Dao of Money

288. Mind Cultivation

Chen Ren slipped left as a chain snapped toward his throat, the metal hissing through the air where his neck had been a breath earlier. He had dodged that same kind of strike so many times in the last few minutes that his body reacted before his mind did. But when he tried to catch the chain this time, his hand closed on nothing. It had already withdrawn.At his side, Wang Jun gave a dry snicker. “You’re too slow. Train more.”

Chen Ren exhaled through his nose. “I’ll do that once we’re out of this pagoda. Until then, keep your mouth shut.”

“I want to,” Wang Jun said, sounding almost amused, “but it’s hard not to say anything when you’ve been getting tossed around like this for the last five minutes.”

Chen Ren wanted to snap back at him. The problem was that Wang Jun was… right.

They had failed to put down the armored figure over and over, and it wasn’t because they weren’t trying. The thing stood in the middle of the chamber wrapped in chains, and not just a few. There were hundreds of them, all moving as if they shared one mind. Whenever Yalan attacked from range, using the shelves as footholds and the books themselves as stepping stones to close the distance, the chains gathered together in thick whips or walls, intercepting her flames and blows before they could land cleanly.

That was what made the fight so irritating. The armored figure itself was not the real problem.

The chains were.

Still, the one useful thing they had learned was enough to keep Chen Ren from getting truly frustrated. They didn’t need to destroy every chain or wear the thing down slowly. The trial had a weakness. The only real way to win was to get close.

Yalan had proven that already.

She had reached it once, just once, and the mark was still there—a deep slash across the figure’s chest where her claws had torn through the armor and revealed that there was nothing substantial beneath it. The chest was hollow.

If she had gotten one more clean strike, the fight might already have been over.

But the chains had reacted too quickly, whipping her away before she could do more, and since then the armored thing had only grown more careful.

And after that, all they had been doing was trying to get close to it again.

As Chen Ren built up another projectile in his palm, Yalan shouted at him while leaping through a storm of chains, her body twisting between them with an ease.

“Chen Ren, get close to it! I’ll deal with most of the chains. Don’t just stand in the back!”

He looked up and saw her glaring at him even while her claws flashed out to sweep aside another cluster of chains. He knew he couldn’t ignore her. The only reason he had stayed back this long was because one of those chains had already hit him hard enough to nearly crack a bone, and the qi running through them had eaten into his [Starlight Armour] in a way he didn’t like at all.

But staying back wasn’t helping. It was only dragging the fight out.

So Chen Ren took a breath and fixed his eyes on the chains. He had been watching them for a while now. There was a pattern to the way the armored figure controlled them, not a simple one, but enough that he could almost feel the rhythm of it. The trouble was that almost wasn’t very comforting when one mistake would get him smashed into a wall.

Still, he had no better option.

Lightning rushed around his body, thin arcs crawling over his limbs as he muttered, “Wang Jun, if you get hit, that’s not my problem.”

The head almost certainly had something insulting ready, but Chen Ren was already moving.

He shot forward at once, crossing two bookshelves in seconds and using them as brief cover while chains lashed toward him. The barriers around the shelves knocked some of them aside, buying him a little space, but the closer he got, the worse it became. Dozens of chains found open paths and came crashing toward him from every direction.

Chen Ren didn’t slow.

He shifted left as several chains shot for his chest, ducked as more swept down from above, then jumped straight through a knot of them, twisting his body in midair just enough to slip between the gaps before dropping low again as another wave came whipping in from behind.

Up to that point, the pattern Chen Ren had read in the chains was still holding.

Then the armored figure shifted.

It was only a small movement, just a turn to the right, but it was enough to break the rhythm he had been following. One of the chains snapped out from a blind angle and slammed into his legs. Pain shot through him at once, and Chen Ren lost his footing, crashing down hard enough that for a second all he saw was the floor rushing up beneath him.

A light weight landed on his shoulder just then. “Leave it to me!” Yalan shouted.

Chen Ren looked up just in time to see her cut through the storm of chains.

She moved like a streak of fire slipping through cracks in stone, twisting past the first wave, then the second, until she landed squarely on the armored figure’s chest. Her claws flared, lengthening into burning spears, and she drove them down without hesitation.

The armored figure tried to retreat. Chains whipped inward, trying to shield its chest, but Yalan was already too close. Her claws punched through the armor, tearing deeper than before and ripping open a larger hole in the hollow chest beneath. The force of it shoved the figure backward into the wall.

Then, all at once, the chains stopped.

The dozens that had been moving through the whole chamber went still in midair before clattering down across the floor in a dead heap of metal. For the first time since the trial began, the room was quiet.

Chen Ren let out a long breath and pushed himself back up. “Well,” he said, brushing dust from himself, “that was easy.”

Yalan gave him a flat look. “It would’ve been easier if you weren’t hiding in the back for half the fight.”

Chen Ren snorted and said, “It worked out in the end, didn’t it? Let’s see if all that trouble was worth it.”

He stepped toward the shelves as the qi around them finally faded away, letting the bindings loosen. For a moment, his attention dropped to the chains scattered across the floor. On instinct, he tried to push them into his spatial ring.

To his surprise, it worked.

Wang Jun’s voice came at once. “What are you even planning to do with those?”

Chen Ren didn’t stop as he answered, “They might be useful. They look good for conducting qi.”

Wang Jun muttered something that sounded like a complaint, though Chen Ren didn’t bother making it out fully. His attention was already on the shelves.

Now, finally, he could see what the trial had been guarding, and as it turned out, killing the armored trial guardian had not been a waste at all.

