Dao of Money

For a second, Chen Ren didn’t even understand what had happened.

There was a huge wave of energy rolling out from behind him, crashing over his body and leaving him stunned. His vision blurred and the world tilted around him. He struggled to tell which way was up as foreign qi forced its way into his body.

It moved through him like poison.

Chen Ren clenched his teeth, but even that felt difficult. The qi from the cracked orb tangled with his own, scraping through his meridians and throwing his control into chaos. Every breath felt wrong. Every movement felt delayed, as if his body no longer belonged fully to him.

Through the haze, he still saw fragments of the battle.

Yalan was holding Jun back.

She stood between him and Chen Ren, flames roaring around her larger form as she clashed with him again and again. Her claws met his demonic blades, each impact sending waves of crimson fire and black qi across the lift. The unstable energy leaking from the orb mixed with both of them, turning the air heavy and violent.

Explosions rang out somewhere to his side.

Chen Ren forced his eyes to move, searching for Princess Yanyue, but he couldn’t see her.

He hoped she had not fallen. Even the thought tightened his chest.

The portal was even closer now—maybe thirty seconds left before they were through. That was all they needed before the lift carried them out of this floor.

But as Chen Ren stared at the purple light above, dread sank deeper into him. Faint lines of qi were moving along the portal—thin and clearly unstable, crawling across its surface in a way he had never seen before.

The portal had not looked like that before.

Had he damaged it when he slammed into the orb?

The thought sent a cold feeling through him, but his mind was too slow to find an answer. Spatial arrays were dangerous even when they worked properly. If the orb had cracked and destabilised the portal, there was no telling what would happen when the lift reached it.

They could be torn apart and roasted alive—maybe even thrown into some unknown space between floors.

Chen Ren tried to push himself up, but even that small movement sent pain through his body. His arm trembled beneath him, and the foreign qi twisted harder inside his meridians, making his vision darken at the edges.

He couldn’t stay like this. He knew there was only one way out.

The return ticket.

Chen Ren forced his hand to move toward his spatial ring. He gathered what little qi he still had control over and pushed it toward the ring, trying to activate the ticket before the portal swallowed them.

He was almost there when chains shot toward him.

Chen Ren’s eyes widened as Jun rushed straight past Yalan. Demonic chains snapped from his hands, reaching for Chen Ren’s body, ready to drag him away from the orb and fling him off the lift before he could escape.

Chen Ren froze. His body refused to move for one terrible breath, but his fingers still managed to close around the return ticket. He dragged it out of his spatial ring, ready to burn it with the last bit of qi he could control.

Before he could activate it, Yalan slammed into Jun.

Her larger body crashed into him with all the force she had, driving him backward toward the edge of the lift. Jun’s feet scraped against the platform, and for one brief moment, Chen Ren thought she had done it.

Jun was going to fall.

At the last second, the chains in his hands changed direction. They snapped away from Chen Ren and wrapped around Yalan’s paw instead.

Yalan yelped.

Chen Ren’s eyes widened as Jun was pulled over the edge, dragging her down with him. Her claws tore across the platform, trying to find a hold, but the chains tightened and dragged her body after him.

“Yalan!”

Chen Ren shouted her name, but his voice vanished beneath a sudden grinding roar from above. The portal had activated.

The sound was wrong.

It was not the smooth hum he had heard before. It was harsh and heavy, like a mountain's bones grinding to powder mid-air. Chen Ren forced qi into the return ticket at once, burning it before the portal could swallow him.

The ticket caught fire, but nothing happened.

Chen Ren’s heart sank.

The purple light engulfed him, and at once, a huge wave of qi crashed into his body, stronger than the first. His mind nearly went blank.

Darkness pressed in at the edges of his vision, but he forced himself to stay conscious, clinging to the last thread of awareness he had.

Images flashed before his eyes.

The first was Goldspire City, the destination they had chosen for the master lift. Its streets and towers appeared for a brief moment, close enough that Chen Ren thought he would fall straight into it.

Then, the image slipped away.

A sprawling forest replaced it, dense and wild, stretching across what he recognised as the third floor. That vanished too. Snow-covered lands appeared next, pale and endless beneath a cold sky. The fourth floor. The image changed again.

This time, Chen Ren saw islands scattered across a wide sea, with ships moving between them. Cannons fired from one vessel to another, smoke blooming over the waves as the battle raged below.

Chen Ren blinked through the haze.

What is happening?

Before he could understand, the image shifted again.

Floating islands filled the sky, hanging in the air like broken pieces of a world. Large bat-like creatures flew between them, and on their backs were figures that looked almost like elves.

The sight lasted only a second. Darkness swallowed it whole, as if he'd been dropped into a world where light itself could not exist. It pressed in from every side.

That too passed.

A moment later, Chen Ren felt something hard scrape against his back. The sensation dragged him fully toward consciousness, and pain rushed through him all at once.

The next second, his vision changed again.

A large sun glared down at him from above, its rays falling across his body with a dry, steady heat. Warmth spread over his skin, chasing away the cold left behind by the strange visions.

