Dao of Money

Till now, even if every floor of the pagoda had felt distinct from the last, they had still felt rooted in reality. Each one was just another kind of landscape, another biome that, strange as it might be, could still exist somewhere in the outside world.

The tenth floor was different.

The moment he arrived, it felt like they were dropped onto another planet.

Lava flowed everywhere.

It moved in thick, glowing rivers through a barren land of jagged rock and ash, cutting across the ground in slow, molten paths that gave off heat fierce enough to shimmer the air itself. Tall red mountains rose in every direction, their surfaces cracked and blackened as if the whole floor had once been burned and never truly cooled. Between them, the rocky earth had been split apart by the flowing lava into deep channels and broken ridges, making the whole place look violent even in stillness.

And above all of that, there was pressure.

Not the kind that came from an enemy or a formation, but something woven into the floor itself. The air felt so heavy that Chen Ren had to push qi through his body just to keep himself standing properly.

The others did the same almost at once, their expressions tightening as they looked around from the cliff where the master lift rested, the whole platform carved cleanly into the stone as if someone had sliced out a place for it long ago.

The trouble was that the mountains blocked too much.

Even from the cliff, they couldn’t see far.

So Princess Yanyue acted first. She stepped onto her flying sword and rose into the air, climbing higher and higher to get a better look. Chen Ren watched her go and immediately saw how different this floor was. Even with her skill, the pressure in the atmosphere made the sword struggle. It rose slower than it should have, and once it even shook badly enough to make his heart tighten for a second.

Only after several minutes did she come back down.

She jumped off the sword the moment she landed and said, “Far beyond the mountains, I saw a huge circular dome. It should take about a day to reach it. I think that’s the grand library City Lord Xiangrui spoke of.”

Chen Ren nodded. “It should also be where this floor’s city lord is,” he said. “If we want to search those books and find what we came here for, we’ll need to be careful. Hopefully it won’t take too much time.”

At that, Princess Yanyue’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think it’ll be simple.”

Yalan gave a sharp little snort, tail flicking once behind her like she was already annoyed by problems that had not even arrived yet.

“With Chen Ren needing to fetch something for Shrey, of course this is going to go wrong,” she said. Then her ears twitched, and she added, “Just don’t deal with that part until we’ve found what we came here for.”

Chen Ren only nodded.

By now, Princess Yanyue had already told the others what he had promised Shrey while he had been busy searching for the array mechanism. He doubted Yalan approved of it. The twins probably didn’t either. But back then, standing, trying to find a way to break through the [Grand Aegis Array], he had not exactly been drowning in better options.

He let the matter go for now and lifted his gaze toward the horizon.

Red mountains stood one behind another, with rivers of lava winding between them and hot wind sweeping through the broken land. Chen Ren drew in a slow breath of that heated air. “It would’ve been nice if the master lift had dropped us closer to the grand library. If something goes wrong, getting back here will take time.”

“Yes, well. It’s not like we have a way to request the pagoda until it changes its mind.” Yalan glanced toward the mountains, then back at him. “We should just get moving before this floor decides it doesn’t like guests.”

That got quiet nods from the others.

The twins stepped onto their flying sword first. Princess Yanyue followed, and Chen Ren climbed on behind her while Yalan squeezed herself neatly into the space between them with offended dignity, as if the arrangement were beneath her.

Then they set off.

The sword dipped off the cliff, gliding downward before steadying itself in the air just high enough above the ground to avoid the nearest rivers of lava. Chen Ren kept one hand on Princess Yanyue’s shoulder and the other braced lightly behind him, trying not to think too much about how one wrong movement could send all of them tumbling into molten death.

Not every stretch of ground below was flooded.

There were patches of black rock and cracked earth between the lava flows, some wide, some narrow, but enough of the floor was burning that he had no desire to test his luck. The swords had to thread through the landscape carefully, bending around sharp ridges, slanting past broken hills, and slipping between mountains that rose suddenly out of the earth like walls.

From time to time, Chen Ren looked down.

There were beasts moving below.

Some crawled over the rocks with bodies long and dark as cooled magma, while others stalked on thick legs through the heat as if it did not touch them at all. One creature he glimpsed had too many horns and skin that glowed faintly red through cracks in its hide. Another looked almost lizard-like until it lifted its head and he saw a mouth far too wide for anything natural.

On one rocky hill Chen Ren spotted something shaped like a yak, only its fur burned with a low halo of fire that never seemed to consume it. Strange as they were, none of the beasts paid them any real attention. They simply remained where they were, moving through the heat as though Chen Ren and the others did not matter at all.

