Dao of Money

Even though Chen Ren knew it was an illusion, that did not make it any easier to break.

As it turned out, simply touching the dragon was not enough to cancel the illusion and get him out of this place. Even reaching it had taken too much from him. He had died dozens of times while trying to close the distance, his body being torn apart, melted, crushed, and pierced every time he moved too close.

Eventually, he somehow stumbled into the golden dragon’s tail.

That only happened because the dragon’s body was enormous. It stretched across the open sky like a living mountain of gold, and Chen Ren had managed to reach one part of it purely because there was so much of it to reach. But even then, touching it didn’t save him. He slammed into the hard scales, died from the impact, and when he was healed again, the dragon simply continued killing him.

Honestly, it was starting to get to him.

Chen Ren could feel his mental strength draining with every injury.

He hadn’t noticed it clearly at first, but now he understood that each attack did more than hurt his body. Every time the illusion killed him, it felt as if a part of his mind fractured. The feeling was strange and heavy, making his thoughts slower and his reactions duller. Even anger became harder to hold onto when pain kept breaking through everything else.

If not for the progress he had made in mind cultivation, he doubted he would have been able to keep his awareness for this long.

Maybe that was what would happen if he failed.

Maybe this was the true purpose of the illusion. Not to kill him once, but to wear him down until he stopped thinking. If he lost his awareness completely, then Chen Ren might remain trapped in this cycle of life and death forever, dying and healing, dying and healing, until nothing of him was left except pain.

That was a torture he could not allow himself to fall into.

But knowing that did not tell him how to escape it. How was he supposed to get the golden dragon off him?

Even if this dragon was only an illusion, it was still a heavenly beast inside the illusion. It carried the weight, power, and presence of something that could go against even a nascent soul realm cultivator. Chen Ren was nowhere near that level. He had only just reached the peak of the foundation establishment realm, and even his attempt to step beyond it had been interrupted by the pagoda itself.

Against something like this, his strength meant almost nothing.

And that was exactly what made the illusion so cruel.

It didn’t matter that the dragon was not real if Chen Ren’s mind believed the pain was real. It didn’t matter that the wounds healed if every death still carved something out of him. The trial was not asking him to defeat a heavenly beast with power.

It was asking him to survive the feeling of being completely powerless before one.

Another problem was that even if Chen Ren could attack the dragon, he only had a very small window to do it.

The primordial qi released by the golden dragon was everywhere. It filled the sky around him, pressing from every direction, and the attacks came so quickly that he barely had time to understand where the next one would strike. If he wanted to fight back, he needed at least a few seconds.

Right now, he did not even know if he would get that much.

So, instead of wasting his thoughts dreading the next wound, Chen Ren forced himself to focus on the timing.

He started counting the seconds between each attack.

As it turned out, there were usually five to ten seconds before the next strike came. Part of that time was spent healing. The primordial qi would kill him, or bring him close enough to death that it hardly mattered, and then the illusion would restore his body. Once the healing finished, he had maybe three seconds if he was lucky.

Three seconds to attack, and that wasn’t enough.

Protective techniques were useless too. The primordial qi was simply too strong. Any additional layer of defence would be torn apart without slowing it down. Chen Ren had already tried once, almost on instinct, forming [Starlight Armour] around his shoulder just before an attack landed.

It hadn’t mattered at all. The armour broke into pieces as if it had never existed.

It didn’t even buy him a single breath.

That meant defence was pointless. If Chen Ren wanted to escape, he had to go on the offensive. So in the few seconds he had between each attack, he stopped worrying about the pain, about dying, and about everything else dragging his mind down. He gathered as much lightning as he could and sent it straight toward the golden dragon.

The bolt struck the massive beast, but did nothing.

Not even a scratch appeared on its scales. Chen Ren doubted the dragon felt it at all. The golden dragon only looked down at him with those star-like eyes, as if his attack was not even worth acknowledging.

Then the primordial qi moved again. Chen Ren was torn apart and healed a moment later.

But when he came back, he attacked again.

He knew he couldn’t give up here. The lightning was weak against the dragon, but that did not mean the attempt was useless. Every attack gave him something. A reaction, timing, and a better understanding of how the illusion moved and how much freedom it allowed him before killing him again.

He understood one thing—that to understand it, he had to keep fighting.

After all, there was no alternative.

So instead of trying to hurt the dragon directly, he focused on becoming more efficient with his attacks. The small gap between each death meant he had to act quickly, but even that was not easy. It was not every time that he managed to release an attack before the next strike came.

Sometimes, his arms were cut off before he could move.

