Dao of Money

While Chen Ren was busy looking for a way to break the [Grand Aegis Array], Zi Wen was dealing with a trial of his own, and that trial had brought him thousands of feet in the air, fingers locked around a wyvern’s neck ridge as the beast threw itself through the frozen sky haphazardly.

Whiskey was hanging from his robes, screaming.

His fur had gone stiff with frost and every time the wyvern banked, the little squirrel’s shrieks climbed another pitch.

The wind at this height was brutal, relentless, and neither of them were in any position to do anything about it. At this height, it didn’t matter how much cultivation either of them had. A fall was a fall.

Zi Wen honestly didn’t know how things had gotten this far.

He had known the trial would be hard. But when the wyvern had first appeared, he had almost decided to give up on the spot. He never got the chance to make that call.

Before he could even turn around, the wyvern had opened its maw and started raining down balls of ice that burst into blue flames on impact, freezing everything they touched.

The whole mountain peak was covered before Zi Wen could even process what was happening. Every path was on flames.

With no way to run, he had settled for a fight.

He had never fought a wyvern before, and this one was clearly well above the foundation establishment realm. But he wasn’t going to go down without trying.

Little Yuze had burned the ice balls out of the air with streams of flame. Whiskey had thrown lightning and wind at the beast, though none of it had ever reached—the wyvern intercepted every attack before it could land. And Zi Wen had pulled his bow from his spatial ring and started firing qi arrows.

He had mostly focused on intercepting the ice balls, keeping them from landing, but every time he tried to aim for the wyvern itself, the beast would simply climb higher, staying just out of reach.

There was no angle that worked. No shot that could close that distance.

Five minutes in, the wyvern had changed its approach.

It stopped raining ice and started diving, sweeping down toward the peak and throwing out its massive wings to blast them with the force of the wind alone. It was a simple and smart strategy.

Whiskey was sent flying on the first pass, tumbling through the air until Little Yuze caught him by the paw and dragged him back.

Zi Wen himself had only kept his footing by pulling a rope from his spatial ring and binding himself to a boulder.

It hadn’t been enough. The wind kept hammering them and even the boulder had started to shift against the stone beneath it.

He had maybe seconds left before it gave out entirely, and just then Little Yuze had launched himself forward and actually landed a hit, a direct stream of flame that caught the wyvern across the face and drove it back.

It bought them time. But it also made things worse.

The wyvern came back angrier. It returned to the ice balls but added something new to its strategy. It started swooping low, claws outstretched, trying to simply pick them up and carry them off.

Little Yuze nearly didn’t make it out of one of those passes. Zi Wen had seen the claws closing and reacted without thinking, throwing a thundercrack orb that detonated on impact and threw the wyvern sideways.

It worked. For a moment, the beast was disoriented, and he had taken the chance to do something that he now regretted.

He crossed the distance before the wyvern could recover and grabbed onto its scales, hauling himself up onto its back.

He didn’t have a better plan than that.

Whiskey, somehow, followed. The idea had been simple—hold on to its back, hit it from above, and let Little Yuze keep its attention from the front.

The wyvern had other thoughts.

The moment it felt his weight, it abandoned the mountain peak entirely and flew right into the sky, until the peak was a grey smudge below the clouds and the air was so thin and so cold that ice had started forming on Zi Wen’s skin.

He couldn’t hear Little Yuze anymore. The howls that had been keeping him grounded, a distant anchor through all of this, was gone. Swallowed by the wind and the altitude.

He just hoped his wolf would find his way back down and reach the rest of his sect, even if Zi Wen didn’t make it through today.

The moment that thought crossed his mind, Whiskey screamed again. Lightning crackled around the little lunari in short, desperate bursts, breaking apart the ice that had built up on his fur.

Then the wyvern took another sharp turn.

They both went sliding down the scales. Zi Wen threw out his hand and caught a ridge by his fingertips, the wind crashing into his face hard enough to blur his vision.

His muscles burned with the strain. He pulled qi around himself just to keep his eyes open against the cold, and through the haze he saw the lunari had slid all the way down to his leg, clinging there.

Zi Wen let go of one hand. Even with everything pressing down on him, with his arms shaking and his grip already at its limit, he reached down, grabbed the lunari, and tucked him back into his robes.

Whiskey screeched once as he found his spot, then went quiet. Zi Wen grabbed the scales again with both hands, bracing himself.

He knew the wyvern would turn again. It always did, and the next second, it happened.

But this time it didn’t bank sideways, it reversed instead, flipping itself upside down in the air. Zi Wen felt his grip give just slightly, just enough to send his stomach dropping.

Whiskey screamed. The sky and the ground swapped places and Zi Wen squeezed his eyes shut, every thought narrowed down to one thing.

Don’t let go. Don’t let go. Don’t let go.

The heavens, for once, listened.

The wyvern rolled back upright and Zi Wen let out a long, shaking breath. For a single second he felt relief.

Then the wyvern screeched—loud, sharp, unbothered—as if to remind him that this wasn’t over. That sooner or later, his grip was going to fail.

It wasn’t wrong.

At the speed the wyvern was moving, at this height, his grip was going to fail eventually.

The fourth floor was also nothing but mountain peaks in every direction. It wouldn’t surprise him at all if the wyvern decided to simply fly into one. It wouldn’t do much damage to a beast that size.

But Zi Wen would be crushed flat.

He needed to do something before that happened.

”Hold on, Whiskey,” he muttered, getting an idea.

