Dao of Money

Chen Ren had imagined quite a few ways Merchant Shrey might fight.

In every version, the man relied on strange artifacts, expensive treasures, and obscure tricks while keeping himself as far from real danger as possible. That just seemed natural. From what Chen Ren had seen, the city lords all felt built around very particular styles, the sort that reflected their personalities almost too well.

So when he watched Shrey move toward the array, he expected more of the same.

What he got instead was something else entirely.

The man’s body suddenly began to swell. Muscles pushed outward, his frame widening so quickly that parts of his clothes ripped apart, and in the span of a few breaths the frail, half-lazy merchant was simply gone. In his place stood something closer to a barbarian—broad, heavy, and built like a beast meant to break things apart with its hands.

It happened so fast that for a second Chen Ren almost felt as though another person had appeared out of nowhere on top of the nyrath. Then Shrey reached into his ring and pulled out what looked like an enormous wine bottle.

He emptied it in seconds.

After that, he let out a breath, and a bright red glow spread through his body. Chen Ren even thought he caught the hint of a smile on the man’s face before Shrey moved.

He jumped straight from the beast and landed on the array itself. The reddish outer layer cracked the moment his foot came down.

Then Shrey punched.

The force of it sent a shockwave rolling through the air. Even Han Qingshi, who had been nearby and busy springing through the sky with his chains, stopped for a moment just to look. But Shrey was not done.

The nyrath let out a cry as Shrey leapt back onto it, then carried him around the barrier in a fast arc. Again and again, Shrey launched himself off it, landed against the array, and drove his fists into it with brutal force.

Chen Ren had never expected anything like it. Each punch seemed to leave fresh cracks behind, and several times whole pieces of the outer layer actually broke loose under the impact.

Unfortunately, the breaks still were not wide enough to let them properly target the middle layer.

Even so, it was a much better opening than Chen Ren had expected, especially with how many more tools he still had waiting to be used. The moment he realized that, he turned to Yalan.

“I think we go all out now. We need to break the outer layer as quickly as possible.”

She purred without wasting a word.

A second later, she leapt onto the front of the boat, flames already gathering along her tail in bright, shifting arcs. Around them, the others moved as well. Princess Yanyue drew up her bow again, and the nearby disciples brought out their own weapons, most of them sticking to ranged attacks so they could support the beam, Shrey, and Han Qingshi, who had already pushed to the very front of the assault.

Chen Ren pointed at one of the royal guards nearby, a man who had been firing projectiles from the tip of his staff.

The guard looked at him, understood what he wanted, and jumped down onto the boat Chen Ren had been standing on.

“Just keep pulling the lever up and down,” Chen Ren told him. “Nothing else.”

Then he moved.

Lightning flashed around his legs as he jumped from one vessel to the next, landing on an empty boat first. The moment he touched down, he opened one of the spatial rings on his left hand and dumped out its contents.

Dozens of puppets appeared at once.

They filled the boat in a tight cluster, each one of them scavenged from the third city and saved specifically for this moment. Chen Ren spread his qi over them immediately, taking control and giving them a single clear order.

“Use every ranged attack you have on the array.”

Their eyes turned red almost at once.

Satisfied, Chen Ren moved again.

He jumped to another empty boat, then another, opening more rings as he went. More puppets spilled out. Then came a few of the strange contraptions he had collected from the lower floors, things he had no use for before but that could still throw force, fire, or pressure in the right direction when pointed well enough.

One after another, he started filling the empty vessels with everything he had saved for support.

One of the stranger additions was a plant artifact Tau Liu and his group had uncovered earlier, something that fired out seeds which exploded on impact with enough force to matter. As more and more of those items joined the assault, the cracks across the array multiplied.

Shrey, meanwhile, landed another blow hard enough to open a fracture nearly half his own size. Han Qingshi saw it immediately and lashed his chains into the weakened section, ripping it wider.

That was when Chen Ren joined in directly.

He gave a sharp whistle to get Li Xuan’s attention. The man turned at once, brought his flying sword closer, and Chen Ren jumped down onto it without hesitation. Then the two of them started moving along the array together.

Li Xuan swung his new lightning-aspected sword again and again, sending out qi slashes that widened existing fractures and deepened thinner lines before they could repair themselves.

Beside him, Chen Ren used every artifact he had on his body. Elemental bursts, bolts of force, and small destabilizing spheres of energy struck the barrier one after another, shaking it so badly that several times Chen Ren thought the whole thing was about to give way.

Then the first layer finally did.

The combined pressure from all sides, together with the beam, the artifacts, and Shrey’s relentless strikes, was enough to rip away nearly a quarter of the outer barrier.

At once, attacks that had been waiting for an opening began crashing into the middle layer instead. Its silver sheen flashed beneath the light of the floor as flames, qi slashes, bolts, and explosions hit it from every side.

But the outer layer was not truly gone.

That was the problem with the [Grand Aegis Array]. It repaired itself.

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Even while Chen Ren and the others kept moving and attacking, he could see the reddish barrier trying to knit itself back together around the smaller breaks.

If he had not built up a force that could keep attacking without pause, Chen Ren had no doubt the first layer would already have restored itself completely.

That much was obvious.

And that was exactly why all the artifacts he had gathered mattered. They gave him something steady enough to keep pressure on the outer layer while the rest of them worked on the middle one. For a while, the assault went even better than he had expected.

Then the first real problem appeared.

The destructive beam suddenly weakened. It gave off one last pulse and then slowly died away.

It had already shifted onto the middle layer by then, and the moment it vanished, the opening it had torn through the first layer began to close. The royal guard operating the contraption immediately pulled the lever down again, but what came out this time was nothing like the black beam.