Other times, the pressure of what was happening got to him, and his thoughts slowed at the worst moment. Once, his attack did not come out at all because the primordial qi destroyed his dantian before he could gather the lightning properly.

Those were big problems.

Chen Ren doubted he had infinite time here. His mind was growing heavier with every death, and even his thoughts felt slower than before. But at least, with every attempt, he was preparing himself better for what might be the hardest battle of his life.

Then he finally got a five second gap.

Chen Ren used it at once.

Lightning burst out around him and spread in every direction, forming a dome in the air. He had practised the technique many times in the desert, but seeing it appear here was different. Bolts of lightning moved through the empty sky, connecting with one another until they formed a wide structure around him, almost like a huge box made of stormlight.

Chen Ren didn’t let himself get distracted by the achievement. The technique had worked, and that was all that mattered.

He moved immediately.

His body disappeared from one edge of the lightning dome and appeared at another. The dragon’s next attack tore through the space where he had been standing a moment earlier, but for the first time since the illusion began, he survived one of its strikes.

The success barely lasted a second. A sharp pain cut through his abdomen, and when he looked down, he saw a deep wound across his body. Blood spilled from it, but the injury wasn’t fatal. Chen Ren winced, forced himself to ignore the pain, and kept moving.

He could still fight.

Before the next attack could land, he teleported again. And again. And again.

Each movement brought him closer to the golden dragon.

He hadn’t managed to engulf the dragon inside the lightning dome, but that hadn’t been the point. The dome was his foothold—a way to move through a space where the dragon’s primordial qi had made normal movement almost useless.

He kept jumping along its edges, closing the distance little by little while the dragon’s attacks tore through the places he had just left behind.

After all, if he had formed the dome around the dragon, the beast would have been able to break it.

More than that, the primordial qi was thickest near its body. Even creating the dome outside that space had drained more qi than he expected, and even now, he could feel resistance from the primordial qi in the air. It pressed against his lightning, trying to smother the structure before he could make proper use of it.

Chen Ren pushed on anyway.

He teleported along the edges of the dome, moving as close to the dragon as he dared. He then pushed qi into his spatial ring, and five large boulders appeared in front of him. He had taken them from the desert earlier without thinking too much about it, but now they were going to be a big use.

He controlled them as best as he could.

The Sky-Grade telekinesis technique was still far from perfect, especially with objects this heavy, but he forced his intent into the boulders and hurled them toward the golden dragon.

He didn’t aim for its body. That would be useless.

Instead, he aimed for the dragon’s eyes. No matter how strong a beast was, the eyes were usually more vulnerable than the rest of the body. Chen Ren did not expect to blind it completely, but if the boulders could do even a little damage, then he might gain another opening.

The boulders struck the dragon’s eye. Then they shattered.

Unfortunately, there was no impact, blood, roar of pain or wound. The stones simply broke apart the moment they touched the star-like eye, turning into dust and fragments that scattered across the golden surface.

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The dragon only squinted slightly, as if the dirt had irritated it.

The very next second, Chen Ren’s head fell from his body.

For a few horrible moments, he saw the world spinning away from him. Then the primordial qi moved again, stitching his neck back together as if death itself had become nothing more than a small mistake to correct.

Chen Ren inhaled sharply the moment he healed.

His hand went to his throat, fingers pressing against skin that had just been severed. The pain was gone, but the memory of it remained.

The golden dragon looked down at him. “A good trick,” it said. “But in front of me, it was never going to work.”

Chen Ren stayed quiet.

He disappeared again, moving through the lightning dome before the next attack could land. Fortunately, the structure had remained even after he died. That gave him a little hope, but as he moved around it, he felt primordial qi coming toward him.

This time, it was not a single strike. It was spreading.

The primordial qi already filled a large part of the space around him, but now it was gathering in thicker amounts.

It was trying to surround the lightning dome.

Chen Ren understood what the dragon was doing almost immediately. If the primordial qi closed around the structure, it would stop his ability to teleport through it. Once that happened, the small advantage he had fought so hard to create would disappear.

He couldn’t allow that.

As the primordial qi pressed toward him, he released a large amount of lightning, aiming to break through it before it could fully close in. His qi clashed against the golden energy, lightning crackling violently as it tried to carve a path through the pressure.

But as he expected, the primordial qi was far too strong.

It was supposed to be the strongest qi in the world, and right now, he could feel why. Every second, it pushed back against his lightning, pressing closer and closer until it was almost touching his body. The space around him tightened, and before he could move away, the primordial qi wrapped around him.

It happened too quickly for him to stop. One moment, he was still trying to fight it. The next, it had already seeped all around him.

Panic shot through Chen Ren’s mind, and then he experienced the worst death yet.