That, more than anything, made the floor feel strange. For a place no climber had crossed in centuries, it felt almost too quiet.

After around an hour of traveling without incident, Chen Ren finally gave in to his curiosity.

“Do you know why no climber ever got past the tenth floor?” he asked. “It doesn’t really look that special.”

Princess Yanyue glanced back at him briefly over her shoulder before returning her attention to the path ahead.

“I believe it’s because the ordinary lift is somewhere under the floor,” she said, “and everything below is apparently filled with lava and beasts strong enough to crush most foundation establishment cultivators with ease. Even cultivators have their limits when it comes to heat, at least in this floor.”

Chen Ren nodded slightly. “We won’t have that problem, then. Though I still don’t understand why the master lift is just sitting there openly on a cliff. Shouldn’t any climber be able to stumble across it?”

Yalan’s ears flicked once before she answered. “Maybe. But I’m sure there are other safeguards in place to stop that. After how hard we had to work just to get one master lift, it would be ridiculous if someone could simply chance over another one in the open.”

“Probably,” Chen Ren muttered. “At least that should mean the surface itself would not give us too much trou—”

A shrill cry split the air from their left.

Yalan immediately frowned.

“I knew it,” she said, giving Chen Ren a sharp look as if this were somehow his fault for speaking too soon.

Chen Ren only shrugged at Yalan’s glare and turned his head toward the twins flying on their right. Both of them had already stiffened, their earlier ease gone the moment the cry split the air.

“Stay close,” he said. “Whatever these things are, we’ll handle it. Li Qingfeng, just focus on flying. Li Qingxue, take down anything that gets too close.”

Both of them nodded immediately as more cries came from the left.

Chen Ren turned fully this time, and then he saw them.

A flock of creatures that looked like smaller dragons was racing toward them through the hot air. Their bodies were a deep, bloody crimson, but strips of darker scale ran across their backs and limbs like blackened armor. Each had four wings instead of two, the extra pair smaller and set lower along the body, letting them move through the air in sharp bursts rather than smooth glides. Their heads were narrow and vicious, lined with hooked teeth that flashed whenever they opened their mouths, and their tails whipped behind them like lashes of living flame.

There were dozens of them.

And the moment they noticed the two flying swords, they sped up.

The shift was so sudden that Chen Ren barely had time to tense before Princess Yanyue dropped their sword sharply. One of the dragonlings as he named them in his mind tore through the space where they had been a heartbeat earlier, its claws slicing through the air with enough force that Chen Ren felt the wind from it.

The next instant, heat rolled over him. The creature opened its mouth, and fire rushed toward them.

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Yalan answered before Chen Ren could.

A burst of flame shot from her, meeting the dragonling’s breath head-on. The two fires collided in midair and exploded, the force of it knocking the creature spinning away until it slammed into the side of a nearby hill. Rock broke under the impact, and the beast vanished in a shower of dust and sparks.

But there were many more left.

Princess Yanyue was already fighting to keep the sword balanced. Between the weight of the air on this floor and the dragonlings swarming in from all sides, even her control looked strained now. The twins had it worse. Li Qingxue kept losing arrows, but too many of them flew wide in the chaos, and Li Qingfeng was having to pour everything into keeping their sword from tilting into the lava below.

Chen Ren saw all of it in a glance, then he started throwing lightning.

Bolt after bolt flashed from his hands. One of them struck a dragonling right in the mouth while it was opening up to breathe fire, and the creature dropped out of the air at once. But the others were already twisting around the attacks, dodging with sharp, jerking movements as they closed in again.

They kept chasing them.

By now, the dragonlings had clearly marked the two flying swords as prey, and the more Chen Ren watched them move, the worse the situation looked. They were fast—too fast for comfort—and the flames pouring from their mouths were not the weak sparks of lesser beasts.

Between the speed of their dives and the force behind their breath attacks, Chen Ren could already tell they were peak tier-three beasts. The worst part was that there were too many of them, and they were learning.

That was the part Chen Ren hated most.

With time, the dragonlings no longer just rushed them wildly. They started gliding around the swords in loose arcs, cutting off certain angles and pushing them into narrower paths before attacking from the directions that were hardest to dodge. If he and Yalan had not been intercepting their claws and flames again and again, both swords would already have been falling.

But that only bought them time. Not much more.

Chen Ren threw out another spread of chain lightning, the arcs snapping between two dragonlings before leaping toward a third, when Princess Yanyue suddenly shouted, “Hold on!”

The next instant, she drove the sword down at such a sharp angle that Chen Ren nearly lost his footing altogether.

