Dao of Money

As they flew through the air on their swords, the shrill cries of the dragonlings kept coming from behind them, and only after several minutes did Chen Ren finally allow himself a quiet breath of relief. His plan had worked well enough.

More than once he turned to check whether any of the flock had broken through the smoke and given chase, but every time he looked, there was nothing there.

For now, at least, they were safe.

They kept flying at full speed, staying lower to the ground where the pressure of the floor was a little easier to bear. They cut through the burning landscape in long, sharp lines. A few times they veered around entire ridges and doubled back through narrow gaps between the red mountains, less because they were lost and more because Chen Ren wanted to make absolutely certain the dragonlings had no chance of picking up their trail again.

Only when enough time had passed and even the last faint echo of those creatures’ cries had disappeared did the tension in the group begin to ease.

It was then that Li Qingfeng brought his sword closer. “What was that? I saw you using darts back there, Sect Leader Chen.”

Chen Ren glanced his way and gave a small nod. “Nothing too special,” he said. “They’re called berserk darts.”

Everyone understood what he meant almost immediately, and Yalan, who had been sitting with her tail curled around herself in an almost offended little bundle, flicked one ear. “I do wonder how many other strange things you bought from Shrey.”

Chen Ren smiled faintly. “A few,” he said. “Enough that they should help if we get trapped up here.”

Yalan gave a soft huff that sounded suspiciously like approval, then looked ahead again.

“For now,” Chen Ren went on, “we keep moving and hope nothing else on this floor decides we look edible.”

No one argued with that.

So they flew.

For the rest of the day, they tried to cover as much distance as they could in as little time as possible, but even flying swords had limits. They needed qi to stay in motion, and none of them had endless reserves to burn. That was especially true for the twins. They were not at the peak of the foundation establishment realm, and their foundations were not as stable or deep as the others’, which meant they tired faster and had to be more careful.

Because of that, they could only keep the swords going for about three hours at a time before needing to stop and recover. Sometimes, even lesser, especially when other beasts noticed them and decided to test their luck.

And there were plenty of them on this floor. The dragonlings had only been the beginning.

If anything, they were the first warning that the beasts here had likely not tasted human flesh in a very long time and were more than willing to correct that. Even when they took the effort to set up a defensive formation around themselves during rest, they were still attacked twice before the day was over.

Land beasts were easier to handle, mostly because they could see them coming and choose how to deal with them, but the real problem was the sky.

This floor had too many flying creatures, and with the mountains and rocky ridges rising everywhere, it was often impossible to keep a clear route. More than once, they got attacked because they were forced to circle around some natural obstacle and ended up entering the territory of something hungry enough to test them.

That costs them time, sometimes blood too.

Most of those fights never became full battles. Chen Ren made sure of that. They would wound the beast hard enough to make it back off and then keep moving rather than waste more strength than necessary. The higher he climbed in the pagoda, the more he had started to feel as though death was always somewhere close behind him, just crawling quietly and waiting for the moment he finally stumbled.

Mainly because of that, he had no intention to spend even a single extra day on this floor if he could help it.

One thought rang in his mind constantly: the sooner they reached the grand library, the better.

Once there, he could search for the medallion, and only after that would he decide whether he truly wanted to keep climbing toward the end of the pagoda or simply leave this cursed place behind. Right now, if he was being honest with himself, he leaned toward leaving.

At least after collecting what else he needed from Shrey. But that choice still depended on the medallion. If he found it, then the rest could be decided. If he did not, then all of this would only become more complicated.

He had already gathered more than enough resources for his sect by this point. Far more than he had expected when he first entered.

Turning his fortunes around this much inside the pagoda still felt almost absurd when he thought about it too closely, and for that alone Chen Ren was genuinely grateful. But gratitude only meant something if he survived long enough to enjoy what he had earned.

That thought stayed with him more than anything else as they continued flying, getting closer and closer to the grand library.

At first, he could barely make out the grand library at all.

The mountains had hidden it too well. The red peaks kept cutting across the horizon, forcing them to weave through one after another, and only in brief gaps did Chen Ren catch flashes of something silver in the distance. But the farther they went, the more the shape of it revealed itself, and once they had passed enough of the mountains, the whole structure finally came into view.

