Dao of Money

For someone like Jun, who took pride in believing he could get through any situation with the best possible result, the Pagoda of Eternity had been a huge disappointment.

He hadn’t managed to get his hands on the medallion, nor he had managed to gather any useful information about the soul puppets that occupied the pagoda either.

By the end of it, the whole situation had frustrated him so much that he simply left without thinking any further.

Staying there would only waste more time. He didn’t have what he wanted, and worse, a man who would surely become one of his enemies in the future now had both the medallion and control over the Pagoda of Eternity.

That likely meant Chen Ren controlled the soul puppets as well.

And every hidden artifact inside the pagoda.

That was a major problem. If Jun’s guess was correct, Chen Ren now had enough power to stand on the level of a guardian sect, if not higher. The pagoda was not only a structure. It was a fortress, a treasury, a trial ground, and an army all in one. Anyone who truly controlled it would no longer be someone the empire could treat lightly.

Jun was sure of that.

His estimations were rarely wrong.

When he thought about it now, he couldn’t help but laugh.

The heavens were truly, truly strange. Just when he had finally come closer to getting his hands on the Gates of Immortal, they had created someone like Chen Ren to stand in his path.

It was almost hilarious, enough that Jun couldn’t even feel properly angry about the situation.

In the end, he simply had to accept it and not think too deeply for now.

Perhaps he would even get some amusement out of the matter when the other old monsters learned of Chen Ren’s existence.

Before the others learned about Chen Ren, Jun wanted to learn more about him first.

The heavens would not send someone who was already standing out in the open. In Jun’s experience, cultivators like that were talented, but they were not chosen. They excelled because they were given resources, teachers, protection, and status from the start.

Chosen ones were different.

They found resources.

Jun still remembered fighting a farmer’s son centuries ago. The boy had stumbled upon a pill that gave him a special aspect, and after that, his rise had become disgusting to watch. He found a hidden bloodline, met a mysterious master, discovered lost inheritances, survived certain death several times, and somehow kept coming back stronger.

It had been hell to kill him.

Jun had been forced to gather three sects, accuse the boy of theft, and use that excuse to destroy him. Even then, he had only managed to cut off one of his arms. In the end, the solution had not been strength. It had been information.

Jun found the boy’s family.

Taking them captive was enough to make the farmer’s son walk into the trap and give up his life.

He had been too attached to them.

There had been several other incidents like that over the centuries, and because of them, Jun knew very well how important it was to understand someone’s background. Cultivators chosen by the heavens could be selfish, perverted, arrogant, and far too lucky for their own good, but they almost always had people attached to them.

People who believed in them. People who helped them when they had nothing. People they would risk their lives to protect.

Those people were always good targets.

So Jun wondered if Chen Ren had someone like that.

There were people who had moved with him through the pagoda, of course. Among them, that wild cat seemed like the perfect fit. She had been close to him, fought beside him, and clearly had some kind of attachment to him.

Unfortunately, she was also strong. Not as strong as him, but it still would be bothersome. On top of that, she was staying in the Corpse Lands for now, and the whole place had become something of a tourist spot for all kinds of cultivators. Many of them came from established sects and older clans, either to watch over their younger generation as they entered the pagoda or to gather favours from other forces so their disciples would not have too hard of a time inside.

It was incredibly risky to attack anyone there.

One wrong move, and too many cultivators would jump on him simply because he was a demonic cultivator. They would not even need to know his full identity. The scent of demonic qi alone would be enough to make them draw swords and shout about justice.

There was also a rule spreading through the camp outside the pagoda. Fighting was forbidden.

Everyone wanted to enter the pagoda uninjured, and enough cultivators had already been wounded or killed by traps set along the way that the larger groups had started enforcing order. It was not out of kindness. It was practical. If people kept killing each other before reaching the pagoda, then no one would gain anything.

Because of that, Jun had to give up on capturing the cat for now.

