Dao of Money

265. Table full of treasures

Chen Ren looked down at the table in front of him, with a gleam in his eyes that he made no attempt to hide.If he was being honest with himself, then coming to the pagoda might have been the best decision he had made since arriving in this world.

Even in his more ambitious moments, he had never expected the pagoda to still be holding so much wealth. Yet here it was, laid out in front of him in plain view.

The book he had found on the eighth floor—the one that held information on the other floors—had proven more valuable than he could have guessed. Hidden among its pages were the locations of treasures scattered throughout the first seven floors of the pagoda, enough to make even Chen Ren pause when he first realized what he was looking at.

There were treasures on the sixth floor as well, buried somewhere deep beneath the sands, but he had crossed those out almost immediately. From what he could piece together, reaching them would likely mean dealing with the sand elementals, and Chen Ren had no interest in throwing himself into that kind of problem. He was not Han Qingshi. He was not the sort of lunatic who looked at the elements and thought they were worth charging headfirst, especially when those same elements came in the shape of gigantic, ugly worms that could probably swallow him whole.

The seventh floor was impossible for a different reason. With the Long family entrenched there, going after anything on that level would have been asking for trouble he did not yet need.

So he had set his sights on the first five floors instead.

Even then, the number of treasures had been absurd.

The table in front of him was already crowded with them, enough that his eyes kept drifting from one item to the next even though he had already looked them over more than once. A good number of them had been brought back by Li Xuan and Anji, and that, more than anything, had surprised him. Chen Ren had expected competence. What he had not expected was for the two of them to turn out to be such excellent treasure hunters.

He had first sent them to the fourth floor, into the storms and ice, thinking it would take time before they returned with anything worthwhile.

Instead, they had managed to recover more than half a dozen treasures in only a few hours.

And they had not stopped there.

After returning, they had gone right back out again, this time chasing down hidden locations on the fifth floor without so much as pausing for proper rest. That had been another useful discovery. As it turned out, even City Lord Xiangrui did not know everything hidden across the fifth floor.

Out of the two, Li Xuan had been more useful.

More than once, he had gone after treasures hidden in places no one sane would have thought to search. One of them had been buried beneath the city itself, somewhere in the sewers, and Chen Ren had only managed to get him access because of the working relationship he had built with the city guards. Another had been far stranger—a treasure hidden inside the stomach of a specific beast that Li Xuan had first needed to track down before he could even think about retrieving it.

Though, Anji had been no less effective.

She had crossed distant stretches of the fifth floor, climbing through mountains and tracking down small caves hidden beneath illusion arrays, then dragged whatever lay inside back to him without wasting time.

And through all of it, Chen Ren himself had barely needed to leave.

He had stayed where he was most useful, keeping an eye on the shop and letting other people do the exhausting part of turning maps into actual profit. It was a system he found increasingly easy to appreciate.

Now the results of all that effort sat right in front of him.

Dozens of treasures covered the table.

Some were weapons, each bearing runic enchantments of varying quality. Others were shields, useful enough in their own right, but what really caught Chen Ren’s attention were the smaller artifacts. Those were where the real value seemed to lie. Bracelets that housed bound wild spirits. Rings with spatial properties. Trinkets that could slow an enemy’s movements at the right moment. Individually, some of them were modest. Together, they were the sort of collection that could silently change the foundation of a sect.

Among them were also blueprints.

He had not gone through all of them yet, but from what he had seen, most appeared to be straightforward designs rather than anything especially complex. Some clearly came from other parts of Xuan Mo’s inheritance, while others looked more random, though no less useful for that. Even ordinary designs had value if they could be replicated well enough.

And there were still more treasures on the way.

Tau Liu and the alchemists had been sent to the third floor to retrieve another batch, but they had not returned yet. When they did, Chen Ren was starting to think he might need a second table.

That was a good problem to have. Even if he ended up with more treasures than he could personally use, his sect itself would make good use of it.

Still, for all the satisfaction the sight gave him, one thought kept circling back above the rest.

He hoped there were enough treasures left to help with what he was planning for the eighth floor.

As Chen Ren thought that, the door to the room suddenly opened.

He turned just as Anji walked in.

She looked like she had been dragged through half the fifth floor and then thrown into a swamp for good measure. Her clothes were wet, strands of weed clung to her hair, and the expression on her face suggested she was one inconvenience away from giving up on life entirely. The moment her eyes landed on him, her frown deepened.

Without a word, she reached up, pulled a clump of weed from her hair, and threw it onto the floor.

Then she stepped over it, walked to the table, took what looked like a gold necklace from her pocket, and tossed it right into the middle of the treasure pile. Only after that did she turn fully toward Chen Ren and let out a long, tired sigh.

“I hope you don’t have more things for me to do, Sect Leader Chen,” she said. “I’m exhausted from running all over the place. I don’t even think I have bullets left.”