Beyond that point, the land opened up.

There were hardly any mountains near the place itself, only a wide stretch of red, broken earth with the library standing alone in the middle of it like something placed there by the heavens themselves.

And it was enormous.

That was the only proper word for it.

The whole structure looked to be made of some silver metal that caught the light almost like glass, and even from afar it dwarfed City Lord Xiangrui’s castle several times over. The closer they flew, the larger it seemed to become, until Chen Ren had the strange feeling that it was still growing simply because his mind had not yet caught up to its true scale.

At the very least, he saw no monsters around it. No guards either.

That didn’t mean there were none. Xiangrui had only told them that the library contained knowledge vast enough to answer almost anything, but when Shrey asked for something from it, he had made it very clear that such knowledge would not be freely given. Chen Ren understood why. If the place truly held so much information and anyone could simply walk in and take it, then past climbers would have stripped it bare long ago. Cultivators were not known for preserving things for the sake of strangers.

So Chen Ren still expected trouble.

From a distance, there was nothing to fight.

Once they got close enough, another problem appeared. The library was so massive that simply finding the entrance took time. They had to circle around part of the structure, tracing its outer edge while the silver walls stretched on and on beside them, and even that nearly took an hour.

In the end, though, they found them.

Two giant gates, set into the structure and made of reddish metal to stand apart from the silver around them.

There were runes set above the gates, and for a moment Chen Ren found himself wondering whether they would need to do something specific to open them. But when Princess Yanyue simply guided the flying sword toward the doors and pressed a hand against one side, both gates swung inward at once.

She glanced back at him. “That was easier than I expected.”

Chen Ren nodded, then stepped off the sword and landed on the ground. Fast as the flying swords were, he was more than happy to be off them for a while. Standing on one for hours was tolerable when necessary, but it was hardly pleasant when someone else was controlling every turn and drop. His legs actually felt relieved to touch solid ground again.

Then he looked past the gates.

A long hallway stretched inward, straight and broad, with light spilling down from openings high in the ceiling. The others dismounted as well, and Li Qingfeng looked ahead. “Should we go in?”

“Yeah.” Chen Ren glanced at him. “We didn’t come all this way to stand at the entrance.”

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Then he took the first step inside.

A part of him had fully expected the floor to answer that decision with some hidden trap. He had almost braced for blades, flames, or some ridiculous formation to spring to life the moment his foot crossed the threshold. But nothing happened. The hallway simply remained what it was, and so the rest of them followed him in.

The place was vast.

Spacious enough that the sound of their footsteps felt small inside it, and every part of it had clearly been made with aesthetics in mind rather than simple function. The proportions were too deliberate, the stone too cleanly placed, the light too carefully arranged. For a few moments, Chen Ren found himself wondering which cultivator had been given the task of designing this floor in the first place.

He might have asked Wang Jun that question under normal circumstances.

But with the twins and Princess Yanyue around, that was not something he could do carelessly. Thinking of it made him realize he had not really spoken to the head for quite some time now. Wang Jun was still there at the edge of his awareness, but between the siege, the climb, and everything that had happened before it, the two of them had hardly exchanged more than a few words in a long while.

Chen Ren had almost forgotten about Wang Jun with everything that had been happening, and he knew the head was probably going to be annoyed about that. But there was nothing he could do for it right now. For the moment, all he could do was keep walking and hope there would be time to speak with him once he found himself alone again.

So he kept moving.

The hallway stretched on ahead until, eventually, it opened into something that looked very much like another lift. It was circular, almost disk-shaped, and stood there with all of its sides open, much like the master lift had. Chen Ren stared at it for a second, then said with a faint frown, “The pagoda really does love its lifts.”

Princess Yanyue, however, was already looking toward the side of it.

“There’s something written there,” she said, pointing toward a plaque fixed near the edge.

All of them moved faster after that, closing the distance until they could read it properly. The plaque was simple enough, and the message was clear: The lift leads to the common library. Warning: you must pass a test to access it. Failure will likely result in death.Yalan gave a scoffing sound.

