Dao of Money

As soon as Merchant Shrey said those words, it was as if the gears in Chen Ren’s mind—jammed and rusted from turning the same problem over and over—had suddenly been greased. He latched onto the idea before he’d even fully processed it, and the more he turned it over, the more it felt right. That was the way. That had to be the way.

The reason he had never stopped believing there was a path through the array came down to something simple—the logic the pagoda ran on. If something existed here, if you could interact with it, then it could be dealt with.

The array wasn’t something he could break with his fists. Instead, he needed a hammer big enough to actually do the job. And Merchant Shrey had just described exactly that.

The smile came before he could stop it.

Shrey stared at him. ”Are you alright, kid? Have you lost your mind sitting in front of me?” He pointed with his finger. ”Why are you smiling? I just told you it was impossible.”

”You also told me how to do it,” Chen Ren said.

Shrey blinked. Then his face shifted as understanding caught up with him, and he let out a short laugh, shaking his head.

”You think the city lords are going to help you? I know you have some kind of arrangement with City Lord Xiangrui, but even he won’t involve himself in something this pointless when there’s nothing in it for him.” He leaned back. ”That man lives in his own world. I’d be surprised if he even leaves his castle to take a walk outside.”

Chen Ren didn’t answer right away. Because Shrey wasn’t wrong.

If he walked up to City Lord Xiangrui and asked for something like this, the man would laugh at him for a long time. But he didn’t need to convince anyone yet. Merchant Shrey had handed him more than one idea to work with, and he still had seven days.

”You don’t need to worry about that for now. What I want is information on the other city lords. At least the ones on the first five floors,” he said after a few seconds.

Shrey frowned at him the way someone might look at a child about to walk into something that would get him badly hurt.

”I can sell it to you for the right price. But you’d just be making a mistake.” He shook his head. ”I don’t even think they’ll agree to meet you.”

”Let me worry about that.” Chen Ren paused after saying that as another thought occurred to him. ”The top hundred items in your catalogue, none of them have been sold yet, have they?”

Shrey snorted. ”Of course not. Only a handful of climbers have even found me, and none of them have the tokens to buy anything past the thousandth spot. I doubt even you have millions.”

”I don’t,” Chen Ren said. ”But I have some ideas. I just needed to know those items would still be here.”

Shrey grunted and said nothing more on the matter.

The next two hours were spent negotiating. Merchant Shrey might not have approved of the plan, but he was a merchant before anything else, and his job was to sell. The problem was the price he put on every piece of information—each detail, each name, each small fact cost more than it had any right to. By the time Chen Ren had pulled out everything useful he could, he was frustrated.

In the end he had spent far more tokens than he would have liked. But he didn’t feel like it had been wasted. Information was exactly what he needed right now, and he already had a clear enough idea of how to earn the tokens back, and then some. He took a long look through the catalogue before leaving, marking out a handful of items that might become relevant in breaking the array, then made his way back toward the lift.

There was a strange lightness in his steps as he walked. It surprised him a little. The plan in his head was unrealistic by almost any measure, and yet just having a direction, just having taken a single step forward, was enough to make things feel different.

Wang Jun ruined the feeling the moment he stepped onto the lift.

”So,” the head said, ”are you planning to offer your body to the city lord to get his cooperation? I’ll warn you now, he might not be interested.”

Chen Ren stared flatly ahead. ”You’re vulgar and you have strange fantasies. I’m not doing anything of the sort.” He started the lift. ”That isn’t even close to the first phase of the plan. City lords come much later.”

”Then what’s the first phase?” Wang Jun asked. ”Getting millions of tokens to buy out the catalogue?”

Chen Ren grinned. ”Actually, yes.”

Silence stretched between them for a few seconds.

Then Wang Jun blinked in surprise. ”How are you going to pull that off?”

Chen Ren thought for a moment, turning the pieces over in his mind. He had everything he needed already. He just had to line it all up in the right order.

Once he had it all lined up, he said simply, ”I’m going to run a small business.”

”A small business,” Wang Jun repeated. ”Chen Ren, you are already selling everything cultivators could possibly want. The shop is running well. That theater you put together is probably gonna get good revenue. And you can’t farm zombies anymore—if you even set foot on the sixth floor, the Zombie Queen will personally come to cut you down.”

Chen Ren’s grin only grew wider as Wang Jun listed everything, because none of it had anything to do with what he actually had in mind.

”You’ll see. But I’ll give you a hint,” he said, then let the pause sit for a moment. ”You saw how many cultivators are still entering the pagoda. I checked the rankings earlier. There are over five thousand of them now.”

”Sure,” Wang Jun said. ”And half of them won’t survive the next week.”

”Probably. But more will come in after them, and I don’t really care about most of them anyway.” Chen Ren leaned back against the invisible wall of the lift. ”What I care about are the ones that make it to the fifth floor. Those are the people I want to target.”

Wang Jun made a sound somewhere between disbelief and irritation. ”Aren’t they already spending tokens in your shop? How much more are you planning to squeeze out of them?”

”You’re misunderstanding something,” Chen Ren said. ”A lot of cultivators have a resource scarcity mindset. They’ve gone their whole lives without easy access to pills, equipment, or anything decent, and that doesn’t go away just because they’re in the pagoda. A good number of them have never bought a single thing from my shop. They’re trying to get through on skill alone, hoarding every token they have because spending feels like losing.”

He knew such cultivators well. They were the ones who had scraped their way up from the bottom of the cultivation world, people who had never had resources handed to them.