Chen Ren waited for the image to pass.

When it didn’t, he blinked.

The exhaustion returned all at once, heavy enough to drag at his mind and limbs. Sleep pulled at him like a hand around his throat, tempting him to close his eyes for only a moment. But Chen Ren forced himself to stay awake. He had no idea where he was, and sleeping in a place like this could easily become the end of him.

With effort, he pushed himself up, and his jaw dropped at once.

Sand stretched in every direction. There were no trees, buildings, mountains close enough to matter. No sign of Goldspire, the fifth floor, or even any living thing.

As far as his eyes could see, there was only sand beneath the burning sun.

The master lift lay beside him.

It had landed at an angle, half-slanted into the sand. Chen Ren realised he must have rolled off it while trying to keep himself conscious through the visions. Seeing the lift there, buried and tilted like a broken piece of debris, was almost more shocking than the desert itself.

He wanted to collapse.

Every part of his body warned him to rest, but he ignored it and reached into his spatial ring. A few pills appeared in his hand, and he swallowed them quickly. They were bitter as they slid down his throat, but the energy that followed cleared some of the fog from his mind.

It was not enough to make him feel well. But it was enough to move.

Chen Ren forced himself to his feet and staggered toward the lift. The closer he got, the worse his expression became.

The orb was broken. Pieces of it lay scattered beneath the sand, dull and lifeless. The edges of the master lift itself had been torn apart during the teleportation, as if the spatial passage had ripped at it from every side before spitting it out here.

Chen Ren crouched beside the damaged orb, his frown deepening.

Even if he managed to straighten the lift and clear the sand away, he doubted it would ever work again. Not without proper repairs, and certainly not with what he had on hand.

His mind began moving through possibilities, searching for anything that might help. That was when another thought hit him.

Chen Ren looked around again.

There was no one else.

Only the desert, the broken master lift, and the endless stretch of sand beneath the sun. For a moment, he stood completely still as the memories returned one after another.

Li Xuan and Zi Wen falling from the sky. The twins thrown from the lift. Yalan dragged down with Jun. Princess Yanyue disappearing somewhere in the chaos.

His chest tightened.

He could only hope they had used their return tickets in time. He hoped they had escaped the pagoda before the fall killed them, before Jun reached them, before whatever floor lay below swallowed them whole. A meaningless death after everything they had survived felt too cruel, even for a place like this.

But if they had escaped, that meant Chen Ren was alone.

Alone on some sand-filled floor that was almost certainly higher than any place he had reached before. The thought made his heart sink further. He did not know what kind of beasts lived here, what rules this floor followed, or how far he was from anything that could help him.

Worse, he had no return tickets left.

He had burned his last one right before the portal swallowed him, and it had not worked. There was nothing left in his storage ring that could take him out of the pagoda.

Like this, he was going to die—

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“Sect Leader Chen.”

The voice pulled him out of his thoughts. Chen Ren turned at once.

Princess Yanyue stood a short distance away, one hand pressed against her left shoulder. Her face was pale, and her hair was dishevelled from whatever had happened during the teleportation, but she was alive.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Chen Ren’s eyes widened.

Relief filled him so quickly that, for a second, he forgot the heat and the pain in his body. He was not alone. That itself was enough to make him breathe a little easier.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Some higher floor.” His gaze moved to her shoulder. “Did you take pills?”

Princess Yanyue nodded. “I did. I passed out after the explosion and hit my head pretty hard. My qi was almost gone too. Using primordial qi against the lord took a lot out of my body.”

Her expression tightened as she looked around the empty desert.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what happened after that. Where are the others?”

Chen Ren looked back at the broken lift. “Jun pushed them off,” he said quietly. “Zi Wen, Li Xuan, the twins… all of them. Yalan went down with him right before we entered the portal.”

Princess Yanyue went still.

Chen Ren continued, his eyes on the shattered orb half-buried in the sand. “Right before the portal took us, the orb cracked. I think that’s why we didn’t reach Goldspire. It threw us onto a random floor instead.”

Princess Yanyue looked toward the broken orb.

Her eyes widened, but the longer she stared at it, the more her face fell. She took a few slow steps toward the lift, her eyes moving over the shattered pieces half-buried in the sand. Chen Ren could almost see the same questions forming in her mind, the same thoughts that had already passed through his.

If the lift was broken, how were they supposed to leave? If this was a higher floor, how were they supposed to survive?

Princess Yanyue stopped beside the orb. “Then what are we going to do?”

Chen Ren didn’t answer immediately.

“All we know is that this might be one of the last five floors,” she continued, her voice lower now. “And there is a good chance it is. We won’t survive here for long with just the two of us.”

Chen Ren went silent because she was right.

This was most likely one of the later floors. A part of him wanted to believe it was the ninth, because the ninth was at least something he knew of. But he doubted that too.

City Lord Xiangrui had said the ninth floor was filled with water, and this place was a desert.

A desert far different from the one on the sixth floor.

There was no demonic qi here. That alone would have been strange, but when Chen Ren spread his senses outward, he found something even worse.

There was no normal qi either.