Only a pale silver light burst from it, cold and thin, striking the array and freezing the surface where it landed rather than truly breaking it.

Chen Ren knew perfectly well what that meant.

They had simply gotten lucky before.

The contraption was random, and now all he could do was hope it spat out something equally useful again soon. But there was no time to stand there cursing bad fortune. What mattered more right now was making sure no one around him lost momentum just because one of their strongest attack had disappeared.

So Chen Ren raised his voice immediately.

“Keep attacking! We’ll break through the middle layer soon!”

As he shouted it, he gave Li Xuan a quick tap on the shoulder. The man understood at once and drove the flying sword higher, lifting them above the array. From there, Chen Ren took out the thundercrack orbs and began hurling them down in a steady rain.

At once, explosions rolled across the array.

They spread so quickly and so unevenly that even Han Qingshi and the other cultivators on flying swords had to pull back to avoid being caught in the middle of them. The cracks that had already started recovering were forced open again, their edges peeling wider under the continued pressure.

Even through the smoke, Chen Ren let out a small breath of relief. He knew the array would start repairing itself again soon. That much was inevitable. But this bought them a little more time. A minute or two, perhaps. Enough, he hoped, for the cannon to cycle back into something more destructive.

He had just started thinking that when Shrey moved up beside him on his mount.

The city lord gave the array a long look. “I hope you have some way to keep pressing it because it’s soon going to attack back.”

Chen Ren turned slightly. “You mean it will start redirecting the attacks?”

Shrey frowned. “No, the [Grand Aegis Array] on the eighth floor was not built with only the obvious protections.” His gaze stayed on the barrier. “I assumed you already knew that. If you don’t, then understand this much—by the time we’re dealing with the third layer, making even a small crack in it is going to be difficult.”

Chen Ren wanted to ask what exactly he meant. He never got the chance.

More attacks slammed into the middle layer, and the silver sheen of it suddenly brightened. Its intensity only increased every second, and Chen Ren understood the danger almost immediately.

He shouted at once. “Get the mirrors ready!”

The twins reacted without hesitation and their boat shifted position, moving toward the center line of the array, and in the next instant the array attacked.

A beam shot out from it and tore through the air.

The twins pulled their boat a little to the left, adjusting its angle to match the path of the beam even as Chen Ren caught the fear plainly on their faces. But neither of them hesitated. A moment later, the beam struck the mirror.

The impact shoved the boat backward through the air inch by inch. Even so, the mirror held.

It took in the force of the beam exactly the way Chen Ren had hoped it would. Then, once the attack began to weaken, the mirror released the stored energy back out. The reflected beam streaked across the sky, punched through the already damaged outer layer, and slammed into the middle one.

For the first time, Chen Ren saw the silver layer tremble under a direct hit.

But no cracks appeared.

That’s okay, he thought to himself as this was only the start. From what he had learned about the [Grand Aegis Array], it worked in much the same way as the one protecting the capital. Part of the force directed into it was stored and then released again in its own attacks. That was exactly why the mirrors were the most important artifact he had bought for the siege.

As Chen Ren watched, the array began to shake more strongly. The middle layer brightened again, preparing more beams, and he shouted at once,

“Line up the mirrors! Stay clear of the attacks! Don’t let the beams touch you directly!”

At once, more beams fired out.

Li Xuan moved first, taking the flying sword out of their path, while the other cultivators carrying mirrors shifted into place. Seeing the twins survive the first impact had done what Chen Ren hoped it would—it had given the others just enough confidence to trust the artifacts.

So one after another, they met the beams.

Chen Ren watched as each impact shoved them farther back in the sky, the force of it dragging boats and swords with it, but the mirrors kept holding. They absorbed the energy, endured the pressure, and then sent the attacks back toward the array.

Chen Ren saw several of the reflected beams slam into the first and even the second layer of the array.

The silver barrier shook harder each time, and at one point, a small crack finally appeared along its surface.

It was only a little.

But for Chen Ren, it was enough.

That tiny crack told him what he needed to know—that even the middle layer was not untouchable.

The effect on the others was immediate too.

Morale rose almost at once. Chen Ren had known from the beginning that not every cultivator gathered here truly believed they could break through the [Grand Aegis Array]. He had felt it in the way they attacked, in the hesitation that had sat beneath their confidence. The idea that the array was invincible seemed buried deep in everyone’s mind.

Whether that came from seeing the array before or simply from years of hearing it repeated, Chen Ren did not know, but it had clearly kept many of them from committing fully at the start.

Now that was beginning to change.

The moment they saw even the slightest crack in the second layer, and after seeing all the strange methods and artifacts Chen Ren had prepared for this assault, the cultivators started attacking with far more conviction.

Princess Yanyue changed as well.

Until then, she had been firing one elemental attack after another with her usual discipline, but now there was something sharper in her eyes.

When she looked at the silver layer again, Chen Ren caught the glint there, and after that, her arrows became noticeably more destructive.

Up to that point, most of them had still been careful with the first layer, trying to make sure they did not get caught in the gap if it started restoring itself too quickly. But with the force behind the assault rising, they began pressing deeper through the opening and turning their attention fully onto the silver barrier.

And it was working.

The silver layer trembled under the assault.

For the first time, Chen Ren saw the sheen across it lose its smoothness. Ripples ran through the barrier where attack after attack landed, and the light inside it flickered unevenly as if the whole layer was straining to hold itself together.

Then Shrey’s next blow landed.

A sharp crack spread across the silver surface. Chen Ren’s face turned to delight before his breath caught suddenly as the [Grand Aegis Array] changed.

***

A/N - You can read 30 chapters (15 Magus Reborn and 15 Dao of money) on my patreon. Annual subscription is now on too. Also this is Volume 2 last chapter.

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