Dao of Money

As soon as Chen Ren said the words “lottery” and “treasure hunt,” neither of them moved for a minute.

Li Xuan’s confusion stayed exactly where it was. Anji, however, went still in a different way.

Something in her expression shifted bit by bit, like she was trying to catch up to Chen Ren’s thinking. He could tell she didn’t understand it yet, not fully, but she had been around his plans long enough that she was no longer wondering whether it made sense. She was waiting for him to explain about the treasure hunt, especially the part where he would ask something of her.

”What are you trying to do now, Sect Leader Chen? I’m already stretched thin managing the Divine Coin pavilion. You know I don’t have the capacity for another venture.”

Chen Ren nodded at her words, understanding where she came from. “You won’t have to run it,” he said. “I will. I just need your help with a few things. It won’t take long.”

”So it’s a one-time thing?” she asked.

“Yes. I plan to have a city-wide lottery. Every cultivator in Goldspire can participate, and by the end of it, I walk away with millions of tokens.”

The room went quiet at his words. Li Xuan’s brow worked itself into a deeper furrow, and Anji watched with the careful look of someone waiting for the part that made sense.

Chen Ren let the silence linger for a few seconds before Li Xuan spoke, ”I don’t really follow, but, what do you even need millions of tokens for? Is there an entry fee for the ninth floor?”

”No.”

”Then what?”

”I need to buy items,” Chen Ren said. ”To break through an array.”

Anji’s eyebrows raised. ”What kind of array requires millions of tokens worth of items to break through? Unless it’s the [Grand Aegis Array].”

Chen Ren looked at her with mild surprise. ”You know about it?”

The color drained from Anji’s face almost immediately. Li Xuan went similarly pale beside her.

”Is it actually the [Grand Aegis Array]?” She asked carefully.

”Yes.” Chen Ren looked between them. ”I need to break through it to reach the top of the pagoda. How do you know about it?”

Anji let out a sigh after hearing that. ”I’ve been to the capital before. Any cultivator who’s spent time there knows what it is.”

Li Xuan nodded and looked at her. ”She’s right. I’ve seen it up close and heard enough about it to know one thing for certain—it doesn’t break. Like, ever. Even during beast tides the capital stays untouched. Land beasts never get close, but flying spirits do, and they’ve never so much as scratched it.” He paused, scratching the back of his neck. ”I didn’t even know there was one here in the pagoda.” He looked at Chen Ren directly. ”And you want to breach it?”

Chen Ren didn’t answer immediately. He turned it over for a moment—how much to say, how much Li Xuan needed to know. But then he thought about what the man had already done. He had turned against his own sect for him. That wasn’t a small thing.

”Let me tell you about the master lift,” Chen Ren said finally, discarding any thoughts of hiding things.

For the next few minutes, he talked without interruption. The master lift, what it was, how he’d confirmed it was real, where it sat on the eighth floor, and why the [Grand Aegis Array] stood between him and it. He finished the explanation by saying how getting through it was the only real path to the top of the pagoda.

And when he was done, both of them fell silent again.

Neither of them argued with him. But neither of them looked convinced either. They had the expression of people who had already formed an opinion and were trying to find a polite way to voice it.

Chen Ren made it easy for them to understand his line of thought.

”There’s no other way to the top,” he said simply. ”No cultivator has ever reached the fourteenth floor. Not one.”

”How is that possible?” Li Xuan asked incredulously.

“The pagoda gets harder in ways that are difficult to explain until you’ve seen it for yourself. I nearly died on the eighth floor. Think about what the ninth looks like. Or the tenth. Without the master lift we’d just be throwing ourselves at walls that keep getting taller.” He leaned forward slightly. ”The master lift is the only way we actually have a chance.”

Anji settled back into her chair, her arms folded. ”Even so, I still don’t see how earning tokens solves the array problem, Sect Leader Chen.”

”That’s one part of a larger plan. But before any of that, we go on the treasure hunt.”

Anji frowned. ”What treasure hunt? I thought the lottery was the plan.”

”We’re doing both.” He scratched the back of his head. ”I’d rather not explain everything at once. Just tell me one thing—how many people can you spare right now?” He turned to Li Xuan before she could answer. ”And you, do you have time? I need trustworthy people. As many as I can get.”

”I have time,” Li Xuan said slowly. ”But for what exactly?”

”I can spare some people as well,” Anji added. ”Tau Liu and his junior disciples, and a few of the royal guards who might be willing. But what are we actually doing?”

Chen Ren smiled.

He reached into his spatial ring and pulled out the book he had taken from Xuan Mo’s workshop on the eighth floor. He turned through the pages with ease, stopped at the right one, and set it flat on the desk so they could both see.

”We’re going to rob the pagoda blind.”

***

Jun flipped through the pages of what was probably the two hundredth book he had read today, and all this while, the frown on his face hadn’t moved once.

To any mortal, reading at that pace would have been impossible. But his [Thousand Mirror Mind] technique meant that every word registered completely, absorbed and understood the moment his qi touched it. It didn’t matter that the texts were old, and some of them even ancient, written in languages that had no business being comprehensible anymore.

He read them all the same, with the same clarity and still found nothing. Not even a hint of the medallion.

It was almost infuriating. If not for the demonic qi of the sixth floor swirling thick through the atmosphere around him, settling into his bones like a slow exhale, he might have actually done something about that frustration. Perhaps gone looking for something to destroy.