The land around them felt empty. Dry in a way that went beyond heat and sand. It was as if the entire floor had been stripped of qi, leaving behind only silence and sunlight.

The implications of that were too much. He simply didn’t have the strength to think through them right now. So he turned toward Princess Yanyue. “You can still get out of here.”

“What?”

“Your return ticket. Use it. Take my spatial ring and leave this place.”

Princess Yanyue stared at him.

“I’m sure the others already used theirs to escape Jun,” he continued. “You should do the same.”

The more he spoke, the more confused she looked.

“What about you?” she asked. “We can leave together.”

Chen Ren scratched the back of his head, though there was no humour in the movement.

“That’s not possible anymore.”

Her eyes narrowed.

Chen Ren let out a breath and explained what had happened. He told her about the moment before the portal swallowed him, how he had burned his return ticket, and how nothing had happened. He told her that the cracked orb must’ve interfered with it somehow, or that the unstable teleportation had swallowed the effect before it could take him out.

By the time he finished, Princess Yanyue looked like she did not know what to say.

Chen Ren understood her predicament well. She still had her return ticket. He didn’t.

That was not an easy position for anyone to be in, especially after everything they had gone through inside the pagoda. A ticket meant safety. It meant escape. It meant she had one choice left that he no longer had.

And Chen Ren didn’t like putting his allies in situations where they had to struggle between guilt and survival.

“You should get out of here,” he said before she could speak. “You don’t need to stay now that you have the journal you were looking for.”

Princess Yanyue gave him a blank stare. “What are you going to do?”

“Find the normal lift,” Chen Ren said. “That’s the only way.”

Her expression stayed the same.

Chen Ren continued anyway. “I have enough supplies to last for a long time. If I’m careful, maybe a year. That should be enough time to find the common lift. Who knows? By then, more climbers might have made their way here too. I could find help.”

Princess Yanyue looked at him for a long moment.

“You do know, Sect Leader Chen, that I don’t have much trouble picking truth from lies.”

“It’s not a lie,” Chen Ren said.

“No,” she said. “But you left out the part where no one has even reached one of the last five floors before. Which means there is a much better chance you get killed in a day, especially if you are alone.”

“You should have noticed by now that I have good luck.”

Princess Yanyue frowned. For the first time, her voice rose slightly. “No, Sect Leader Chen. I am not leaving the pagoda before we find the common lift.”

Chen Ren opened his mouth to argue.

But the words did not come out.

Princess Yanyue looked far too resolute. There was no hesitation in her eyes, no sign that she was only saying it out of guilt. She had already decided, and Chen Ren knew enough about her by now to understand that pushing too hard would not change her mind.

It would only waste what little strength they had left.

The exhaustion pressed against the back of his mind again, heavy and relentless. His body still ached from the teleportation, and the strange emptiness of the desert around them only made the feeling worse.

Chen Ren let out a slow breath.

“Fine,” he said at last. “But if things become impossible, you use that ticket.”

Princess Yanyue held his gaze, but she didn’t agree nor argue. And he truly didn’t have the energy to argue.

Especially not with someone who looked as if she had wrapped herself in righteous determination. In his opinion, those were always the worst people to convince. Princess Yanyue had already decided what was right, and anything he said now would only make her dig her heels deeper into the sand.

Besides, he was sure she would be more willing to leave after a few days on this floor. Until then, he would not refuse the help.

At the very least, he would have company. He didn’t say that part out loud, but the truth was that he didn’t want to face this floor alone. The desert was too empty, too silent, and too wrong. He wouldn’t even be able to sleep properly if he had to do it by himself, not with the constant tension of beasts, and whatever else might be dwelling in this place.

So he only nodded. “Okay. But before we travel, I need some rest. That whole thing took too much out of me.”

Princess Yanyue seemed to relax at that.

A moment later, her shoulders sagged slightly, as if his words had reminded her of her own exhaustion. She looked toward the broken lift. “We can rest on top of it. It’s better than the sand.”

Chen Ren nodded.

Together, they moved toward the lift and began pushing it upright. It was heavier than it looked, especially with both of them injured and low on qi, but after some effort, they managed to shift it until the platform sat straight on the sand.

Once that was done, they discussed who would sleep first. Unsurprisingly, Princess Yanyue told him to go ahead.

“I’ll wake you in two hours,” she said.

Chen Ren didn’t argue.

He lowered himself onto the lift and lay down without caring about comfort. The metal beneath him was hard, still warm from the sun, and faintly uneven from the damage it had taken during the teleportation. None of that mattered.

He closed his eyes and tried to take whatever rest he could get.

Sleep came slowly.

Even as exhaustion dragged him under, his mind refused to quiet. He thought of the others and wondered whether they had escaped. He thought of Yalan being dragged down with Jun, of Li Xuan and Zi Wen falling from the sky, of the twins thrown from the lift. He thought of Jun himself, and whether a monster like that had survived the fall.

More than anything, he wondered if Jun would keep chasing him.

And beneath all of those thoughts was the one question he could not escape.

Would he truly be able to leave this floor alive?

***

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