Dao of Money

287. Princess worries

While Chen Ren fought the chained armored knight, Princess Yanyue felt the beginnings of a headache settle behind her eyes as she moved through the library with the twins close beside her.She was not unfamiliar with grand places. As a princess, she had grown up around them. Libraries least of all should have intimidated her. The imperial library back home was one of the largest in the empire, and she knew it so well that even now she could picture its halls without effort. Her brothers had often mocked her for it, saying she was better suited to become a librarian than an empress.

But this place was not something she could compare to home. It was too vast. There were too many books, too many rows, too many levels, and worst of all, no clear order she could make immediate sense of.

Walking through a single row properly took far too long, and there was no index, no register, no attendant to point her in the right direction. She had to work it out herself, and even with the twins helping her search, she had not yet found the diary she had come here for.

That only made the frustration in her chest grow sharper.

A part of her had already begun whispering the ugly possibility that the diary might not be here at all. But she forced that thought down whenever it surfaced. If she judged things correctly, then there was every reason it should be here. The cultivator whose diary she sought had not been some towering figure whose writings would have been sealed away in a precious inner section. He had been painfully ordinary.

And because of that, the pagoda should not have considered his diary important enough to guard too carefully.

Which meant it had to be somewhere in this endless place.

The problem was that “somewhere” inside the grand library might as well have meant nowhere at all.

By now, Princess Yanyue felt as though she could spend an entire year wandering between these shelves and still fail to find what she wanted. That realization had finally forced her to change the way she searched.

Instead of wasting more time moving through whatever section happened to be in front of her—even the ones that actually looked interesting enough to make her pause—Princess Yanyue changed her approach and started looking for what she believed had to exist somewhere in this place.

An index.

There was no way a library this vast had been built without one. Whoever created the grand library would never expect a climber to blindly wander until they died of old age. No, if the pagoda had any pattern at all—and by now she knew it did—then there would be some path to understanding the place. Some trial, some hidden room, some puzzle that would eventually lead to an index or registry.

That was how the pagoda worked.

And strangely enough, after seeing Chen Ren’s plan to break through the [Grand Aegis Array] actually succeed, something in her own thinking had shifted. Before, she might have dismissed the thought as wishful nonsense. Now, she found herself believing that if she searched properly enough, then yes, she really might find it.

The problem was that the library kept refusing to give her anything easily.

No matter how much she walked, no matter how many shelves and staircases and hidden corners she searched, the thing remained out of sight. What she had figured out instead was that the knowledge inside this place had clearly been divided into different sections, and many of those sections had to be earned. More than once already, she had come upon chambers that were not simply open to anyone who passed by. They had their own trials.

In just half a day, she had already gone through two of them.

The first had happened by accident.

She had spotted a narrow door hidden between two shelves and opened it expecting another room, only for the library to shift around her. The floor beyond had become a cave, and before her stretched a narrow bridge leading toward three lone bookshelves standing on the other side. At first glance, the whole thing looked simple enough. It was only when she looked below that she understood what sort of place she had stepped into.

There was no visible ground under the bridge. It was all darkness.

Not empty darkness either, but a depth thick enough to feel alive, and moving through that blackness were creatures that looked like mud sharks circling just beneath unseen water.

Princess Yanyue had taken one look at them and knew that if she fell, she would not survive long enough to regret it.

So rather than trust the bridge and her luck, she had first focused on killing the mud sharks from a distance before attempting to cross.

Though that hadn’t actually worked.

The mud sharks refused to die no matter what she threw at them. Arrows pierced them, qi attacks broke apart their forms, and yet every single time they simply gathered back in the darkness below as if nothing had happened. In the end, Princess Yanyue had no choice but to abandon the idea of clearing the way and simply move.

So she rushed the bridge.

Every movement technique she knew came into use then. The moment she stepped on the first stretch of it, the sharks burst upward from the darkness, their jaws tearing through the stone and mud beneath her feet as if the whole bridge was nothing more than wet sand.

Any ordinary cultivator would have died there without question, but Yanyue was not ordinary. She had multiple movement techniques, all of them at the peak of the Earth grade, and she used each one without hesitation, slipping through the snapping jaws and collapsing bridge in a blur until she finally reached the other side.