“As if everything else in this pagoda hasn’t already been trying to kill us.”

Chen Ren found himself agreeing with that far too easily. He looked toward Princess Yanyue and said, “Do you think the test happens as soon as we step on the lift, or right before the library itself?”

Princess Yanyue only gave a small shrug. “It could be either. But there’s no point wasting time guessing.”

With that, she stepped onto the lift first.

The twins followed after her, and then Chen Ren climbed on with Yalan. The moment all of them were on it, the lift began to move. Chen Ren lifted his head as it carried them upward, expecting at some point to catch sight of whatever lay above, but the longer it rose, the less he could see of anything at all. There was only height, distance, and an endless ceiling lost somewhere far beyond his sight.

He knew the whole structure was massive already, but a part of him still wondered whether spatial arrays had been used to make it even larger on the inside. The scale of it certainly felt wrong enough for that. The lift kept rising and rising, yet the space above them never seemed to come any closer, as if height inside this place did not quite obey the same rules as the outside world.

Like that, more than five minutes passed in uneasy peace.

Eventually, everyone settled down a little. Even the twins sat, and after a while Li Qingfeng reached into his spatial ring and pulled out a few buns, passing them around without much ceremony.

Chen Ren took one immediately.

He could not even remember when he had last eaten properly. Pills were enough to keep a cultivator going, yes, but surviving and eating were never the same thing. Food was one of the better parts of being alive.

As he chewed, another thought came to him. And Chen Ren reached into his spatial ring and brought out four tickets.

That immediately caught everyone’s attention. Before any of them could start asking what they were, he decided to explain. “These are exit tickets. I got them from Shrey. If you tear one apart, it’ll take you out of the pagoda immediately. Unlike the return tickets between floors, you don’t need to be on a lift to use them.”

He passed them around one by one.

“I bought more of them recently,” he continued, “in case something happened and we needed a way out.”

Li Qingfeng looked down at the one in his hands and looked back up. “So this is a true escape route?”

The others studied theirs just as carefully.

Chen Ren nodded. “Yes. But don’t waste them. Only use one if you genuinely believe there’s no way left to survive otherwise. These are for when you need to stay alive.”

The moment that settled in, both twins immediately went to one knee.

“Thank you for your generosity,” they said almost together. These can’t have been cheap.”

Chen Ren shook his head. “It’s not a big deal. You two have stayed with me through too many floors already. This is the least I can do.”

Princess Yanyue looked down at the ticket in her hand for a moment. “This is still generous. Though I hope I never need to use something like this. We’re too close now to doing what no one else has done.”

Chen Ren nodded. “Yes, but—”

A shriek cut straight through his words.

He looked up at once, and dread settled in his chest as he finally understood what the plaque had meant by a test. Far above them, part of the wall split open, and from the gap burst what looked like books.

Only they were no books.

They were huge, each one nearly half his size, flying through the air with covers that snapped like wings. Their pages fluttered in violent bursts, and on the front of each was a mouth lined with crooked teeth where no mouth should have been. Strange runes glowed across their surfaces, but there were no eyes at all. Chen Ren had no idea how they saw, yet the moment they emerged, they angled straight toward the lift.

For a second, he simply stared.

Then the books dove.

The next instant, the rings on the twins’ hands flared, and a shimmering purple barrier rose around the lift. But the monstrous books only shrieked harder, and the sound of them was hideous, like chalk grinding down a slate until the ears wanted to tear themselves shut. Chen Ren pushed qi into his ears on instinct, just to keep them from bleeding.

Then the first book hit the barrier, and Chen Ren’s eyes widened.

He had been the one to give the twins those defensive artifacts. He knew how durable they were. Yet after a single slam from one of those things, cracks spread through the barrier.

He barely had time to process it before more books crashed in from the sides.

Once.

Twice.

Then the barrier gave out.

It shattered apart in a pulse of purple light, and before Chen Ren could fling the lightning already gathering in his hand, the monstrous books opened their mouths wide.

The next second, one of their tongues lashed out and slammed straight into him.

***

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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