But the qi smoothed the edges off it before it could build into anything, and he knew well enough that a rampage wouldn’t produce answers.

He set the book down and reached for the next one.

He had already worked through most of what the Zombie Queen Vesrya kept in her castle. Several thousand volumes in total, gathered over centuries by a floor lord with nothing better to do than collect knowledge. He had maybe five hundred left.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Vesrya had told him that a number of her books had been taken by a climber not long before they had met. It was possible that the relevant information had walked out of this castle in someone else’s hands. But Jun doubted it. The chances felt too slim to lean on. And when he had asked Vesrya directly whether she had ever heard anything about the medallion herself, she had told him no.

That had irked him more than the empty books had. She was a floor lord. If anyone on this floor should have known something about it, it was her.

Still, irritation solved nothing. Jun turned to the next page and kept reading.

From what he had gathered, Vesrya had spent centuries stealing from other city lords and keeping the most valuable pieces in her spatial ring. She had handed all of it over the moment he asked, which was the smart decision on her part. The alternative would have come with consequences she wasn’t in a position to handle.

At least sparing her had been worth something.

When he had first seen her, he had gone straight for a fight. The demonic qi saturating the sixth floor’s atmosphere had pushed him well beyond anything another climber could have matched here, and he had spent the opening exchanges reading her—dodging, circling, working out the most efficient way to finish it. Killing her outright would have been possible. But it would have cost him significantly, and the pagoda problem had a way of punishing cultivators who pushed too far. Getting thrown out was a real risk.

So the plan had been simpler. Injure her enough to ask his questions. That much he was fully capable of.

Then something had changed.

Midway through the fight, Vesrya had gotten a proper look at his techniques. The demonic cultivation he used was something she had clearly never encountered before. He had seen it register on her face between exchanges, the fury in her eyes shifting into something else entirely. Something closer to hunger.

They had ended up talking while still trying to tear each other apart, which had struck him as a reasonably efficient use of time. By the end of it, she had dropped her attacks entirely and made him an offer.

His demonic techniques, in exchange for anything he wanted from her.

Part of him had considered teaching her something deliberately flawed. It would have been easy and he was genuinely curious what the pagoda would do if a city lord died—whether it would react at all, whether something would change in the floor’s behavior, whether it would come directly after him.

But in the end, he had let the thought go.

If Vesrya somehow could tell, the fight would restart from scratch and he would lose every advantage he had built.

Across his centuries of living, he had learned something—it was always better to squeeze every last use out of a person before making any permanent decisions about them. That way there was never any regret. No resource left on the table.

And staying in her city had already given him some benefits.

The first was tokens. After discovering that Vesrya had been blocking cultivators from accessing the lift entirely, he had talked her into changing that. He proposed a fee system similar to what the fifth floor ran, with the tokens flowing to him in exchange for continued instruction in his techniques. She had resisted the idea at first, but the logic was hard to argue with—she couldn’t defend the city forever, not with her attention split toward learning, and the cultivators had already breached it once. There was no guarantee they couldn’t do it again. Better to profit from them moving through than to exhaust herself trying to stop them.

She had agreed after a long discussion, and as a result, Jun moved steadily up the rankings.

He didn’t particularly care about his ranking, but tokens were resources, and more resources were always better than fewer.

The second thing the stay had given him was confirmation of something he had already begun to suspect. The pagoda was not entirely the work of cultivators from this realm, regardless of how ancient. Vesrya was proof of that. He had known she was a puppet from the beginning, but talking to her at length had revealed something more complicated—she was a puppet and a person simultaneously, a combination of the two that should not have been achievable even a thousand years ago by anyone he knew of.

Cultivators from other realms had to have been involved in its construction. Maybe even the Devourers. Maybe something else entirely.

Vesrya had no knowledge of how the pagoda had been built—she had not even been able to point him in a useful direction on that front—and Jun had accepted that he would have to find those answers himself, the same way he had always found everything. Piece by piece, on his own terms.

But the medallion came first.

He closed the book he had been holding and looked at the remaining pile. Five hundred left, but he had no willingness to go through them.

It was a better task for his disciples. He would have them go through the rest.

He stood up and walked out of the library.

The hallways of Vesrya’s castle were bland, practical, and built without any interest in aesthetics whatsoever. Jun supposed such creatures had little use for beauty.

He moved through the corridors at an easy pace, passing death knights who tracked him with wary eyes, but said nothing.

He ignored them and made his way to Vesrya’s chambers. The two knights outside opened the doors before he even reached them.

Jun stepped through without slowing.

Vesrya floated at the center of the room, demonic qi coiling around her in slow, dense spirals with strands of flame running through it.

She was working on one of the techniques he had given her—the one that tried to merge demonic qi with elemental energy—but from a single glance he could tell she was nowhere close to true integration yet.

He stopped and watched for a moment, reading the flaws in the circulation, the points where the flame slipped out of rhythm with the qi instead of sinking into it.

Then he spoke. “The books you have aren’t helping me. I need a reliable way to find information on the medallion.”

Vesrya opened her eyes.

For a moment she only looked at him, something shifting behind her expression as if she were mulling over what to answer.

Then a smile touched her lips. “There might be one place where you might get the information.”

“Where?” Jun asked immediately.

Her smile did not move as she replied, “The grand library on the tenth floor. All the knowledge of the pagoda is said to be held there.” She tilted her head slightly. “Why don’t you sit, so I could tell you all about it?”

***

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