A shriek came from inside his robes, somewhere between a question and a complaint. Zi Wen didn’t answer. He started moving, reaching up and grabbing the next scale, then the next, pulling himself forward one handhold at a time. He kept his movements as intentional as he could, hoping the constant buffeting of the wind would mask what he was doing. If he could just reach the wyvern’s head, then he could—

A sudden jolt ruined his thoughts.

“Fuck!”

His right hand slipped and he was left hanging by one arm, the wind tearing at him from every direction. Whiskey screamed. Zi Wen swung himself back in and grabbed on, breathing hard, fingers aching.

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Then the wyvern dived.

The ground rushed up from below and the wind became a wall, pressing against him with enough force to flatten his robes against his body. He flooded qi around himself and held on through the shaking, teeth clenched.

The wyvern leveled out a moment later and Zi Wen immediately reached up and grabbed another scale with his free hand.

Then he looked at his palm. It was bleeding.

The edges of the scales had opened cuts across his skin that he hadn’t even felt until now. The blood was already beginning to freeze, dark at the edges of each wound.

Zi Wen cursed under his breath, dread settling heavy in his chest.

He didn’t know how he’d lasted this long. But he knew it wouldn’t continue. Every second he spent crawling from scale to scale was a second the wyvern had to throw him off, and with his hands already bleeding and the cold eating through his qi, he was running out of both time and strength.

Whiskey also kept screaming. It made it nearly impossible to think, but then something clicked in his mind.

He didn’t move on it immediately.

The idea had risk built into it—doing it wrong meant losing his grip entirely. So he stayed where he was and turned it over in his head, looking for the flaws, running through it again and again while the wind howled around him.

Then the wyvern shook.

He nearly lost his grip, fingers scraping against the scales before catching on a ridge. He held there, breathing through his teeth, and when the beast steadied he let out a slow exhale.

There was no more time to think.

He focused on his spatial ring and pulled out a chain. One arm left the scales as he let the links wrap around his forearm, and then he swung it up and threw.

It bounced off and fell slack. He pulled it back and threw it again.

It bounced again. Zi Wen felt frustration flare up hot in his chest, cutting through the cold for just a moment.

He sighed, deciding to wait. The wyvern straightened further in the next minute, its movement briefly leveling, and in that window he threw the chain one more time.

It caught finally. The end slipped under a scale and held.

Zi Wen smiled, but then the wyvern shook and his grip on the scales gave out completely. He grabbed the chain instead. For one terrible second he felt it go taut and strain under his weight, every link pulled to its limit. But it held.

The wyvern probably didn’t even feel the chain catch. To a beast that size, it was nothing. But to Zi Wen, it was everything.

When the wyvern straightened again, he moved.

He wedged his feet between the scales for footing and used the chain to pull himself forward, and for the first time since this whole nightmare had started, he actually made real progress.

He took a step every few seconds. Slowly, he was making progress. Even Whiskey chirped at that.

Though, the jolts kept coming.

The wyvern wasn’t letting up, shaking and banking at irregular intervals, clearly intent on putting him on the ground one way or another. But with the chain in his hands and his feet finding holds between the scales, he could balance through most of it.

He learned to read the small shifts in the beast’s movement, the slight tensing before each jolt, and when he felt it coming he would stop and hold until it passed.

Then he kept climbing.

It took far longer than he’d expected. The wyvern was enormous, and what had looked like a manageable distance from below turned out to be a crawl that stretched on and on.

He climbed like the beast was a mountain.

The trial clearly wanted him to tame it. That much was obvious now. But taming wasn’t going to happen while the wyvern still saw him as something to scrape off.

After what felt like hours, the neck finally came into view.

He gritted his teeth and pushed through the last stretch, then stowed the chain back into his spatial ring and grabbed on with both hands. The skin here was rough and thick, with hardly any scales, but it gave him something to hold. He locked his grip and let himself breathe for just a second.

Then suddenly, the wyvern realized where he was.

It let out a cry that split the sky and dove straight down, nose aimed at the ground far below. Zi Wen’s stomach lurched, and he just held onto that rough skin.

The ground rushed up fast but Zi Wen had spent enough time on the beast’s back by now to know how to hold through it. He kept his grip, kept his balance, and waited out the dive.

But he also knew he was running out of time. If the wyvern had figured out what he was trying to do, it would make things a great deal harder very soon.

He took a breath, an idea coming to his mind before he muttered. ”Whiskey, hold on tight.”

The next second, he pushed his qi into his right arm, grabbed with his left, and drove his fist into the wyvern’s neck.

The impact sent vibrations rippling through the thick skin beneath him. He hit it again. Then again.

The wind screamed around him and the beast shook and rolled but Zi Wen kept punching, again and again, until the skin split and blood welled up against his knuckles.

The wyvern roared.

Each strike made it more agitated, its movements growing wilder and more erratic. But Zi Wen already knew the punches alone wouldn’t be enough.

He reached into his spatial ring and pulled out the thundercrack orbs.

The wyvern turned sharply before he could use them.

The orbs rolled straight out of his fingers. He watched them bounce across the spiked back, tumble toward the wings, and then they went off.

The explosion hit him like a wall. He was slammed down hard against the scales, ears ringing, vision white for a moment.

When it cleared he saw the spikes around him broken and scattered, the wings caught in crackling flame. He grabbed the nearest scale with everything he had as Whiskey screamed somewhere in his robes as the wyvern started to fall.

It dropped out of the sky in a slow, terrible arc, angling straight toward one of the mountain peaks in the distance. Zi Wen watched it coming closer and his eyes went wide.

He knew exactly what was about to happen.

”Whiskey. Hold on!”

He shouted, and then he let go, dropping down.

***

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