Dao of Money

Yalan shouted for the third time. “Chen Ren, get off the flying sword. You are not going to find the array mechanism in the courtyard by flying into every corner of it like an idiot.”

At her words, Chen Ren turned again and saw her glaring at him from where she sat on top of the master lift. There was a scowl planted firmly on her face, while next to her Princess Yanyue only let out a quiet sigh and kept eating the rice cakes she had taken out from her spatial ring. The twins sat nearby, both of them looking a little awkward about sharing food with a princess but clearly too hungry and too tired to care much in the end.

Chen Ren had wanted to send them all out into the city to look for salvageable artifacts before they left. Surely there had to be valuable things left in the fourth city after all this. But before he could even say it properly, the twins had sat themselves down and made it very clear with their faces alone that they were done for the day.

And honestly, he couldn’t blame them.

All of them had nearly died several times in the last few hours. The difference was that Chen Ren didn’t have the luxury of stopping.

He still had to find the array mechanism. Until he did, he could not shut the [Grand Aegis Array] down, or even weaken it enough to let City Lord Xiangrui and the others outside enter the city. And letting Xiangrui take control of the place was important for more than one reason. Once the city lord was inside and in command, no one else would be able to casually use the master lift for themselves, which only helped Chen Ren in the long run.

But first, he had to find the mechanism.

That was the problem.

The only thing Shrey had told him was that it was somewhere in the same courtyard as the master lift. That sounded useful in theory, but in practice the courtyard was enormous. There were too many places for something to be hidden, like wide stone paths, ruined decorative structures, pillars, old gardens, broken statuary—he didn’t have enough clues to narrow it down.

Therefore so far, he had found nothing. And the courtyard was too large to simply run through blindly.

He had decided he might as well use the chance to practice with the flying sword.

No one else looked remotely interested in helping him search, and, more importantly, nothing around the master lift had shown any sign of danger so far. The whole courtyard felt strangely still compared to everything they had just gone through. If something did appear, they were already standing right beside the master lift and could leave whenever they wanted. By Chen Ren’s reasoning, that made this the best time to try.

The problem was that “trying” mostly meant crashing.

Again and again.

As it turned out, flying swords were far harder to control than he had imagined. Making one rise was easy enough. All he had to do was feed it qi, and the sword would respond immediately. The real difficulty came after that. Steering it properly was another matter entirely. It was not just about qi. It was also about intent, balance, and keeping your will fixed on where you wanted the sword to go without letting your body panic halfway through.

Chen Ren had already slammed into the ground enough times to stop counting comfortably.

At least he had made some progress. After half a dozen crashes, he could now get the sword to drift left or right without immediately throwing himself off. That was more than he had managed earlier, though the thing still shook beneath his feet far too much to inspire any confidence.

Right now, he stood on it with his knees bent a little, eyes lowered toward the trembling blade, trying to guide it through the courtyard without embarrassing himself further. He kept shifting his balance left and right in small motions, adjusting the flow of qi every few breaths, trying to understand what part of the instability came from the sword and what part came from him. From time to time, the blade would wobble so badly that Chen Ren nearly pitched forward, but unlike before, he at least knew how to recover now.

He pushed a little more qi into both sides of the sword, and slowly, it steadied. Not perfectly, never that, but enough.

Chen Ren knew very well that if he tried taking it high into the air, he would likely fall within seconds. He was not nearly skilled enough for that yet. But keeping it low and moving it through the courtyard was… unexpectedly enjoyable.

That realization caught him a little off guard.

There was something freeing about it, even while it shook under him and threatened to throw him off every few moments. It was the sort of fun he had not realized he needed until now. Flying swords were one of the great staples of xianxia worlds, the kind of thing every cultivator was supposed to want, and yet after transmigrating here, Chen Ren had barely given them any thought at all.

Mostly because he had never had the time.

He wasn’t a sword cultivator to begin with, so flying swords had always sat somewhere on the edge of his interest rather than at the centre of it. But now that he was actually standing on one—badly, awkwardly, and with far too many bruises already forming—he had to admit they were more appealing than he had given them credit for. There might even be a business in them one day. He would need the right gimmick, of course. Simply selling flying swords would not be enough. From what he knew, sects treated a disciple’s first flying sword almost like a rite of passage. It was not just an item. It was a symbol, something given only when one had finally proven worthy.

That kind of sentiment made things harder to compete with.

For the moment, though, he pushed the thought aside and focused on the courtyard.