His legs burned with the strain of keeping himself on the sword as he grabbed at Princess Yanyue’s waist without thinking, and Yalan’s tail, hot and alive with flame, brushed his leg as she clung tighter too. The sword plunged so low that for one terrible second Chen Ren thought they were about to bury themselves straight into the lava.

He heard shrill cries above them.

Then Princess Yanyue twisted the sword left.

They skimmed away from the molten river by a breath, and as Chen Ren looked back he saw three of the dragonlings fail to match the turn. They slammed into the lava and screamed, their bodies thrashing in the molten current.

So even creatures born on this floor were not entirely safe from it.

The thought barely settled before something else pulled his attention—the twins.

Their sword had drifted farther ahead during the dive, and now they were in trouble. A dozen dragonlings had boxed them in from all sides. Li Qingxue kept firing arrows, quick and desperate, but the beasts were already moving too well. They slipped aside before the shots could land, closing in again with every pass.

Qingfeng’s control over the flying sword was getting worse by the second.

Panic was starting to show in the way he moved it, and with dragonlings darting around them from every side, his vision kept getting cut off at the worst moments. Chen Ren could see the path that panic would take. Another few seconds like this and the sword would lurch too hard in the wrong direction, and then the twins would not just fall.

They would crash.

Before he could say anything, Princess Yanyue saw their situation too. She angled their sword upward and drove it toward the twins. “We need to get these things off us. There are too many to fight properly like this, especially in the air.”

Chen Ren nodded. “Be ready to fly as fast as you can,” he said. “I’ll make sure the dragonlings can’t keep up.”

Princess Yanyue glanced back at him for just a second. “Dragonlings?”

But he did not explain.

By then they were already closing in on the flock surrounding the twins. A few of the beasts noticed them and started to turn, but Chen Ren moved first. He reached into his spatial ring, pulled out a blowpipe, and fired.

Small, thin needles shot out in quick bursts and scattered through the cluster of dragonlings.

With so many packed together, there was no real way for them to avoid it all. A few of the needles missed cleanly. Others cut through empty air or dropped uselessly when the beasts shifted. But enough of them struck.

From his shoulder, Yalan immediately muttered, “Poison?”

“No.” Chen Ren replied at once, then shouted. “Watch out!”

A wave of dragonlings turned fully toward them, and several of them opened their mouths at once. Flames poured down in a hot rushing wall.

Yalan answered immediately, throwing her own fire forward to meet theirs head-on, but there were too many of them. Even with her intercepting the worst of it, enough heat pushed through to threaten them, and Chen Ren reacted on instinct. He activated one of his defensive artifacts, and a red shield bloomed into place right in front of them.

Chen Ren’s shield might have meant nothing against the [Grand Aegis Array], but his artifacts were still more than enough to block attacks at the peak of the foundation establishment realm, and that was all he needed here. The red barrier held long enough against the dragonlings’ flames for Princess Yanyue to force the flying sword through the heat and past the first line of beasts.

The moment they cleared it, she pulled the sword higher.

Chen Ren immediately pointed toward the three dragonlings pressing closest to the front of the twins’ sword, the ones keeping them pinned even with their defensive artifacts flickering around them.

“Yalan,” he said in a tight voice, “take those three out, then we leave.”

She moved immediately hearing that.

Her claws slid free at once, and as soon as they drew close enough to the twins, she launched herself off the sword. The jump was clean and long, and she landed squarely on the back of the nearest dragonling. Her claws dug in deep, extending as they cut into the creature’s scales. Before it could thrash her off, she pushed away from it and sprang straight to the second one.

That dragonling tried to twist away, but Yalan’s flames hit it first.

The beast screamed, blinded, and she finished the job by raking through its eyes before using its collapsing body as a stepping point toward the third. Her claws tore into its wings the moment she landed, shredding enough of them that the creature lost its balance in the air. But Yalan did not stay on it long enough to fall with it. She kicked off again and slipped back through the space between the swords, using the twins’ protective barrier as cover before landing neatly on Chen Ren’s shoulder as if she had never left.

The whole thing took less than ten seconds.

Chen Ren had no time to admire it.

The rest of the flock was already turning toward them, regrouping faster than he liked, so he reached into his spatial ring again and pulled out three smoke bombs. He hurled them directly into the dragonlings’ path. The bombs struck their front ranks and burst at once, filling the air with thick smoke.

“Now!” Chen Ren shouted. “Run!”

That was all the twins needed.

Their sword shot upward through the smoke, and Princess Yanyue pushed theirs after it, doing her best to match the sudden burst of speed. Behind them, Chen Ren heard dragonlings shrieking and snapping in frustration, and knew one thing.

His plan had worked.

***

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