Dao of Money

266. Lottery ticket

For the past two months, there had been one topic spoken of across nearly every corner of the Kalian Empire.The Pagoda of Eternity.

It had appeared in the Corpse Lands as if dropped there by the heavens themselves, and from the moment news of it began to spread, people had not stopped talking. Merchants carried the story with them wherever they traveled, passing it from village to village, from market to market, from city to sect. Soon enough, it was no longer just normal news. It was the thing everyone spoke about. In small towns and noble courts alike. In humble teahouses and cultivation halls. Among wandering cultivators, wealthy clans, and every sect large or small.

After all, how could people not talk about it?

Even the geniuses of the Guardian sects had entered it. Royalty had entered it. Nobles and heirs and promising talents from every major power in the empire had all turned their eyes toward the pagoda. Once the elites began rushing toward something with that much hunger, the rest of the empire could hardly pretend it did not matter.

And in many ways, the talk surrounding it had become even larger than the structure itself.

People said the pagoda was the one chance even a mediocre cultivator had to stand on equal ground with the heaven-blessed talents of the empire. That was the line repeated most often, and whether it was entirely true hardly mattered. It had spread far enough that people believed it.

So they came.

Every cultivator who thought fortune had denied them in ordinary life began looking toward the Corpse Lands. It did not matter if they had barely stepped into the body forging realm. It did not matter if their future would have been considered small under normal circumstances. The pagoda changed what was possible, or at least that was what people wanted to believe.

The most eager among them were often those with low spirit roots.

To them, the pagoda felt like an equalizer.

If they could prove themselves inside, then perhaps talent would no longer be the only thing the world measured. Perhaps even the Guardian sects would be forced to notice them. That was another piece of news merchants carried everywhere they went—that low-born cultivators with poor roots could rise through merit alone if they performed well enough inside the pagoda.

Stories had already begun to take shape around that hope.

One of the most famous story was about a village boy who had drawn the attention of the Emerald Sun Sect after entering the pagoda, and there were even claims that once he emerged out of it, he would be made a core disciple. Whether every part of the tale was true or not, it hardly mattered. By the time stories like that reached the outer parts of the empire, they no longer needed to be fully real to have power.

And with tales like that spreading, how could a cultivator from some forgotten corner of the empire not start dreaming bigger than before?

For years, the greatest treasures and opportunities had seemed reserved for the wealthy, the well-born, or the frighteningly gifted. But the pagoda stood open to all beneath the foundation establishment realm.

That alone was enough.

So from every direction, cultivators began making their way toward the Corpse Lands, each of them carrying the same hope in one form or another—that somewhere inside the pagoda, fortune might finally choose them.

Small clans had emptied their yearly revenues just to secure passage to the Corpse Lands. As the prices of transportation rose higher and higher, some still paid without hesitation, gambling everything on the chance that one successful climb might return wealth enough to justify the loss. Smaller sects did much the same. Some rushed toward the pagoda so recklessly that they seemed almost willing to be destroyed on the road if it meant arriving even a little earlier than their rivals. Beasts, bandits, hostile cultivators, treacherous routes—none of it mattered enough to stop them.

To most, this was not merely an opportunity.

It was opportunity.

One chance to reach toward the heavens. One chance to drag themselves out of whatever fate had been waiting for them and replace it with something greater.

Yin Che had believed the same thing.

He had swallowed the stories as eagerly as everyone else. The merchants had sold them well, but it had not only been merchants. His own clan patriarch—his father, a failed cultivator in his own right—had fed those hopes too. The old man had pressed silver into his hand, told him to make the journey, and sent him off with words grand enough to sound like a blessing and heavy enough to feel like a burden. Return a champion, he had said.

Yin Che had felt the pressure of that every step of the way.

Still, part of him had believed.

At thirty-five spirit roots, his future had never looked bright. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have counted himself fortunate to reach the foundation establishment realm before old age caught up to him. So when the pagoda appeared, how could he not think this might be his one chance?

That thought process was short-lived. Now, he knew better. Coming here had been the worst mistake of his life.

Reaching the pagoda at all had already felt like surviving a trial the heavens had no intention of letting him pass. He had seen enough corpses on the road to understand that much—cultivators gutted by beasts, poisoned by traps, cut down by other cultivators who had decided it was easier to reduce the competition before the climb even began. By sheer luck more than anything else, Yin Che had still made it.

