Dao of Money

For a few seconds, Chen Ren saw everything flash through his mind. His dreams, goals, sect, friends, Princess Yanyue and Yalan. Every step that had brought him here, every gamble he had taken, every plan he still wanted to see through.

Just a moment ago, victory had felt so close that he could almost touch it. He had truly believed they were about to break through an array no one in the empire had ever managed to breach. Then, in the very next breath, all he could see was his own death.

He saw himself smashing into the bottom of the eighth floor.

A meaningless death; the kind of death that came too fast to even call glorious. He wasn’t even sure if the air shield he could use would be enough.

And worse than that, he knew it would not be his death alone. Yalan was still clinging to his shoulders. If he went down, she would go with him.

The thought struck harder than the fall itself.

He had just begun to open his mouth, ready to mutter a quiet apology before the layer and the sky swallowed him whole, when something suddenly caught him.

Chen Ren’s eyes widened and he jerked his head up.

Nyrath.

Shrey’s mount had him clamped in its mouth, holding him up before he could drop any farther. Above it, Shrey looked down at him with a grin and said, “Let’s get you through the array. We barely have seconds left.”

Before Chen Ren could say anything, the beast snapped its head upward and the world lurched.

The next second, Chen Ren was flying toward the opening. The movement was so fast and sudden that even the beams streaking through the array seemed to miss him by chance alone. As he was thrown upward, he caught sight of Princess Yanyue slipping through the opening ahead, the twins right behind her, while farther off others were struck by the random bursts of light and hurled away.

But Chen Ren had no room left to think about any of them. The opening was shrinking. And every second, it narrowed even more.

He would get only one chance—he knew that with painful clarity.

So the moment Nyrath’s throw gave him enough height, Chen Ren forced lightning through his legs. At the same time, Yalan’s fire qi flared around his shoulders, both forces pushing him forward. It was barely enough, but barely was all he needed.

He stretched out his hand.

His fingers caught the edge of the shrinking layer.

Pain exploded through him at once as the golden light burned into his flesh, but he held on.

Then he pushed harder.

Yalan sprang from his shoulders and made it through first, but Chen Ren still had to drag the rest of himself across. He pulled with everything he had left, yet even as half his body crossed the golden layer, he felt it bite into the edges of his waist. Panic hit him instantly. For one horrible second, he truly thought the array was about to cut him in half.

So he forced every shred of remaining qi around his waist and drove himself forward again. He kept moving further and further until finally most of him cleared the layer.

But not all.

The golden barrier snapped shut around his legs and held them there, clamping down with vicious force as if it had decided that if it could not keep all of him, then it would at least take a piece. Chen Ren hung there on the edge of the layer, body half over and half out, trying to wrench himself free, but the array refused to let go.

And when he started to think he might truly lose his legs, Princess Yanyue shot toward him.

She grabbed hold of him immediately and shouted, “Sect Leader Chen, push!”

Chen Ren obeyed at once.

He drove his free leg against the edge of the layer and shoved with everything he had, while Yanyue strained with him, her face tightening as she pulled. The force on his body was awful. For a second, it felt as though his arm might tear out of its socket before the rest of him came free.

But slowly—painfully slowly—he felt his legs give, then slide and finally rip loose from the golden layer.

Chen Ren almost shouted in relief. He never got the chance.

The force of that final pull sent him crashing straight into Princess Yanyue. She lost her balance on the sword immediately, and the two of them dropped hard toward the city below. The sword went with them, tilting and tumbling until all three slammed down onto the street together.

The impact was brutal.

Chen Ren felt bones crack despite the last gasp of his defensive artifacts trying to save him.

He hit the ground beside Yanyue, who let out a low groan of pain. Even through the shock of it, even with his whole body screaming at him, Chen Ren still noticed one ridiculous thing.

His hands were definitely not in the right place.

And immediately he tried to turn, but the movement only sent another wave of pain tearing through him. Chen Ren clicked his tongue, gave up on moving too much, and instead reached into his spatial ring for more pills. He pushed them into his mouth one after another, forcing himself to swallow despite the taste of blood and dust still thick in his throat.

The medicine barely dulled the pain, but it was enough to tell him one important thing.

He was not going to die. He was indeed, very much alive.

As he lay there breathing through the throbbing in his bones, the thought that ‘he’d made it’ finally settled into his mind with full weight.