The reward waiting there was disappointing in one way and fascinating in another.

The books on those shelves had nothing to do with what she was looking for. Instead, they focused on a kind of technique she had barely even considered before—methods meant specifically for surviving in places even cultivators would struggle to endure for long periods.

There were techniques for deep water, for crushing pressure, and even for lava. They were not just about enduring those environments either, but about forcing qi through the body in such a way that the flesh itself would adapt temporarily and function inside them.

Princess Yanyue had wanted to take them all.

Unfortunately, the library did not allow that. The books would not enter her spatial ring no matter what she tried. In the end, she could only choose two that seemed the most useful and carry those back with her in her own hands. Hopefully, she would be able to take them out with her.

Fortunately, the return out of the chamber had been easier.

The mud sharks no longer bothered her, and the broken pieces of the ruined bridge were enough for her to use as footholds to leap back across the darkness.

Once she returned to the grand library, it had not taken long before she stumbled onto the second trial.

This time, however, she had not been the one to find it first.

She came upon the twins searching around one of the shelves, with Li Qingfeng sitting on top of a large pile of books.

As soon as they saw her, both twins straightened at once.

After a bit of talking, Princess Yanyue learned that they had discovered another section around a bend in the shelves but were not sure whether it was safe to enter. Since she had already gone through one trial by then, she chose to go with them, and this time the test proved far more direct.

They had to fight.

The thing waiting for them looked like a giant bookshelf at first glance, but only from afar. Once it moved, it became obvious that it was some sort of ancient abomination that should not have existed in this world wearing the shape of a shelf. Tendrils writhed out from between its rows, and books kept firing out of it one after another like shots from a qi cannon.

The fight had been chaotic but manageable.

The three of them moved around it carefully while avoiding the barrage, and fortunately one of Princess Yanyue’s arrows struck a book just before it launched. The impact caused the thing to explode within the shelf itself, blasting part of the creature backward and opening it up. After that, the twins had moved in and finished it off with surprising efficiency.

That had honestly caught her attention.

With the new artifacts they had been given, especially the defensive ones, the twins had gained far more confidence, and that confidence had changed the way they fought. They were still not polished in the way true sect disciples were, but for cultivators who had been little more than scavengers not too long ago, they were genuinely impressive.

It made her understand more clearly why Sect Leader Chen had chosen them to accompany them into the pagoda.

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Unfortunately, even after clearing that trial, the reward had still not helped her.

There was no sign of the index she had been looking for, and the books in that section were again unrelated to her goal. This time they were about famous bow cultivators, detailing both their lives and their techniques. As a bow user, Princess Yanyue could not say she was uninterested. Li Qingxue, in particular, had also clearly been drawn to them, her eyes brightening as she moved through the shelves. But for Yanyue herself, this was not the time to start studying a new technique, no matter how tempting the books might have been.

Hence, they only took a few of the better-looking books and left that section behind. It was after that that Princess Yanyue finally decided to tell the twins what she had really been searching for.

An index.

The moment she explained it, both of them agreed to help without hesitation. They were smart enough to understand that blindly wandering through a place like this would waste far too much time. Unfortunately, knowing what they needed did not make finding it any easier. No matter where they searched or how carefully they moved through the library, the index remained frustratingly out of reach. Worse, they stopped finding new trial rooms altogether. Even when they went up another floor, all they found were more reading spaces, more tables, more chairs, and no real clue pointing them forward.

The size of the library only made it worse.

Princess Yanyue had already started to realize that if they kept searching like this, it might take more than a week before they found the room holding the index. Maybe longer.

So eventually, she stopped walking and turned to the twins.

“I think we need to change our strategy,” she said. “At this rate, we’re getting nowhere.”

Both of them nodded, clearly having come to much the same conclusion already. After a short pause, Li Qingxue said, “Should we look for a detection technique first? Something that covers a larger area. Maybe that would help.”

Princess Yanyue shook her head. “No. It won’t.”

She had already tried that.

“I used every detection technique I have,” she said. “None of them work properly here. There’s probably an array around the library that blocks that sort of thing or I just don't have the right technique.”