And even that small success had meant nothing once he stepped inside.

He had barely escaped the arena of the second floor alive. In his last match there, the only reason he won at all was because his opponent had been an arrogant fool who slipped at the wrong moment. Yin Che had not defeated him through superior skill or overwhelming strength. He had simply survived longer than the other man’s luck did.

The third floor had been a little better.

There, Yin Che had spent most of his time trailing behind a much larger group of cultivators, clinging to their path like a shadow and hoping none of them cared enough to turn around and drive him off. Maybe they never noticed him. Maybe they did and simply judged him too weak to matter. At peak body forging realm, he was hardly the sort anyone worried about.

And like that—through luck, caution, and no small amount of humiliation—he had reached the fourth floor. It had been the hardest experience of his life. Even his father’s training had never been this cruel.

Yin Che had frozen more times than he wanted to remember. He had clawed through snow with numb fingers just to bury himself deep enough to hide from passing bears and the massive snow boars that roamed the fourth floor. More than once, he had laid there, hardly daring to breathe, listening to heavy bodies crunch past above him and wondering whether the sound he heard next would be the one that ended his life.

In the end, he had only found the lift because he saw another cultivator running in one direction with the kind of desperate certainty that could not be ignored. Yin Che had not known where the man was going, but he had followed anyway, and when he finally saw the lift waiting there through the storm and snow, he had nearly collapsed from relief.

He had cried.

Not quietly at first, either. The tears had simply come the moment he stepped inside and realized, with painful certainty, that he was not going to die on that floor. The other cultivators in the lift had looked at him strangely, but none of them said anything. Most of them had carried the same strained, hollow look in their eyes—the kind left behind by fear that had not fully drained yet. Whatever dignity Yin Che lost in that moment, none of them seemed cruel enough to take advantage of it. So he had stood there and wept while the lift rose.

By then, he already wanted to leave the pagoda.

He had found no treasure or a miracle. Nothing that had changed his cultivation or brought him closer to the kind of fortune the stories promised. If anything, the whole climb had only made him long for the smaller troubles of home—arguments with his cousins, petty clan squabbles, the familiar narrowness of a life he had once thought too small.

The wider world had teeth. And he had no wish to feed himself to it.

But Yin Che also knew he could not simply turn around and go back. His father had paid too much to send him here. If Yin Che returned now with nothing, it would not only be his own shame waiting for him. It would be his father’s as well, and that was the sort of humiliation the man might rather die than carry. Yin Che would not have put it past him.

Not that there was any easy way to leave the pagoda in the first place. So he decided to keep going.

But when he finally stepped onto the fifth floor and saw Goldspire City in the distance, hope rose in him for the first time since entering the pagoda.

This floor was different.

There was no frozen wasteland. No wild forest. No beasts prowling through the streets looking for blood. It was an actual city, and inside it, battles were forbidden. That alone felt like a blessing from the heavens. More than that, as he walked through the streets and listened, he began hearing cultivators speak of ways to earn tokens through various tasks and work scattered across the city.

For a little while, Yin Che actually believed things might finally turn around.

Maybe he could make enough tokens here. Maybe he could rise in the rankings little by little, stay alive, and see what manuals or artifacts he might eventually afford in Goldspire. It was not the grand rise he had once dreamed of, but for the first time in a long while, it felt possible.

After all, a city this large had to contain things that could change a person’s fortune.

And in truth, it did.

Yin Che had seen enough to know that much.

He had spent more than one day simply walking through the markets and shops, staring through windows at things he had never imagined would one day lie within reach of ordinary cultivators. There were manuals there that dwarfed anything his clan had ever owned. Swords and spears displayed so proudly that any one of them could have become a treasured heirloom back home, passed from one generation to the next with reverence.

The problem had come after that; the truth of the matter was that he was poor.

Every method of making tokens he had heard people talk about so confidently turned out to be far less useful once he tried them himself. There was simply too much competition. Whenever he left the city hoping to gather herbs, there were already other cultivators fighting over the same patches, often tearing the plants apart in the process before anyone could profit from them. Hunting beasts went no better. Groups moved through the surrounding areas in teams, and whenever Yin Che tried to approach a kill or claim a chance for himself, he was driven off without much ceremony.

It was not as though he had not tried to join them.

