Dao of Money

Jun dodged left in the air as the giant tentacle beast lashed out in front of his face.

Before it could swing again, he formed a huge spear of dark flames and drove it straight into one of its larger eyes. At once, he made more smaller spears and sent them tearing toward the rest.

The monster tried to block them with its tentacles, but the flames ripped through the thick flesh and punched into more of its eyes anyway.

Just then, Shuyi leapt from one of the shelves with a blade in hand and cut clean across the monster’s chest. Flesh split apart and a wet mass of it slapped onto the floor.

And just like that, it was dead.

Jun clicked his tongue.

The grand library hadn’t given him a single good fight yet. This was already their third trial in the last half hour, and every single one had been useless. The monsters looked frightening enough, and maybe that would be enough to shake weaker cultivators, but Jun knew better.

They only looked dangerous.

A beast with that many eyes was easy to kill once one stopped being distracted by its shape, and tentacles were only useful if they had room to move. In a chamber like this, half their size worked against them.

Whoever built this trial clearly cared more about fear than function.

Still, that part worked in Jun’s favour. The faster these trials ended, the less time he wasted. That was good.

Unfortunately, it was also pointless.

He only needed one look at his disciples’ faces as they flipped through the books in the room to know there was nothing worthwhile here either.

As he looked at them, Shuyi was the first to speak. “This one seems to be filled with water-aspected techniques, Master.”

Jun immediately snorted.

He had no use for such techniques. There might have been one or two decent ones among them, but in the end most of it meant nothing to him. More importantly, he could not simply pass such things down to any disciple he pleased. Normal martial techniques and demonic techniques were different at their root. One could not just treat them as the same.

“Then let’s try another room.”

Both of his disciples nodded, and the three of them moved back out into the hallway. But the moment they stepped outside, Shuyi spoke again.

“What if we don’t find any information about the medallion in this library, Master? Where do we go next?”

Jun paused and turned to look at her. “I don’t like thinking about that before we’ve even searched the whole library,” he said. “And besides, we are not the only ones looking for the medallion here.”

Both disciples stilled at that. “Do you mean Princess Yanyue, Master?” Wenji asked.

Jun shook his head. “No. I doubt the princess knows anything about the medallions. But Chen Ren definitely does. When I asked him about it, his face went blank. It wasn’t shock. It wasn’t confusion. He was trying to hide his reaction at that moment, and I’ve seen that look before.”

That confidence didn’t come from guesswork.

Jun had lived for centuries. He had seen every kind of person there was to see, and because of that, he could tell lies from truth easily enough even without using any technique. In his eyes, Chen Ren not only knew about the medallions, but there was also a real chance he already had one in his possession.

Maybe more than one. There were several reasons behind that thought.

The biggest one, at least in Jun’s mind, was the existence of Chen Ren himself.

Since becoming a cultivator, Jun had tried many things, and every time something strange rose in his way and blocked him from taking the final step, it had almost always turned out to be the will of the heavens creating an obstacle. Right now, he saw Chen Ren as exactly that sort of obstacle.

After all, the man had appeared from nowhere.

Before this, he and his sect should have been nothing more than a small, forgettable speck in the empire. Yet now Chen Ren was moving together with Princess Yanyue and had the attention of all the Guardian Sects on him. That was not something one achieved normally. Not without some favour from the heavens.

Another thing that added weight to Jun’s suspicion was how quickly Chen Ren had climbed the floors.

Even with Princess Yanyue beside him, that pace did not make sense. She was not especially famous for overwhelming strength. Jun also remembered seeing her, Chen Ren and a whole group trying to break through the Grand Aegis Array back on the eighth floor, yet somehow he and his group had still reached this place before him. There was no way they had moved up by the normal path. They had clearly found some other method of ascending between the floors.

Jun knew well enough that the Zombie Queen Vesrya had not told him everything. He had always expected that much. But he still had not thought there would be another path through the floors, and certainly not one that some random cultivator would discover before him.

If Chen Ren was not heaven’s chosen, then none of that should have been possible.

And Jun hated the chosen of the heavens with every fibre of his being.

They were always more troublesome than they looked at first glance.

Because of that alone, Jun had already decided that Chen Ren and everyone with him would die before he left this floor. The only reason he had not acted yet was because he still didn’t know what would happen if they started fighting inside the library itself. He was sure there had to be security measures for something like that, and the last thing he wanted was to trigger them without reason.

Jun had never been the type to create more trouble for himself when patience could solve the same problem.

So he kept watching them quietly instead.

Through his sensing technique, he followed their movements through the library. Once they stepped outside, he planned to move immediately and kill them all. It would take some effort, especially with that elder spirit beast among them, but in the end Jun had no doubt he would win.

With that thought in mind, he brushed his senses outward again, letting them spread through the vast library and mark every person still inside it. The cat and the twins seemed to be inside a trial room already. There was enough resistance around them that he could not easily pin down their exact position.