He was inside the fourth city.

He had actually breached the [Grand Aegis Array], the same array that had been treated as impossible to break through for who knew how long. When he managed to raise his head a little, he saw it still glowing overhead, whole and sealed once more, hanging above the city like nothing had happened at all.

But it didn’t matter. He was past it.

And the moment that truth landed properly, another followed right behind it.

What had happened to everyone else?

Li Xuan. Han Qingshi. The other cultivators. The royal guards.

He already knew not all of them had made it through. That much was obvious. But had they survived outside? Were they still fighting? Had they fallen?

Chen Ren’s chest tightened at the thought.

Han Qingshi, at least, might have been able to live through it if he had managed to use his movement technique in time. But Li Xuan… Chen Ren could only hope that one of the city lords had helped him, or that the man had regained control of the flying sword before it was too late. He had given Li Xuan defensive artifacts, yes, but whether those would be enough to survive a massive fall, he could not say with any confidence.

A trace of guilt rose in him almost immediately. Yalan’s voice cut through his thoughts right then.

“Are you alive?”

Chen Ren shifted his head to the side to look at her.

She was standing there, watching him with narrowed eyes. Behind her stood the twins, both of them looking equally worried, and from what he could see, no one else had managed to make it inside with them.

“I’m alive,” Chen Ren said. “Just a few broken bones. Nothing unusual.”

Yalan snorted at that.

Chen Ren ignored her and turned his attention toward Princess Yanyue. She was trying to push herself up as well.

Unfortunately, the sword behind her had snapped cleanly in half from the fall, but other than that she looked mostly fine. Her defensive artifacts had clearly absorbed enough of the impact to save her from anything too serious. Once she steadied herself, she looked straight at Chen Ren, studying his face for a moment.

“I don’t say this often, but I truly underestimated you, Sect Leader Chen. You’re the first person I know who has breached the [Grand Aegis Array]. If my father knew what you just did, he would want to meet you.”

Chen Ren let out a breath. “I hope he doesn’t.”

That drew a faint smile from her. “I doubt you’ll be that lucky after everything you’ve managed to pull off.”

Her eyes moved away from him and began taking in the city around them, starting from the edge where the array sealed the fourth city off from the rest of the floor and then moving deeper toward the distant buildings.

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Chen Ren followed her gaze.

Only then did he properly look at the fourth city itself. And at once, he could tell it was different from the first three in almost every way that mattered.

Close to the edge of the array stood large stone buildings, thick and plain enough that he guessed they had once served as towers, barracks, or garrisons of some kind. He had no idea why the city would even need so many defensive structures when it already had the array surrounding it, but perhaps the barrier had not always been active.

Further on, the city changed.

Behind those harder stone structures, he could make out gardens spreading between estates and mansions, the buildings growing larger and richer the deeper the eye went. A smaller noble house here. A grander one beyond it. Then another larger still, until at the very center of everything stood a palace so massive it rose high enough to nearly touch the top of the array itself.

Chen Ren had not been able to see any of this from outside. The barrier had hidden all of it.

But now that he was here, seeing it with his own eyes, he had to admit the diary had not been exaggerating.

The fourth city truly had been the seat of the floor’s city lord, and of everyone wealthy enough to stand close to power.

Chen Ren didn’t actually know what had happened to the city lord of the eighth floor.

Neither of the two city lords helping them knew either. They had not heard anything from him since the fall of the floor, and that left only two possibilities in Chen Ren’s mind. The man had either died during the puppet uprising, or he was still somewhere in the fourth city, reduced to a state where he could no longer do much of anything. The latter was the theory Chen Ren leaned toward, though he had no real desire to test it.

Whatever the truth was, it could wait.

Now that he had finally made it inside the city, Chen Ren only cared about two things. He had to reach the master lift, and he had to shut down the array covering the city. Nothing else mattered enough to delay those two goals.

So he forced himself up.

Pain flared through his body the moment he moved, bones grinding where they should not, but there was no time to sit there and recover. Princess Yanyue rose as well, steadier than he expected considering the fall, and Chen Ren turned his attention to the twins.

“Does your sword still work?”

Li Qingfeng nodded immediately. “Yes.”

“Good.”