He also had to give up on killing a few of Chen Ren’s other companions just to rile him up. There were too many eyes in the Corpse Lands, too many factions, and too many chances for a simple act to turn into a larger mess.

Still, Jun had leads.

In the first place, he had heard enough about the Divine Coin Sect inside the pagoda. Apparently, Chen Ren was its sect leader, which was almost funny to Jun. Someone so weak had somehow become the leader of a sect, and people were already treating the name as if it mattered.

Jun wondered what would happen if he killed everyone in that sect.

Chosen ones often grew stronger after revenge arcs. He knew that very well. But anger also made them careless. They rushed, overreached, trusted the wrong people, and exposed weaknesses they would have hidden if they had stayed calm.

The heavens would play their part, of course. They always did.

Some lucky encounter would appear. Some hidden inheritance would open. Some old monster would suddenly take pity on the chosen one at the perfect moment. Jun had seen such things too many times to pretend they were coincidences.

But he was used to it. He had killed people favoured by the heavens before. He knew how to handle them.

Another problem appeared when Jun finally found the Divine Coin Sect and went there.

As it turned out, the whole sect was only a few buildings in a village.

For a moment, Jun wondered if he had even come to the right place. It looked too… small. A sect connected to someone who had taken control of the Pagoda of Eternity should not have looked like a village with a few extra buildings attached to it.

But there was a solid wall surrounding the area, and an array had been placed over it.

Villages rarely had something like that.

When Jun sensed around carefully, he also detected a few cultivators inside. None of them were impressive, but their presence confirmed that this was indeed the right place. The Divine Coin Sect was real, even if it looked far more pathetic than he expected.

He was just about to move in and destroy it when he felt a presence that made him pause.

Jun winced.

Why the fuck was she here?

With his centuries of life, Jun knew many cultivators. He had fought many of them too. Some had been strong, some had been lucky, and some had simply been annoying enough that even killing them required too much effort.

Qing He belonged to the troublesome kind.

She had once been close to becoming the sect leader of a guardian sect, and she had even worked with the imperial family for a while. She was strong, experienced, and far too full of tricks for Jun to treat her casually. He could kill her if it came to that, but old cultivators like her could not be handled with confidence and strength alone.

They needed preparation. That made the situation extremely annoying. Jun stared toward the village, his expression darkening.

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What exactly was going on with Chen Ren?

Was he truly just that lucky?

Or was he actually the emperor’s bastard child?

The thought almost made Jun laugh. The old emperor did love to fool around, so it was not impossible in principle. But the more Jun thought about it, the less sense it made. Princess Yanyue was not the type to like her siblings no matter what blood they shared, and if Chen Ren had truly been part of the imperial family, there should have been some trace of it.

So this was probably just another matter of fate.

The heavens were treating Chen Ren well, but Jun did not care.

He needed information on him.

So he kept moving, following whatever traces he could find about Chen Ren’s background. That eventually led him to Cloud Mist City, and from there, he finally managed to gather reliable information.

Chen Ren was apparently quite famous there.

He had won a tournament in the city and was spoken of as some sort of heavenly genius because he had managed to manifest a dragon of all things. That part made sense to Jun. If Chen Ren was truly following the Dao of Money, and Jun was almost certain he was, then a dragon manifestation was not impossible. Wealth, fortune, fate, and dragons had always been tied together in strange ways.

But the more useful information was not about the tournament.

It was about Chen Ren’s origin.

Apparently, he came from some Chen clan in Red Peak City and had been banished from it.

That did not surprise Jun at all.

People like Chen Ren always had something like that in their past. A banished clan member. A broken engagement. A bastard child. A humiliation that pushed them forward. They always had something to prove, and the heavens always made sure that insult became fuel instead of ruin.

Deciding it would be best to ask the source directly, Jun flew toward Red Peak City.

