"Of course she is," Zhang Long added, not the slightest bit convinced by Tang Ze's story.
Tang Ze sighed. He had repeatedly told them all that if they didn't believe him, he could teleport them to where she was so they could see her in person.
However, they had all declined this offer, because they thought that using wizard magic might weaken their cultivation bases somehow.
Sure, they might be Tang Ze's friends, but they had also been raised to believe that wizards were these weird, strange, creatures antithetical to cultivation.
As it was, Tang Ze hadn't had any of his cultivation progress stalled by dressing as a wizard… at least, he didn't think so. He was worse than the others at cultivating, though he chalked this up to other things.
Whatever, he thought finally, it didn't make much of a difference whether they believed that Xian Yue existed or not.
Some of the other sect members tried to buy their winning tickets off of the four of them, only to be given harsh glares by the priests.
People were not allowed to sell tickets to each other - otherwise what was the point of the raffle in the first place? You might as well just auction them off directly then. The only reason Tang Ze might have been allowed to do so with the three extra that he had was because they were extra. Now that each of them only had one, they could not be exchanged or sold.
As a matter of fact, the rules were so strict that they could not even give away their winning tickets if they wanted. After all, what would prevent someone from being 'gifted' a ticket and then two years later returning that gift with a hefty sum of money? The winner's names were recorded, and only they could use the winning tickets.
The most they could do was refuse to use their chance, but in that case, all that would happen was that one chance would be wasted. And why would someone who had purchased a ticket do something like that in the first place?
The next question was to decide in which order the four of them would go to use the grimoire.
"Tang Ze was the one who won the tickets in the first place, so he should go first," Zhang Long said, and the others nodded.
They could agree on that well enough, the issue was how would the rest of the three of them decide among each other? Going before someone else wasn't really that big of a deal, but everyone was eager to try it out first - especially as there were a few days of waiting time between each number.
They drew straws for this, and the sequence was Zhang Long, then Chen Yu, and finally Yun Tiang.
Zhang Long couldn't help but bemoan something though. "If you had told us that you could do this earlier, we wouldn't have spent so many of our sect merit points on buying tickets."
"I uh, honestly didn't know beforehand that it would work," Tang Ze said. "And not that it would work to this extent either."
"It's alright," Chen Yu said. Though they had paid a lot of sect merit points, the fact that they had all won made the points spent well worth it. "We'll just think of it as each of us having paid to win one of them."
"Right," Tang Ze said. "Still, I'm sure that this costume has more uses. I think we should go to a rock gambling den one day…"
The thing about such dens was that Tang Ze knew that he could not use his ability over and over in such places, else people would either get suspicious, or just throw him out.
Of course, they couldn't prove that his outfit was the reason why he kept winning nor would they ever think that as being any more real than someone who said that they had a 'lucky jacket' back on Earth - but they didn't need to. They would just straight up refuse to service him after a while.
For something like this sect raffle, though, it was perfect.
"Tch! Can't believe I didn't win anything."
"Did you hear though? Zhang Long's squad all won a ticket each."
"Really? That sounds impossible!"
"Maybe Zhang Long really is some kind of favored son of heaven..."
"Nah, it wasn't Zhang Long who won them. It was Tang Ze."
"They say he got four winning tickets in a row!"
"That has to be a lie - no one's luck could be that good! I would eat my hat if that ever happened!"
"Nah, I swear it's true!"
"He's right but tch, there's no way that someone could actually be that lucky! He must've cheated!"
"How though?"
"Dunno, but no one else seems to be able to figure it out either."
"He must've had someone helping him!"
"Who though - he doesn't know anyone else in the sect."
"Maybe he's secretly the sect elder's son or something?"
"I have a better question - what's he wearing?"
Talk like that echoed throughout the place as the squad made their way back to their common living space.
Tang Ze re-evaluated how useful Leonald the Lucky Leprechaun's outfit was.
He had not used it before because he had difficulty getting some of the materials for making the costume - it was extremely hard to find a vibrant, dark green fabric for some reason in this place. The best he could find were fading light green clothes, which were not how Leonald the Lucky Leprechaun dressed himself. There were other such colors which weren't easy to get his hands on as well, such as deep purple, and he had to find a workaround for them.