She had seen enough such protections in the imperial castle to recognize the signs. It was possible that some rarer detection techniques might bypass the interference, but finding one here, learning it, and then testing it would take too long.

That was not a real answer. Which left her with the harder question. What was?

She kept turning the problem over in her head while the twins watched her in silence, waiting for her to decide what they should do next, and somehow that only made Princess Yanyue more irritated. She had gotten far too used to Chen Ren handling every impossible thing the pagoda threw at them. Realizing that stung more than she liked. Depending on someone else for too long was the sort of habit that got people killed.

So she forced herself to think, and think again.

Her gaze drifted upward as she did, climbing past one level after another until it disappeared into the heights of the library. The floors just kept going. It felt as though there might be hundreds of them, and with the ceiling still nowhere in sight, the whole place almost seemed endless.

Then, finally, an idea came to her—that might not work, but was worth trying.

Without wasting another moment, she reached into her spatial ring and took out her flying sword. She tossed it lightly into the air, and it hovered there in place. That, at least, was a relief. She had no idea what she would have done if the library had somehow forbidden even that.

The twins looked at her with confusion, so she explained as she stepped closer to the sword.

“When people build places like this, they usually hide the most important things either at the very top or at the very bottom. That’s how a lot of architects think.” Her eyes went up again. “So I’m going to see what’s hidden above.”

Before either of them could say anything else, Princess Yanyue stepped onto the sword and rose.

She moved up quickly, crossing one floor, then another, keeping her balance as the sword angled higher and higher through the open space of the library. From time to time, her eyes swept across the levels she passed, but at first nothing stood out. It was all shelves, reading spaces and rows that looked as endless as the ones below.

But the higher she climbed, the more she began to notice something. There were more doors that could only lead to more trial rooms.

One after another, set at intervals across the upper floors.

Seeing that made her wonder just how many hidden sections this library actually contained. And for one brief, dangerous moment, a thought crossed her mind with startling clarity.

If she could claim everything this place contained, if she could truly gain all the knowledge hidden here, then perhaps one day she would not need to dream of becoming empress.

She would simply become it.

But for now, her focus stayed on the top.

She thought she would reach it in a minute or two. Then five minutes passed. Then ten. The ceiling still seemed far away, hidden in the same distant haze that made the whole library feel endless, and a faint irritation started to build in her chest. For a moment, she genuinely wondered if the place had been stretched by some absurd spatial array to go on forever.

Then, finally, she saw the ceiling.

It was still distant, but no longer impossible to reach, and Princess Yanyue immediately pushed more qi into the sword and rose faster. Another five minutes passed before she finally reached the highest floor and slowed, letting the sword hover beneath her.

For a second, she looked down and had to steady herself. The floors of the library dropped away beneath her like the inside of some giant hollow tower, and the sight almost reminded her of looking down from the highest point of the imperial castle.

Then she turned her attention away from the depth and slowly spun the sword, searching the top of the library.

and then she found a door.

It stood to the left, set apart from everything else, and the moment she saw it, she knew it was different from all the other trial doors she had passed on the way up. It was made of gold.

That alone was enough to set it apart.

She drifted toward it, wondering for a brief second whether it would even open for her, but when she placed her hand against it and pushed, the door moved inward with slow, smooth ease. Princess Yanyue stepped through at once.

The room beyond was empty. At least, it looked empty.

Its walls were white, its floor white, everything inside it washed in the same pale stillness, with not a single piece of furniture or decoration in sight. She took a few cautious steps forward, and the moment she did, the golden door behind her shut.

Princess Yanyue turned sharply and moved toward it on instinct, but before she could reach it, a voice spoke.

“So a climber finally found the way to me.”

Her heartbeat quickened. She turned around immediately to see a woman standing there.

She wore a long white gown and held a faint smile on her face. At first glance, there was nothing particularly grand about her. She did not shine with some visible aura, nor did she look overly imposing. But every instinct Princess Yanyue possessed screamed the same thing at once.

This woman could crush her like dust if she wished.

Before Yanyue could even ask who she was, the woman spoke again.

“Why are you just standing there?” she said, still smiling. “Introduce yourself, so we can begin the trial and see whether you are worthy of my inheritance or not.”

***

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.

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