Chen Ren smiled. “You should take a bath. You smell like you just came back from playing in the mud.”

That only made her look more irritated.

“Because I did,” Anji said. “I fought a hippo that lived in the mud for that necklace. I still don’t even know what it does.” She glanced at the treasure pile as though it had personally offended her. “I don’t think I’m meant for a life of treasure hunting.”

Chen Ren’s smile stayed in place.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I don’t think there are many treasures left. The others can handle what remains. You’re needed somewhere more useful now.”

Anji’s expression did not improve in the slightest.

“What more useful place?” she asked slowly. “I don’t want to be anywhere except my office, looking over numbers.”

Chen Ren looked back at the treasures spread across the table.

“You remember what I said,” he told her. “The treasure hunt was only the first part. We’ve gathered what we could and checked the marked locations in the book. Now it’s time for the next step.”

He turned back to her with a different sort of gleam in his eyes now.

“It’s time to start the lottery. A big one. One that makes us so rich we can do whatever we want.”

“But what’s the prize?” she asked. “These treasures?”

Chen Ren shook his head. “No. The prize is going to be the chance of getting the treasures itself. Let me explain.”

***

Princess Yanyue did not know what had happened to her luck.

There had been a time—not long ago at all—when she had genuinely started to believe she might reach the top of the pagoda. Not merely climb far, not simply outperform expectations, but actually do what no one had managed in centuries and stand where no other cultivator had stood before.

Now, she was no longer sure of even the tenth floor.

When she had first entered the pagoda, that had been her goal. The tenth floor had seemed high enough, difficult enough, prestigious enough to justify the risk of the climb. But floor after floor, that goal had shifted. What had first been caution slowly became ambition, and then ambition turned into something more dangerous—a belief that perhaps she truly could go higher.

The greatest reason for that change had been one man.

Chen Ren.

Princess Yanyue had recruited him after making a few early guesses about the kind of person he was. Even then, she had known that someone with his Dao would be valuable. What she had not expected was for him to prove so useful that, aside from a few difficult moments, the climb through the pagoda had started to feel almost easy. He had solved problems that should have slowed them down. He had created opportunities where none should have existed. More than once, he had turned situations that ought to have dragged her group into hardship into something they simply moved past.

That kind of usefulness did not go unnoticed.

At one point, she had even considered trying to make him one of her retainers, though she had known from the beginning that he would most likely refuse. He already had his own sect, after all, and not one destined to remain small forever if his current rise was anything to judge by.

Still, Yanyue had already decided that whether he became her retainer or not hardly mattered. What mattered was building a connection with him. Because she knew, with growing certainty, that Chen Ren was the sort of man who might one day change the empire itself—for better or for worse.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Not many could escape the Guardian sects and fewer still could defeat Yun Zhaotian. Princess Yanyue, for her part, had never looked at his methods with the same disapproval others might have.

She didn’t care whether a victory looked clean so long as it was a victory. In her eyes, a person used whatever they had if they wished to win. That was not cowardice. That was survival. Her father believed much the same.

But then, all at once, things had started turning in the wrong direction.

Chen Ren had become obsessed with the master lift, and if Yanyue was honest with herself, she had understood why.

It was a good idea.

The sort of idea only someone like him would notice in the first place, and perhaps the sort only someone like him would even dare to pursue seriously. For a time, she had even allowed herself to think that if anyone could somehow get to it, Chen Ren might be that person.

Then she learned what protected the city where it was located.

After that, the whole thing had crumbled in her mind.

Once she understood that the [Grand Aegis Array] stood around it, every plan she had built around the master lift had turned to dust. From that moment on, Princess Yanyue had wanted to abandon the idea entirely and continue climbing the pagoda the normal way, difficult as that path might be.

But then Chen Ren had turned stubborn. That, more than anything else, had caught her off guard.

Until then, he had been practical almost to a fault. He had always known when to push, when to cut losses, when to turn away from something that cost more than it was worth. Seeing him fixate on the master lift like this felt strange, because it did not match the man she had come to know through the climb. It was as if he simply could not let go of the idea, no matter how impossible it was.

And to Yanyue, it was impossible. No one broke through a [Grand Aegis Array].

Anyone who claimed otherwise was either a fool or a liar, and Chen Ren was neither. Which only made the whole thing more frustrating, because it meant he had some reason for wanting the master lift badly enough to keep chasing it even now. Perhaps he simply did not want to spend any longer in the pagoda than necessary. Perhaps there was something else behind it. She could not tell.

She had even tried asking Yalan, the elder spirit beast Chen Ren had left behind while he went off to search for some way to break the array, but she had refused to say a single useful word.

In the end, Yanyue had not been able to press further.

And she doubted Chen Ren would actually find a solution. There simply was no way to break something like that. Eventually, she thought, he would tire himself out against the dead end in front of him. And when that happened, perhaps he would be willing to see reason again and turn his attention back to the climb itself.