Thankfully, he had managed to finally make one before the sect raffle. He had not considered how powerful just being lucky was, or if it would've actually helped him out, but it was clear now that he could in fact, increase his luck by wearing this outfit.
Doing the math in his head, he calculated the odds of him being able to pull off four winning tickets by just buying four tickets as being less than one in several hundred billion.
That made this outfit a perfect candidate for something he could try to passively gain once he was done absorbing strength.
There was a reason why he wasn't going to focus on gaining this power though - luck was a rather nebulous concept and he was not sure how much something like zero point one percent of this character's luck would mean in practical terms.
Compared to that, increasing his strength seemed to just be more reliable and something he could actually wrap his head around.
As it was, it would take about one hundred and fifty years to fully passively absorb this character's powers to the fullest extent that he could, which made him think that it wasn't all that powerful in the first place.
Several things influenced how fast he could passively absorb a character's strength. For one, the stronger they were, the longer that it would take. The better the costume, the faster he could do so, but it did not increase proportionately.
For example, if a costume he had made could access twenty percent of a character's powers, it might take him a hundred years, hypothetically speaking, to be able to fully absorb that twenty percent. If he made a better costume, say, one that could access forty percent of said character's power, he could now fully absorb forty percent, and at a faster rate too, so that rather than taking two hundred years like one would expect, it might only take one hundred and fifty years.
Still, those were very long time intervals. For now though, at least for twenty or thirty years, Tang Ze felt, it was best to passively increase his strength as much as possible.
After all, if he did well in the Novice Tournament using feats of strength, he could easily gain resources that might make up for his lack of cultivation talent for the time being. The Grimoire of Heaven was just an example of such a thing, though he had earned it through manipulating his luck rather than strength. But, there were other such similar things he could access if he got stronger.
He had initially thought that after increasing his strength to a certain amount, he would then try to absorb the powers of a spellcaster (as blasphemous as the other cultivators would think of this) so that he would have another avenue of attack. However, it might be worthwhile to boost his luck instead.
Still, that was something that would come up in a few decades. No need to stress his mind over that right now.
The day for using the Grimoire of Heaven came soon enough.
The sect was already buzzing about the grimoire's benefits. One of the people who got to use it before Tang Ze jumped through a minor realm just from using it, and that was at the Qi Refinement level!
Even if people did not experience breakthroughs, they would often find their speed of cultivation accelerated, or their future horizons broadened through using the Grimoire of Heaven.
Without a doubt, it was a first-class tool for cultivators, which is why it was so much in demand, and why Song Xian had set up this kind of system in the first place.
Access to the grimoire was given out in six hour intervals, with two of them occurring per day. For the other twelve hours, the elder who oversaw the grimoire had to sleep and it was locked up for safekeeping.
As such though, Tang Ze got to use it the second day after the winners could start using it.
This involved waking up early, and though Tang Ze would normally complain about such, the benefits were to the point where he seriously considered just not going to sleep all night so that he would not miss a moment of the time he got.
He didn't go that far though, and just had his squad members wake him up.
He arrived at the designated place half an hour before he could actually use the grimoire, which wasn't too out of place for the winners. As it was, the grimoire was kept in a remote area, so it was very hard to infiltrate, and Tang Ze hadn't wanted to get lost and end up being late for his turn. Any time that he lost from being late would be time he would not be allowed to make up..
"The person before you came in two hours early," the elder in charge of the grimoire said as he finally let Tang Ze in after verifying via his ticket that he was the winner, and matching his name with the records he had to make sure that it wasn't stolen.
The elder was really all the security that one needed for the grimoire - he was a Nascent Soul stage cultivator, meaning he could likely fight all of the other members of the sect here and still win. The Nascent Soul cultivators of the sect took turns to keep guard over the Grimoire of Heaven, because, as a great treasure of the sect, it had to be kept under close watch.
'Oh, but maybe if I could get a blow in with my strength if I could wear a costume, we might have a chance,'- Tang Ze though idly, though there was little point to pursuing this imaginary scenario in which this elder fought against the rest of the sect.
"Come with me," the elder said, and led Tang Ze to a room.
Tang Ze had expected the room where the Grimoire of Heaven was being kept to be fancy or at least giving off an air of spirituality, but instead, the walls and the floors were made of what looked like iron but had a dark glow to it - meaning it was likely some kind of magical alloy and not just steel.
This was not a room - this was the inside of a vault!