Even earlier, he had not been able to sense Princess Yanyue and Chen Ren properly at first. Something had blocked his technique around them, and he guessed that certain trials had stronger protective barriers against detection methods. That made sense to him.

But at least right now, he could still sense Princess Yanyue and Chen Ren.

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They had separated from the rest of their group for some reason and were both on the ground floor. But then something suddenly changed, making his eyes widened.

Shuyi noticed it immediately. “What happened, Master?”

Jun turned to her. “Chen Ren and Princess Yanyue are suddenly going underground.”

***

For a full minute, Chen Ren held his breath as he gazed at the man sleeping on the bed in front of him.

His hair was long and dark, and there was a serene expression on his youthful face, as if the man was in a deep sleep after years of never being able to rest properly. But there was no doubt in Chen Ren’s mind that this was the floor lord and master of the grand library.

The reason was simple enough.

First of all, there was no way anyone else should have been sleeping here.

Second, even in sleep, every breath the man took sent streams of qi bursting out and filling the room. Every time it brushed against Chen Ren’s skin, he felt a strange sensation full of vitality. The man might be stronger than even City Lord Xiangrui or Shrey himself, and Chen Ren was only lucky that he was still asleep.

Slowly, he took a step back, intending to leave the room as soon as possible and search the others instead, but then his eyes moved across the chamber.

There was not much here other than the bed, but to the side, something made him pause. There was a bookshelf, filled with different books, and just seeing it made his heart sink.

Were those the books they were looking for? Maybe.

But there could be more scattered around the chamber too. Sadly, it was not as if even the registry had told them where exactly inside the chamber the books were kept. And if the diary really was here, then he would have to go closer, search the shelf, and take it out.

But what if that woke the lord? Would he even get the chance to turn around and run out of this place?

He had no answer to that.

In the end, he realised that the worst place to stand there thinking through all of this was right inside that room.

So he slowly backed off until he was finally out in the main chamber again. He left the door open and kept taking silent steps back, his mind racing the whole time. A dozen different thoughts ran through his head before he turned away and decided that the first thing he should do was check the other chambers.

Over the next ten minutes, he went through three more rooms.

Each of them held a good amount of things inside, and even without touching them, Chen Ren could tell some were valuable from the runes clearly marked on them. Even so, he didn’t stop for any of it. He only searched for books, and in the end he found nothing.

From the side, Wang Jun snickered. “Nothing ever really goes well for you, does it?”

“At this point, I’m sure that’s just the heavens doing it on purpose.”

He paused and ran through his options one more time before deciding there was no point thinking alone. He moved to find Princess Yanyue instead.

It took another ten minutes before he found her.

She was in a smaller room, one that held nothing but different kinds of lamps. Chen Ren had no idea what any of them actually did, though the runic patterns on them made it obvious they were not ordinary items. He didn’t care enough to inspect them right then. The moment he saw Princess Yanyue, he simply told her what he had found and where the books were.

Just as he had expected, her face lost a little colour hearing that.

Even so, she followed him back to the lord’s room, and once she saw the shelf for herself, the two of them exchanged one look and understood the same thing at once.

They had to check.

At the very least, they had to see whether the diary was there.

So both of them moved slowly toward the shelf, with Princess Yanyue’s eyes scanning across the books intently.

After two minutes of doing that, she gestured for him to back out of the room, and once they had put enough distance between themselves and the doorway, Princess Yanyue frowned. “The diary is there.”

Chen Ren looked at her in surprise. “Are you sure?”

She nodded. “Yes. I saw the same cover as the diary I already have. It’s there. But I don’t know whether taking it out will wake the lord or not.”

Chen Ren let out a slow breath. “It probably will. There’s no other reason those books would be kept in his room instead of anywhere else.”

And honestly, that made sense.

If there was one thing that should matter most in the floor lord’s personal chambers, it would be books. They were beneath a grand library, after all. Everything about this place revolved around knowledge.

Every instinct in Chen Ren told him the same thing. The moment they took even one book from that shelf, the lord would wake, and once that happened, they would either be dead or captured in less than half a minute.

But they had never come here expecting things to go smoothly.

They had already known there was a good chance the lord would chase them once the books were taken. The real problem was how close things would become. If they wanted to escape the library, they needed at least half a minute of a head start. Once they were outside, the environment itself might start working in their favour. There were enough beasts around the area to create chaos, and Chen Ren also had more than a few items that could help buy them time, all of them bought from Shrey, who had very specifically told him to use them if the lord ended up chasing them.

So the real question was simple.

How were they supposed to get that lead if the lord woke the moment they touched the books?

He could tell Princess Yanyue was thinking along the same lines, but then, the moment their eyes met, he noticed the spark in her eyes.

“Sect Leader Chen, I think I have an idea.”

***

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