More than once, he had put himself forward as best he could, hoping someone might accept another hand if only to swell their numbers. But his cultivation was too low, and that was the beginning and end of it. No one wanted a peak body forging realm cultivator slowing them down when better options stood close by.

So in the end, Yin Che had done what weaker people always ended up doing.

He took whatever work the city was willing to give him.

Simple jobs, carrying goods from one place to another, running errands, sweeping, helping move packages for shopkeepers too busy or too lazy to do it themselves. For a while, he even worked in a clothing shop, spending his days hauling stacks of folded garments where they needed to go. The pay was enough to keep him alive. It covered a tiny broken room and two meals a day if he was careful.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on NovelFire.

But that was all.

Even after saving for a while, Yin Che had barely managed to gather a few hundred tokens. It was nowhere near enough to buy anything worthwhile, and it was certainly not enough to help him continue climbing the pagoda in any meaningful way.

And little by little, the hope that had flared in him upon reaching Goldspire City began to wear away.

The pagoda was not changing his life.

It was only showing him, in new and humiliating ways, that the world would keep him small no matter where he went. Back home, he would have been called a failure for never rising far. Here, among greater talents and wealthier powers, that feeling only sharpened. Perhaps reaching the fifth floor should already have counted as an achievement for someone like him, but Yin Che found no comfort in that thought.

He was still poor and still not going anywhere.

And just as he had begun to sink fully into that bitter understanding, something happened to break it.

Yin Che had been in the middle of another ordinary task, carrying a stack of clothes to a tailor as he moved through the city streets, when he heard it.

A voice cut through the street noise and made Yin Che stop in place.

“The chance of a lifetime!”

He turned before he quite realized he was doing it.

“A lottery that might place in your hands the very treasure that changes your fate! Hidden inheritances, relics from across the pagoda itself—one chance might be all it takes!”

Yin Che’s first thought was that it had to be a scam.

There was no shortage of smooth-tongued liars in a place like Goldspire, and anything that sounded too generous usually hid its teeth somewhere. But then he saw the crowd gathered around a raised platform, and on that platform stood a man in robes so fine they looked worth more than Yin Che’s entire life.

The man raised his voice again, as if answering the doubts already spreading through the onlookers.

“This is not a scam,” he said. “This is an opportunity presented by the Divine Coin Pavilion itself. And if any of you have ever done business with us, then you already know the value of our word.”

That was enough to stop Yin Che from walking away.

He knew of the Divine Coin Pavilion, even if only from a distance. They operated under the imperial princess herself, and nearly every cultivator in the city who hunted beasts or moved beyond the walls bought something from them sooner or later. Yin Che never had. Their goods had always seemed too expensive for someone like him, especially when he had never even been able to join a proper hunting party. Still, the name meant something.

And more than that, the word treasure had already lodged itself too deeply in his mind.

So he moved.

Keeping the stacks of clothes tucked tightly under one arm so no one could snatch them in the crowd, Yin Che pushed his way toward the front. His smaller build helped. He slipped through gaps larger cultivators could not have taken advantage of, edged past shoulders and elbows, and before long found himself close enough to see the speaker clearly.

He did not recognize the man.

But he was handsome in the polished, effortless way of someone clearly used to wealth and status, and there was something in the bearing of him that suggested he stood high in the rankings. The crowd kept growing while he waited, letting the anticipation stretch just enough before speaking again.

“As all of you know,” the man said, his eyes sweeping across the gathered cultivators, “the pagoda is home to countless treasures. But not every treasure is something you can simply stumble across. Most will never be discovered at all–

He let that hang for a breath.

“But we discovered them.”

Then, the man slipped a hand beneath his robes and drew out a piece of paper.

From where Yin Che stood, he could not make out exactly what it was. The man kept turning it this way and that, lifting it high, letting the crowd see it from every angle as though the sight alone should be enough to stir hunger in them. Yin Che could only catch flashes of dark markings across its surface—lines, symbols, the shape of something drawn with purpose.

Whispers rose almost immediately through the crowd. The man smiled and raised the paper a little higher.

“This,” he said, “is a piece of paper that may change the course of your life.”

He let the words settle before continuing.

“We have prepared several such pieces, and every one of them is a map. A map leading to treasures hidden throughout the first five floors of the pagoda. Rare materials, weapons, and pills. Perhaps even manuals powerful enough to let one of you stand against a cultivator from a Guardian sect.” His smile widened just slightly. “With one of these maps in hand, any one of those prizes might become yours.”