The qi around him sharpened all at once.

His body was cut into a hundred pieces in a single instant.

Pieces of him fell from the sky and scattered through the golden light before he could even scream properly. The pain was so sudden and complete that his mind almost failed to understand it.

The primordial qi repaired him again.

Chen Ren came back with a sharp gasp, his heartbeat pounding wildly in his chest. The experience flashed through his mind again and again, refusing to fade. He had felt pain before. He had died many times in this illusion already. But nothing had felt like that.

His hands moved over his body through his torn robes.

There were marks on his skin where he had been stitched back together. Thin lines tracing the places where his body had been cut apart and rebuilt. Seeing them made his breathing turn uneven.

He only looked up when the golden dragon spoke again. “This is the bitter fruit of the disappointment you caused me.”

Chen Ren growled at that.

It felt as if the dragon was repeating the same thing again and again just to make him sick of hearing it. Considering how this illusion had been going, that was probably exactly what it wanted. It wanted to break him down with pain, fear, and the same accusation until he started believing it.

Still, Chen Ren knew he had to do something. There was no way he could take another death like that.

As he floated there, the primordial qi began pushing toward him again. The memory of being cut into pieces only half a minute earlier flashed through his mind. His body had been rebuilt, but his mind still remembered every part of it. Chen Ren knew that if it happened again, something inside him might truly break.

He tried to teleport through the lightning dome.

The primordial qi intercepted him.

It locked the space around him before he could move properly, cutting off the path he had created for himself. Chen Ren’s heart clenched, but with no other choice left, he focused on fighting it directly. He had failed once already, and he knew he might fail again, but there was no other way forward.

A huge amount of lightning burst out of him.

It crashed into the primordial qi, crackling violently as Chen Ren pushed with everything he had. But it felt like trying to shove back the largest mountain in the world. The golden qi did not stop. It only slowed for a moment before pressing forward again, forcing his lightning back inch by inch.

Soon, Chen Ren was barely projecting it outside his own body.

It was horrible.

He could see exactly what was going to happen. If this continued, then in ten seconds, maybe less, the primordial qi would wrap around him again and cut him apart. He would die in pieces, heal, and wake up with that memory burned even deeper into his mind.

He couldn’t let that happen. But could he truly fight against primordial qi? No.

That… was the wrong question.

It didn’t matter whether he could fight against it or not. He had to fight against it. There was no other path. No one would come to save him. If he let himself accept death just because the illusion would revive him, then he would eventually stop resisting altogether.

Chen Ren couldn’t allow that.

As the primordial qi began wrapping around him, he didn’t give up.

Last time, some part of him had simply waited for his fate, knowing he would be brought back. This time, he rejected that thought completely. He forced more lightning out of his body, pushing until his meridians burned and his mind screamed from the strain.

He had only one goal—push back the primordial qi.

Chen Ren didn’t bother thinking about whether he could actually do it.

There was no point in second-guessing himself now. If he hesitated, he would be cut apart again, and he was not sure his mind could survive another death like that. So he pushed everything into his lightning and forced it against the primordial qi.

It felt like he was draining himself dry. But soon, he saw something unexpected.

The primordial qi that had almost wrapped around him completely stopped moving forward.

Chen Ren’s eyes widened.

That small pause gave him a surge of confidence, and he immediately pushed harder. Lightning wrapped around his hands as he forced them into the golden qi, moving it aside bit by bit. To his surprise, it worked. The pressure fought him, but it no longer felt impossible. He kept pushing until he finally slipped out of the thick, suffocating qi and regained the space to teleport again.

The moment he moved, another question struck him. How had he suddenly gained enough strength to resist primordial qi? The answer came soon after.

This was an illusion.

The golden dragon was not real.

The primordial qi was not real either, at least not in the way his mind had accepted it. Chen Ren had failed to resist it earlier because he had never truly believed he could. From the very beginning, he had treated the dragon as an existence far above him, something he could only run from or endure. Even his attacks had been attempts to stall, not truly fight.

That had been his mistake. Chen Ren looked at the golden dragon again. This time, he did not see an unbeatable heavenly beast.

He saw the illusion trying to wear him down.

The golden dragon met his eyes. “You cannot run forever. Give your life to me and suffer for eternity.”

Chen Ren scoffed.

Lightning gathered around his fists and legs, brighter and sharper than before.

“Don’t fuck with me,” he said. “You are not even real.”

The next second, he rushed straight toward the golden dragon.

The beast opened its mouth, and golden flames burst out, flooding the empty sky in front of him. Chen Ren did not turn away. He pushed more lightning through his body and met the flames head-on.

***

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