He spread his [Void Sense] as far as he could, wishing it were broad enough to swallow the entire place in one sweep, but it still fell way short of that. Even so, he had a rough idea of what he was looking for. If his reasoning was sound, then the array mechanism should not have been hidden in some absurdly secret place. The courtyard had likely been meant for the city lord alone and guarded under normal circumstances by puppets strong enough to kill intruders in a single strike. If that was true, then the mechanism did not need to be concealed too deeply. It only needed to be safe from ordinary access.

So what he really had to search for was a space below the ground. Simple enough in theory.

Much less simple when the sword beneath him kept shivering like an irritated fish every few breaths.

Even when he tried to steady it with better balance and cleaner qi flow, he still hit the ground twice in the next couple of minutes, and once the sword simply gave up on the turn he wanted and drifted down so lazily that he almost felt insulted by it. But he kept going. For all the clumsy landings and jolting recoveries, he was still covering ground far faster this way than he could have on foot, and little by little more of the courtyard passed under his search.

A lot remained, but progress was progress.

And so he kept at it.

Time slipped by strangely after that. An hour, perhaps more. The crashes never fully stopped, but neither did Chen Ren. He was learning. Slowly, painfully, but undeniably. And somewhere in the middle of all that searching, all that wobbling and correcting and cursing under his breath, the flying sword started becoming genuinely enjoyable.

At least right up until the next crash.

Though, even while he was getting the hang of the sword, Chen Ren never let his senses relax.

He kept [Void Sense] stretched outward the whole time, despite the steady strain it was putting on him. His dantian was getting close to empty again. The siege had already drained a frightening amount of qi out of him, and while the pills had restored enough to keep him moving, he knew very well that it would not last much longer. At the same time, he could not afford to stop. City Lord Xiangrui and the others were likely still outside, waiting for the array to fall. Han Qingshi and his sect had not risked their lives just so Chen Ren could stand around inside the city forever either. They had helped him get here for the treasures, for the chance at glory, and because they believed there was still more to gain.

That meant Chen Ren had to move quickly. The array needed to go down and the others needed to come in.

And only after that could he think about the tenth floor.

So he kept searching, pushing the sword through the courtyard again and again while his senses scraped through the ground below, trying to catch even the slightest irregularity. Time dragged past in that rhythm until, after what felt like hours, luck finally decided to stop mocking him.

Something brushed against his senses. It was faint, but it was there.

Chen Ren reacted so suddenly that he forgot he was still on the sword. He tried to stop it at once, and the result was a violently sharp halt that threw him clean off. A second later, his face hit the dirt.

He spat out soil, coughed twice, and pushed himself back up while wiping at his mouth. Before he could properly straighten, Yalan’s voice came from the direction of the master lift.

“Are you alive?”

Chen Ren turned toward her. “Yes. And I think I found the array mechanism. Get over here and help.”

That was enough to make both Yalan and Princess Yanyue rise at once. The two of them jumped onto the twins’ flying sword and started making their way over while Chen Ren, unwilling to waste even a second, gathered lightning around his fist and started smashing into the ground where he had sensed the space below.

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The earth resisted at first before cracking, and he kept punching again and again.

It took roughly a dozen blows before the surface finally began to collapse inward, and through the spreading fractures Chen Ren caught sight of what sat underneath.

A huge spirit stone rested at the bottom.

***

It took Chen Ren and the others a while to actually shut down the [Grand Aegis Array] around the city.

Finding the mechanism had only been the first part. After that, they had to break open more of the ground until the opening was wide enough for them to climb down properly, and only then did they reach the chamber beneath the courtyard.

It was enormous.

At the center of it sat the spirit stone feeding the array, suspended within a framework of metal wires, latches, and old mechanisms that looked far too intricate to understand at a glance. Chen Ren had never seen anything like it in his life.

For a full minute, he simply stood there staring, feeling the pure qi rolling off it in waves. It was so dense, so clean, that he knew immediately this had to be the purest spirit stone he had ever come across.

Princess Yanyue looked just as stunned.

And honestly, it made sense. Even after all these centuries, the stone was still powering the array, and judging by the qi it still held, it could probably go on doing so for centuries more. Just looking at it made Chen Ren start wondering how much something like that was worth.

A few cities, maybe, or more. And this was only the eighth floor of the pagoda.

That thought alone made him much more curious about what other wealth might be hidden in the floors above. A greedy part of him even wanted to try stuffing the spirit stone into his spatial ring, even if he had to empty everything else out first. With something of this quality in his hands, he could probably do things even the emperor himself would struggle to match.

But that thought died as quickly as it came.