Chen Ren reached into his spatial ring and brought out another flying sword. When Princess Yanyue looked at it, he said, “I bought an extra one in case something went wrong. I still can’t ride one properly, but having a spare didn’t seem like a bad idea.”

“You should learn,” Yalan said with a hiss.

“I will,” Chen Ren said, “once we’re out of here. If I try now, I’ll probably smash into a building, and I already have enough broken bones.”

That got a chuckle out of her, and she left it there.

A moment later they were moving again.

Princess Yanyue took control of the spare sword, with Chen Ren behind her. Yalan jumped onto Li Qingxue’s shoulders while the twins moved ahead, guiding the way through the city. Even that much movement sent fresh pain through Chen Ren every time the sword tilted or turned, his broken bones shifting enough to make his vision tighten at the edges for a moment. But he endured it.

Because with every stretch of street and every rooftop that slipped beneath them, their goal came closer.

He expected the city to be empty. After all, Chen Ren didn’t have the strength left in him to deal with more puppets, or anything else that might still be wandering these streets. And as they moved deeper through the fourth city, it became clear that whatever had shattered the eighth floor had struck here hardest of all. Even the mansions had not escaped it. Walls were split, roofs had caved inward, and long cracks ran down the sides of noble estates as though the whole city had once been grabbed and twisted. The streets below looked worse. Stone had broken open in places, and bodies were scattered everywhere—puppets in ruined heaps, and what looked at first like human corpses until Chen Ren reminded himself that they were puppets too.

He was still looking down at them when Princess Yanyue spoke.

“There’s something I wanted to ask.”

“What?”

Her sword dipped just a little as she guided it around the broken shell of a mansion. “What exactly did you offer the two city lords to make them help you? Without them, we would never have broken the array. So the price must have been high.”

The question caught him off guard, though not because he had forgotten it would come. If anything, he had expected it sooner or later. Now that the array had been breached, there was no real point avoiding it. The time to pay for victory had already begun.

So after a moment, he said, “City Lord Xiangrui was actually the easier one to convince. He’s a simple man in his own way. I offered him the eighth floor.”

For a second, the flying sword slowed so noticeably that Chen Ren nearly laughed despite the pain in his ribs. Princess Yanyue turned her head toward him with a look that suggested he might as well have grown another head.

“How do you plan to do that?”

Chen Ren smiled faintly.

“It’s not complicated,” he said. “We shut down the array around this city. If we manage that, then Xiangrui can come in and start rebuilding.” His eyes moved ahead toward the palace at the center of the city. “He didn’t care much about the first three cities when we spoke. Probably because this fourth one is the key to controlling the others. All he really needs is access.” He shifted slightly, then added, “And that’s the one thing I can give him.”

Princess Yanyue muttered something under her breath, but the wind tore the words away before Chen Ren could catch them.

“And what about Shrey?” she asked after a moment.

At that, Chen Ren fell quiet for a few breaths.

Xiangrui’s price had been simple compared to this. The city lord wanted influence, territory, control—things men like him always wanted. The moment Chen Ren had suggested that this might be the chance for him to become the first lord to hold two floors under his authority, Xiangrui had shown interest at once.

Shrey was different.

The man had no hunger for rule.

If anything, he was more like a dragon, the kind that cared only for hoarding whatever rare thing caught its eye and then refusing to let it go.

So when Chen Ren finally answered, his voice had lost some of its earlier ease.

“He wants something from the library on the tenth floor.”

This time Princess Yanyue didn’t slow the sword. If anything, she pushed it a little faster.

“Then why can’t he get it himself?”

“In his own words, only climbers can reach that part of the library.” He paused, then added, “I agreed because we were already going there anyway for the book you want. Shrey did say that getting what he needs would be extremely difficult, but I don’t see what other choice we had.”

The wind rushed past them as the city blurred below, and Chen Ren continued, “If we can reach the master lift, we’ll have a path to the final floor. Just getting there should give us more than enough tokens to make the whole thing worthwhile.”

Princess Yanyue gave a slow nod.

Chen Ren’s thoughts drifted for a moment toward the rest of Shrey’s catalogue. Before they committed to the final breach, he had managed to recover the mirrors and the contraption and return them to his ring, but now that he had seen how useful such artifacts could be, he found himself wanting more of them.

But then the city ahead opened up.

The buildings fell away all at once, giving way to open ground, and a broad courtyard came into view.

At its center stood the master lift.

***

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