They were the ones who probably spent a century barely scraping into being an inner disciple of their sect. The type who guarded even the smallest resources because that was how they had survived in a world that handed everything to geniuses and left everyone else to figure it out on their own.

They had probably debated with themselves multiple times before buying even a basic item here, and with so many cultivators now competing for tokens, the chances of earning enough to feel comfortable were slimmer than ever.

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Those were exactly the people Chen Ren wanted to aim for.

The portal came up before he could say anything more, and within a few minutes he was already moving through the streets of Goldspire City.

It was noticeably fuller than before. Climbers were everywhere, moving in groups or alone, and more guards patrolled the streets than he remembered seeing. He also spotted cultivators with handcarts weaving between the foot traffic, trying to sell wares, and every time a guard came into view they scattered quickly and found somewhere else to be.

The city still hadn’t legalized climber-run businesses then. But with this many people flooding in, Chen Ren suspected that wouldn’t hold much longer. The laws would have to bend eventually. At this point, nobody would even blink if the pagoda stayed open for a full year.

That was its own strange thing to sit with.

As far as he knew, nothing like this had happened before. Was it simply because it had been centuries since the last opening? Or was something deliberately keeping the gates open, pulling more and more people inside for reasons that he couldn’t comprehend?

Chen Ren didn’t know. And he was fairly certain he wasn’t going to find an answer to that anytime soon.

He pushed the thought aside and kept moving until he reached the Divine Coin Pavilion just to find it even busier than the last time he’d seen it. The line outside stretched well past what he could comfortably count, cultivators packed together and waiting with the particular restless energy of people who had been standing too long. The inside, visible through the open entrance, was no better—wall to wall with climbers, the noise of it spilling out onto the street.

Chen Ren smiled at the sight of it and started moving through the crowd toward the entrance.

A few heads turned immediately. Then came the voices.

”What do you think you’re doing?”

”Get to the back of the line.”

”Hey, did you not hear me?”

Chen Ren didn’t slow down. ”I’m the owner, clear the way.”

There were confused looks. A few muttered exchanges. But the crowd parted anyway, because there was something about the way he said it that didn’t leave much room for doubt, and within a minute he was through the entrance and inside.

New staff moved behind the desk. He scanned the faces quickly and found Du Rensheng near the center of it all, already looking back at him.

The man’s face went through several emotions in rapid succession before landing firmly on relief and happiness, and he immediately started pushing through the crowd toward Chen Ren with a speed that was slightly alarming. He looked ready to hug him in front of everyone, maybe even kiss if he allowed it.

Chen Ren put a hand up before things could escalate. ”Don’t.”

Du Rensheng stopped, looking genuinely disappointed about it. Around them, several climbers had turned to watch, confusion plain on their faces. Most of them would have known Du Rensheng as the partial owner of the pavilion, which made the man’s reaction to his arrival something worth staring at.

Chen Ren gave him a moment to compose himself, then asked about Anji. Du Rensheng pointed toward her office without hesitation.

He immediately made his way through the crowd, not paying attention to the looks that followed him, and reached the office door. He didn’t even bother knocking.

”Anji, it’s me. I’m coming in.”

He opened the door and paused.

Anji was there, as expected. But she wasn’t alone. Sitting across from her was Li Xuan.

At the sound of the door, he turned.

Li Xuan’s eyes went wide and he stood up immediately, Anji also rose from her side of the desk at the same time. Chen Ren had wondered more than once what had become of him on the seventh floor, but the man looked healthy enough.

”Chen Ren.” Li Xuan said. ”I didn’t expect to see you back on the fifth floor.”

Chen Ren closed the door behind him and nodded. ”I can say the same for you. What are you doing here?”

Li Xuan’s expression shifted, eyes dropping slightly. ”I managed to impress the Great House of Long on the seventh floor and got access to their lift. But Li Kuangdao and Li Shijun had already moved ahead with a few others from my sect.” He paused. ”I figured they’d set up an ambush somewhere further up and decided it wasn’t worth walking into. So I came back down to think things through.” He glanced at Anji briefly. ”I came to ask about you since I didn’t have much else to do in the city. And now here you are.”

”Here I am,” Chen Ren agreed. He moved further into the room and looked between the two of them. ”I’m sure you’re both wondering why.”

Anji nodded from behind her desk. She looked well for someone who had been managing things alone for a while. ”Honestly, Sect Leader Chen, I didn’t expect to see you for some time. Li Xuan mentioned you had likely moved on to the eighth floor.”

”I did,” Chen Ren said. ”I came back because there’s something I need to take care of.”

”And what’s that?” she asked.

Chen Ren pulled out a chair and sat down. ”I need to start a new business.”

Anji blinked. ”What kind of business, Sect Leader Chen? The pavilion is already running at full capacity and the theater—”

”Something different.” He leaned back, turning the idea over one more time in his head, trying to find the cleanest way to explain it. It had several moving parts, and the order mattered. He needed her to understand the whole shape of it, not just the surface.

But then a single word clicked into place and he smiled.

”A lottery. I’m going to start a lottery. But before any of that gets set up, before we sell a single ticket—” He looked between Anji and Li Xuan, his smile widening just slightly. ”We’re going on a treasure hunt.”

The room fell quiet for a moment.

Li Xuan stared at him. Anji stared at him. Neither of them looked like they had expected those two sentences to come out of his mouth in that order.

Chen Ren chuckled at their reaction, and then moved to explain what he actually meant.

***

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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