The whispering in the crowd swelled at once.

Yin Che felt his own eyes widen, his attention fixed so tightly on the man atop the platform that he barely noticed the jostling around him as the crowd pressed in closer. Was the man telling the truth? Or was this some carefully built trick? If the Divine Coin Pavilion truly knew where such treasures lay, why hand them out this way instead of taking them all for themselves?

The questions came fast. But before doubt could root itself too deeply, Yin Che noticed something behind the speaker and went still.

The city guards stood there openly, not interfering, or looking troubled in the slightest.

That sight shifted something in him at once.

He had heard the rumors before—that the Divine Coin Pavilion stood in good favor with the city guards—but hearing was one thing. Seeing it with his own eyes was another. And with the guards present like this, some of his suspicion eased despite himself. If this had been an outright fraud, would the guards really be standing there doing nothing? Would the pavilion risk its name so publicly if the whole thing were false?

Yin Che did not think so.

No business that had risen as high as the Divine Coin Pavilion would willingly burn its own reputation for a cheap trick.

As Yin Che was still turning those thoughts over, voices began rising from the crowd.

The loudest among them called out, “If you really have maps like that, then why aren’t you taking the treasures for yourself?”

The man on the platform grinned and turned toward the voice.

“Because I don’t need to,” he said easily. “I’m already rich enough. You’re all welcome to check my ranking if you doubt it. I have no need to chase after hidden treasures when anything I want can already be bought.”

He spread one hand in a gesture that was almost generous.

“What I’m doing here is giving all of you an opportunity. I know many of you have been working hard, and with so many cultivators flooding into Goldspire, I know things have only gotten harder. Of course this isn’t entirely free—my sect and I put in real effort to secure these maps—but I’m still doing this to help the cultivators of our empire. At the end of the day, we all come from the same land. We are one people.”

Yin Che did not believe a word of it.

The speech sounded polished in the way that made it feel rehearsed, something a politician or merchant might say while reaching for a person’s purse with the other hand. But belief was not always what mattered. Around him, he could already see the change in people’s faces. Some cultivators looked suspicious, yes, but more than a few looked as though they wanted desperately to believe the man.

Yin Che understood that much.

Everyone here was hungry for some chance to pull ahead, some opportunity that would let them grasp at the future before someone else got there first. And whatever this was, it certainly looked like one.

He found his own eyes drawn back to the map in the man’s hand.

If there truly was a treasure marked there—if by some miracle he could get one of those maps and reach what it led to—then perhaps his father would not have to be disappointed after all. As that thought settled in him, the man continued.

“Now, as for how you can get your hands on these maps—you won’t be buying them directly.”

That made the crowd stir again. The man lifted a hand before the noise could grow too loud. “Maps like these are limited. There are only so many, and every one of you would want one if I allowed a direct sale. So instead, what we will do is simple.”

He extended his hands, gesturing at the crowd.

“A lottery.”

Whispers broke out all at once, sharper than before, flowing through the street in waves. The man let them rise for a moment, then cut through them with his voice again.

“I know you all have questions,” he said. “And they will be answered. But for now, understand this—if you wish to enter the lottery and win the chance to claim one of these treasure maps, the cost is only one hundred tokens.”

At that, several people stepped forward to the sides of the platform, clearly prepared for what came next.

“You may register your names and submit your tokens here,” one of them called. “The lottery will be held in two days. This is your only chance.”

The crowd moved almost instantly.

For a moment it seemed as though the whole street might collapse into chaos, cultivators surging toward the platform from every direction at once, but the city guards stepped in quickly, forcing order back into the gathering and barking at people to form proper lines.

Yin Che struggled to keep his balance as the crowd shifted around him, shoulders pressing into his sides, bodies jostling for position. Even so, his eyes stayed on the platform, the man and the map in his hand.

And beneath all the noise, one thought kept turning through him with painful force.

Was this finally his chance to become something more?

***

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.

Read 15 chapters ahead HERE.

Join the discord server HERE.

DAO OF MONEY BOOK 1 is out on Amazon right now! Leave a review and even if you can't read right away, download it to read later (totally free on KU). It helps with the algorithm. Thank you! Read here.