He had no idea how to separate the stone from the system holding it in place without breaking something important, and trying to force it into his spatial ring felt like a terrible idea. The thing was massive to begin with, and even spatial rings had their limits. More than that, Chen Ren was not eager to find out what would happen if he tried shoving that much concentrated qi into a dimensional space not meant to hold it.

And even if it worked, Xiangrui would never be pleased.

If the [Grand Aegis Array] became unusable because Chen Ren got greedy, then it would ruin much of what the city lord wanted from the fourth city in the first place.

So, in the end, Chen Ren let the thought go.

He stopped looking at the spirit stone like treasure and started treating it like what it was—a mechanism that needed to be understood just enough to turn the array off. Then he and the others began moving around it, searching for some lever, switch, or control that would finally shut the formation down.

A part of him still found it strange that something as vast as the [Grand Aegis Array] could be turned on and off with what was, in the end, just a lever.

But then again, simple designs had their own wisdom. Overcomplicated systems only became harder to manage, and if the one controlling the city ever needed to handle the array in a hurry, then a single direct mechanism was far better than some layered mess that could go wrong in ten different ways.

So when he finally found and pushed the lever up, the effect was immediate.

A long, heavy whooshing sound rolled through the chamber and seemed to travel outward through the city itself. He felt it more than heard it by the end, like something great had loosened and withdrawn. And when he climbed back out from beneath the courtyard, he looked up and saw that the array was gone.

Just like that.

The vast wall of protection that had nearly killed them all more than once had vanished, leaving the sky above the fourth city open at last.

Seeing it gone gave Chen Ren a strange sort of relief. Not joy exactly, because he was too tired for that, but something close enough. The work here was done.

And because of that, he had no intention of lingering any longer than necessary.

He got onto the master lift immediately with the others following behind him. In design, it was surprisingly plain. It did not look much different from the ordinary lifts on the lower floors, though there were thin stripes of gold worked around its surface that gave off faint waves of qi, and at its center sat a smooth orb. All Chen Ren had to do was place his hand on it and think of the floor he wished to reach.

He had no idea what the golden stripes actually did. And at that point, he did not care enough to start guessing.

The master lift activated smoothly and began to rise. They had barely started moving when Li Qingfeng suddenly let out a sharp yelp.

Chen Ren turned toward him at once, his body reacting faster than his thoughts, half-expecting another disaster to unfold right there inside the lift. But Li Qingfeng only stared at the air in front of him with wide eyes and said, “Look at the tokens.”

At once, Chen Ren and the others pulled up their statuses. What he saw made him widen his eyes.

He had gained another five hundred thousand tokens.

The number put him firmly back in first place on the rankings, and when he glanced across the others, he saw that all of them had received the same reward. Every one of them had jumped upward, enough that they were now sitting inside the top ten.

For a few breaths, Chen Ren simply stared at the numbers.

Was that the reward for reaching the master lift? It had to be.

But even so, he had not expected anything on that scale. To him, reaching the lift had already been the prize.

He even wondered, for a moment, whether he should simply ride the master lift through every remaining floor one by one.

If reaching this point had given him so many tokens, then what would happen if he simply kept ascending? No one had ever gone beyond the tenth floor before. Maybe each floor would reward him the same way, or even more, just for being the first to step onto it.

The thought was tempting enough that it lingered in his mind for a few breaths, but he soon forced himself to let it go. That was not what mattered right now.

First, he needed to reach the tenth floor. And once they were there, he needed to search the library.

If fortune still had some pity left for him, then there would be information on the medallion waiting there. And even if there was not, then he at least hoped to find some sort of manual on mind cultivation. If he could get his hands on that, then all the qi he had gathered so far would finally become useful, and he could push himself to the peak of the foundation establishment realm.

Princess Yanyue seemed to be caught in thoughts of her own.

Chen Ren glanced toward her. “We’ll find the journal you’re looking for.”

She looked back at him and gave a small nod, though her expression remained thoughtful.

“I hope so,” she said. “We’ve already done the impossible just to carve a direct path toward it. I only hope our luck didn’t run out while breaching the array.”

Yalan snorted immediately. “If there’s one thing I know about Chen Ren, it’s that his luck never seems to run out.”

Chen Ren opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, he saw the vortex above them beginning to form. The teleportation of the master lift was already taking hold, and the sight of it was enough to make him close his eyes at once. The others did the same. The circle of qi brushed over all of them, and a moment later he felt a wave of hot wind stroke across the back of his neck.

His eyes snapped open and what he saw made him freeze.

They were standing on the edge of a cliff.

And all around them, lava flowed.

***

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