She needed him to. Because without Chen Ren, the last few floors felt like a wall.

And as that thought passed through her mind, a voice suddenly cut across it.

“Princess, they’re coming. Get your bow out and deal with them.”

At once, Yanyue looked down.

Puppets were pouring up from the sewer lines on either side, climbing out in such numbers that the street looked completely covered. Hundreds of them pressed forward in a broken, relentless mass, all of them chasing after Yalan as the spirit beast raced ahead and drew them onward.

It had not been the original plan.

She and Yalan had first gone underground to reach the normal lift directly, but the moment they entered the sewer tunnels, it became clear that the path was unusable. The place had been packed with puppets so tightly that there was barely room to move, let alone fight. Trying to break through down there would have meant getting swallowed by numbers in a space too cramped to escape. So they had changed tactics and dragged the things into the open instead.

Princess Yanyue raised her qi bow in one smooth motion. Energy flowed into the limbs of the weapon and split at her will, gathering along the drawn string until three arrows took shape at once.

Then, she let them go.

Explosions burst through the street below, loud enough to shake dust from the walls around her. The first blasts tore through the front of the puppet mass and dragged nearby bodies into the detonation as well, shattering dozens in a matter of moments.

For a few breaths, it was almost easy.

Then the puppets adapted.

As more arrows dropped from above, some of the constructs began hurling up chunks of rock and broken debris, trying to intercept the shots before they could strike. A few explosions burst harmlessly in the air, their force wasted above the crowd.

Yanyue had expected that much.

She pushed more qi through her meridians, and at once the runic tattoos winding along her arms began to glow. The light deepened, spread, and the next set of arrows formed differently. What had once been gold turned red.

She fired again.

This time, when one of the arrows was struck by a flying rock and burst before reaching the ground, flame spilled out of it in a wide, hungry wave. Fire washed over the street below, catching across the puppets and licking over the stone itself, scorching everything it touched.

The heat flashed outward fast enough that even those not caught by the center of the blast still burned.

After that, she settled into rhythm.

Arrow after arrow rained down from above, each carrying a different elemental force as she shifted the qi through her runes. Some burst with raw impact. Others spread fire. More tore through the formation with wind force to throw puppet bodies aside like broken dolls. Below her, the street became a churn of explosions, flames, and collapsing constructs.

Fortunately, for all their numbers, the puppets themselves were nothing remarkable.

They had only physical attacks, no real ranged techniques beyond throwing whatever rubble they could get their hands on, and from this distance that was not enough. So she kept her attacks going on.

Some of the puppets made it through her bombardment.

Princess Yanyue saw them from the corner of her eye first—shapes climbing the sides of the building beneath her, clawing their way upward with enough speed that they would reach the rooftop within moments. She shifted at once, lowering her bow toward them, ready to lose another shot.

Then Yalan moved.

In her natural form, the spirit beast was terrifyingly fast. One instant she was below, the next she was already among the climbing puppets, leaping across them with elongated claws flashing in quick, precise arcs. She did not fight them so much as pass through them.

From one puppet to the next she moved in a blur, the kills carried out so quickly that Princess Yanyue’s eyes barely kept pace.

In less than a minute, every puppet on or near the building was gone.

Princess Yanyue let out a quiet breath.

For a brief moment, she found herself deeply grateful that she had done nothing in all their time together to offend Yalan.

Then she turned her attention back to the street and resumed firing.

Arrow after arrow rained downward until the last of the puppets collapsed across the stone below, broken and unmoving. Looking at the aftermath, Yanyue felt even more certain they had made the right choice. Had they tried to fight all of those things in the sewers, they would have been overwhelmed by sheer numbers in the cramped tunnels and likely come away with serious injuries if they survived.

Out here, though, with space to move and clear lines of attack, it felt almost simple.

More like hunting than battle.

Only after the street had gone still did Princess Yanyue finally lower her bow and jump down from the rooftop. She landed lightly atop the broken remains of a puppet whose head had been blown apart, then straightened and looked toward Yalan, who was now on the edge of a nearby building.

“I think we should go back down and make for the lift,” Yanyue said. “Once we reach it, we can guard it until Sect Leader Chen finally understands that what he’s trying to do is futile and decides to return.”

Yalan purred in agreement.

“That’s a sensible plan,” she said. “But I do not think he will come here before the time he asked for is up. He becomes very stubborn when he decides he wants something.”

Yanyue exhaled through her nose. “That’s fine,” she said. “It will probably take us some time to explore more of the city anyway—”

The street shook beneath her feet.

Her words cut off at once as her balance shifted. In the very next second, the stone below split apart with a violent crack, and something massive surged upward through the broken street.

Another puppet.

A huge one, shaped like a bear that screamed a guttural, mechanical roar.

***

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