindness, and though at the time Tang Ze had been too busy getting beat up by Tang Ru to notice - Xu Feng had told him about a certain cluster of trees which were very good for bird watching.
Even when Tang Ze had been able to recollect this fact after the matter, he couldn't understand what was so great about a place to watch birds.
He visited it after he was able to teleport, though didn't notice anything strange, as a matter of fact, it seemed that the location was actually rather poor for watching birds because of the foliage that would obstruct one's vision.
It was very good at keeping the watcher hidden, however, and this was what Xu Feng had really meant by 'bird watching.'
You could not only peep on some of the female sect members bathing, but also spy on a spot that was popular for couples.
Naturally, Tang Ze had disregarded the place and written Xu Feng off as someone who was truly hopeless after he figured this out, but that was where he remembered that girl from.
When he had realized this while half-asleep, he had immediately woken up to tell Chen Yu.
"She already has a boyfriend!"
"Whatever," Chen Yu said. He hadn't been planning on saying 'yes' anyway, and so he then immediately went back to sleep, a rare instance of Tang Ze not being the laziest member of the group for once.
Oh well, Tang Ze thought to himself as he too, went back to bed, yawning.
Hopefully Zhang Long was having better luck than they were.
Meanwhile, with Zhang Long
Zhang Long was rather tired from all the meetings, wishing they'd get straight to the point.
The two families had gathered at his house, and Jin Zhen was wearing a veil. Why? He had no clue - they had known each other since they were children, but this was 'traditional' so he had to go along with it.
He tapped his foot as he was getting antsy. When he finally couldn't take it anymore, he voiced his concerns. "I'm sorry, can we please get this done faster? The sect won't give me a break forever, you know."
It was true - the prefects might have a favorable opinion of him, but there was a limit to how much they would accommodate him There was a pause in the flow of the discussion.
"My, my," his mother said, which immediately made him realize that he had made a mistake. "I apologize for my son's behavior - he seems a bit too eager in his anticipation to enjoy his wedding night, I think you can excuse his impatience, you know how young boys tend to be," she said to Jin Zhen's parents.
Zhang Long wanted to throw himself out the window right then and there. Just two days back, Jin Zhen had a bit of nausea after eating something off - and his parents had glared at him the whole day, thinking he had gotten her pregnant hence her symptoms.
A few weeks later, after Zhang Long had returned, there was a large commotion within the sect.
"Eh? What's going on?" Yin Tiang asked, poking his head outside of the squad's common living space and checking to see what was going on in the hall. He had been making a Leaden Semi-Heavenly Elixir, whose manufacturing process was quite sensitive to loud noises like this. That was why he wasn't making it in the alchemical library as there would be too much noise there what with the occasional explosions - but he hadn't been expecting things to be even louder here. "Can't you idiots keep it down for an hour!"
As he said this and opened up his door, he saw that everyone was hurriedly rushing somewhere.
"Didn't you hear? They're selling raffles for the Grimoire of Heaven!" one of the people he had yelled at replied before resuming going wherever they were.
With that, Yin Tiang, who had been annoyed by the noise disturbing his latest project, immediately abandoned it to run after the others in the corridor.
After all, there was no one in the sect who would miss out on a chance to view the Grimoire of Heaven.
Eternal Soul cultivators were quite rare - with only four of them in the entire Raswatian Empire currently, not counting Xian Yue.
In this day and age, the Rising Phoenix sect did not have a single Eternal Soul cultivator to its name, which is why it could not be counted among the top sects of the Empire.
However, this had not always been the case in its history.
Thirteen thousand years ago, the Rising Phoenix Sect had an elder by the name of Song Xian. He had a rather remarkable life story. He had been born to a family of average means, though he had a total of three fortuitous encounters in his life which had allowed him to get to the second-highest echelons of cultivating known to be achievable by man.
One was that he had found the inheritance of a Nascent Soul cultivator in a secret realm. The second was being chosen as the disciple of the Seer of Ten Thousand Li. The third was to have found the Grimoire of Heaven in a ruined library.
The Grimoire of Heaven was part of a trilogy of long-lost texts related to cultivation, which were: the Grimoire of Earth, the Grimoire of Heaven, and the Grimoire of Man. The Grimoire of Earth was the least powerful of the three, followed by the Grimoire of Heaven being in the middle, and the Grimoire of Man taking first place.
Only the Grimoire of Heaven was currently known to actually exist, with the other two volumes having been lost to time. They were mentioned within the Grimoire of Heaven itself, which quoted some of their passages, but no one knew where the originals of the other two grimoires were or if they had even survived the ravages of time.
The grimoires had been made with special technology by the civilizations that predated not only the Raswatian Empire, but the Mercury Kingdom as well. The books were made of Qi itself; allowing them to stand the test of time and meaning they were nearly indestructible unless they were attacked with special means.
They contained various secrets to cultivation - to the point where Song Xian had said that he would have absolutely been stuck at the Nascent Soul realm if he hadn't found the Grimoire of Heaven.
However, while he got far with the help of the grimoire, that was the peak of how far he progressed. Song Xian left the Grimoire of Heaven not to his children (he had none for that matter) or other descendants but to the Rising Phoenix sect as the sect's own property.
It was for this reason that he was highly revered within the Rising Phoenix Sect, perhaps next only to its founder - even though the sect had had six other Eternal Soul cultivators in the past.
Although Song Xian left the Grimoire of Heaven to the sect, he still remembered his roots, and how he had been lucky to find it in the first place. As a matter of fact, were it not for those other two fortuitous encounters as well, he knew that he would not be the cultivator that he had become.
As such, he did not want the Grimoire of Heaven stored in a sect vault somewhere where only a few could benefit from it - he wanted it to be given to the members of the sect, with even the most ordinary member getting a chance to peer at its contents.
The Grimoire of Heaven was entrusted to the care of a high-ranking Nascent Soul cultivator, who, in according with Song Xian's wishes, rotated the Grimoire of Heaven through the various divisions of the sect.
Naturally, not even a fraction of a percent of the sect's members could actually spend any time with it, but Song Xian wanted the decision of who got to read it to be left up to pure chance rather than based on merit, talent, or money. Otherwise, he felt, it would turn into a situation where those with connections or money would be the only ones with any opportunity to use it - meaning only those who had already accomplished much leading to a 'rich get richer' scenario.
Going against the widely-held philosophy of this world, he did not want the grimoire to go only to those who were already good, but also wanted those who might be weak to have a chance at using it.
So, instead, raffles were set up - whose tickets could be bought with sect points.
To keep things fair, there was an upper limit on how many one could buy, and anyone who had not bought a ticket during a prior event would automatically get one the next time around.
In this way, Song Xian wanted for things to be more equitable among the sect members. "Let Heaven have a chance to pick new favorites - instead of those already chosen by Heaven alone moving forward!" Although it might seem counter-intuitive at first glance to say that giving out opportunities at random was more egalitarian than giving them based on merit, by simple fact, there were more average people in the sect than there were people with strong backings.
Given this, this sort of system did help with evening the odds a little and giving the little guy a chance, so to speak.
It was so valuable that Yin Tiang had completely forgotten about what he was making and left it aside, as he absolutely did not want to miss the chance to possibly get a chance to read it.