He believed he had visited the place once before, perhaps a century or so ago, to gather certain materials. After that, he had no reason to care about it. It was not important enough to remember.

Once he identified the Chen clan, there was not much left to decide.

There were only two ways to proceed.

He could approach them and ask directly, or he could start destroying things until someone finally spilled what was going on.

In the end, Jun decided the second option was better.

Clans rarely gave away useful information to outsiders, no matter how politely they were asked. They became even less cooperative when the person asking was a demonic cultivator.

It did not matter that Jun was far stronger.

In the end, as long as he wielded demonic qi, cultivators were bound to try to kill him. It was the single shred of righteousness most of them clung to, even when they were no different from demonic cultivators in every other way.

So Jun simply attacked.

It did not take long for half of the Chen clan estate to be destroyed. Walls collapsed, courtyards split apart, and buildings that had probably stood for generations broke under the spread of demonic qi.

More than a few cultivators rushed out to attack him, throwing their weak lightning techniques in his direction. The bolts struck his shields, chains, and robes, but in the end, they barely did anything. Jun ignored most of them until they became too annoying, and only then did he start killing.

After enough of them had died, the clan patriarch finally appeared.

He was an old man named Chen Leijun, and he declared his name with the kind of pride that suggested Jun was supposed to recognise it.

Jun did not.

The man was oddly confident in his strength, though that might have been anger more than confidence. Jun had killed several of his clan members by then, and most of them were obviously related to him in some way. Still, age did not mean strength.

Chen Leijun proved that soon enough.

After a short series of exchanges, the old man crashed through the roof of his own clan estate and landed hard on the ground below. He tried to rise again, which was commendable enough, but Jun’s chains moved faster.

They wrapped around Chen Leijun’s body and tightened before he could escape.

Jun made sure not to kill him.

The old man was still needed for questioning.

Only then did Jun slowly lower himself toward the ruined courtyard. No other clan member tried to get in his way, likely because they had finally understood that doing so would only earn them an early death.

That was smart of them.

Jun didn’t care if some of them ran away, though he supposed there was a small chance they might become problems later.

It always happened.

Some boy from a destroyed clan would survive, swear revenge, and come looking for blood years later. Jun had seen that story too many times to care. Even if someone from the Chen clan escaped and grew stronger, it would take decades at the very least. Perhaps a hundred years. By then, Jun would be too powerful to care much about it.

So he pushed the thought aside and focused on the old man bound in front of him.

Chen Leijun glared at him through the pain. “What do you want from me? Do you covet the Chen clan’s treasures, demon?”

“Your clan is worth nothing to me. I am here for information.” Jun looked at him with mild amusement.

“What information?” Chen Leijun growled. “You killed so many of my clan members for that?”

“You would not have given it to me if I asked nicely,” Jun said. “So I used force. Do not act like you have never killed innocent people because you wanted something.”

Chen Leijun’s face stiffened.

A moment later, his expression darkened. “Do not lump me together with a demon like you.”

“Funny.” Jun laughed. “We are both demons here. Stop pretending this is anything but your karma catching up to you, and give me what I want.”

“I do not even know what you want.”

“Chen Ren,” Jun said. “You know him, right?”

Chen Leijun’s expression shifted at once. It was small, but Jun caught it.

“What do you want with trash our clan banished long ago?” the old man asked. “Did he offend you? Then go kill him. My clan and I have nothing to do with him anymore.”

Jun’s smile faded slightly. “I did not ask you for advice. I need you to tell me everything about Chen Ren.”

Chen Leijun stayed silent.

Jun stepped closer.

“If you do not talk,” he said, “I will finish off every last member of your clan.”

Then Jun drove his foot into the old man’s stomach.

Chen Leijun let out a strained growl as his body curled against the chains. For a moment, he looked like he still wanted to resist, but the ruined estate around him and the terrified clan members hiding among the rubble made the choice clear enough.

The next second, he started talking about everything.

***

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