The moment Chen Ren started going through the shelves, he realized this section actually held books he cared about, and for one reason above all else. Nearly every book here was tied to the mind in some way. He didn’t know yet if every hidden section in the library had been arranged around a specific theme, but if that was the case, then this one was clearly centered on mental techniques.

It did not take him long to confirm one thing.

The armored figure had been controlling the chains through telepathy.

Chen Ren had already suspected as much during the fight. The way the chains moved had felt too smooth, too immediate, too detached from ordinary physical motion. But once he began flipping through the books, it became obvious. Several of them described the same core method in different ways, and all of them pointed toward the same principle: the chains had not been dragged around by hand, but directed through the mind itself.

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That alone would have been enough to keep his attention.

But what drew him in even more was another detail that kept repeating through the books. The technique demanded a resolute mind. More than that, one of the manuals had an entire section dedicated to mind cultivation and the requirements needed to support this sort of control. The moment Chen Ren saw that, his interest in the whole section deepened.

Of course, he still wanted the telepathy technique itself.

It was simply too useful to ignore.

Being able to control objects with the mind alone was the sort of skill that could help in countless situations, and beyond all the practical use, there was another reason he wanted it. It looked cool. Being able to command hundreds of chains at once, all moving through the air without being tied to one’s body, would be enough to shake most enemies before a fight even properly began. Half of battle was pressure, and a skill like that would create plenty of it.

Still, even with that in mind, Chen Ren’s priorities were clear.

He began moving through the section with a single purpose—find more books on telepathy. And, if fate was being kind for once, find a proper manual on mind cultivation.

The second mattered more.

After all, he had been looking for a proper mind cultivation manual for a long time now. It was the one thing he still lacked if he wanted to finally push himself to the peak of the foundation establishment realm, and if there was any place in the pagoda where such a thing could exist, then it had to be here.

So he kept searching.

Every now and then, he would find something tempting enough to slow him down—one book on using mental attacks to break an enemy’s will, another on disrupting thoughts in the middle of battle—but each time he forced himself to put it aside and keep looking for the manual he actually needed.

Like that, nearly two hours passed.

The section was smaller than the others, but there were still enough books in it to swallow time without effort, and even with Yalan helping him, going through them all was slow work. Then, at last, Chen Ren pulled out another thin volume, looked at the title, and smiled.

[Mind Cultivation for Beginners].

To anyone else, it might have looked plain. To him, it felt like finding buried treasure.

He opened it at once and skimmed through several pages just to make sure it was real and not some misleading title, and it was. The chapters were exactly what he had hoped for, each one explaining, step by step, how to strengthen the mind slowly, how to endure mental pressure, and how to defend against different kinds of attacks on consciousness itself. The explanations were detailed too, far more than he had expected from something marked for beginners.

Chen Ren did not dare read too much right there.

Instead, he flipped through just enough to confirm its value, then slid it beneath his robes and secured it against the strap around his body. After that, he took the book on the telekinesis technique as well to read and copy them later and finally looked around the section one more time.

“I think we should go see what the others are doing,” he said.

Yalan, who had been pawing through a few open books of her own, gave a small shrug and nodded.

“I don’t see anything interesting here anyway.”

Chen Ren said nothing to that. He simply began putting the books he had taken back onto their proper shelves before leaving.

They made their way out of the section, and as soon as they stepped back into the main part of the library and started descending the stairs, Yalan flicked an ear. “So when are you going to look for the books Shrey asked for?”

Chen Ren paused.

Yalan glanced at him and added, “You didn’t forget, did you?”

He shook his head. “Of course not. I just wanted to look around first, because I’m not confident enough to go after those books yet. There’s a good chance whatever is guarding them could simply kill me.”

Yalan’s tail lifted slightly at that. “If you’re not confident, then why did you agree in the first place?”

Chen Ren gave a small shrug as they kept walking. “Because at the time, I thought I’d find a way.” He let out a quiet breath. “Back then, I couldn’t afford to hesitate. And either way, if not for Shrey, we would never have gotten here this quickly.”

Yalan went quiet after that, clearly turning his answer over in her head, and Chen Ren had no desire to keep discussing it. The silence lasted for a little while before Wang Jun cut through it. “And what exactly are these books the merchant wants? And where are they? You didn’t come all the way here without knowing that much, did you?”

“Of course I know where they are. That’s not the problem.” He stepped down another flight of stairs before continuing. “The trouble is that beyond the location, I have no idea what we’ll run into there. And once I begin, I’ll be on a time limit. That’s why I’m waiting until just before we need to leave the library.”

Wang Jun was quiet for a moment. “You still haven’t said where in the library this place is.”

Chen Ren slowed at that. Wang Jun was right.

But there was a reason he kept avoiding that part. He already knew what they would say the moment he admitted it. They would tell him he had been an idiot to accept Shrey’s condition in the first place, and the worst part was that they would not even be wrong.

But then Chen Ren figured he had put it off long enough.

If they were truly going to get those books for Shrey, then the others deserved to know what kind of danger was tied to it. So after a short silence, he finally said, “It’s on the underground floor of the library. Shrey gave me a rough idea of how to get there, and that’s where the books are kept. There are a lot of them, but he only wants three for us to carry out.”

Yalan walked beside him for a few steps before saying, “That doesn’t sound too hard if you already know how to get to them. So what’s the catch?”

Chen Ren stayed quiet until they reached the bottom of the stairs. “The catch is that those books belong to the personal collection of the lord of this floor.”

At once, Yalan turned her head and glared at him as if this was exactly the kind of answer she had expected.

Wang Jun, on the other hand, laughed. “What is it with you and stealing from lords? First the Zombie Queen, now this.”

That question made him exhale loudly. “Maybe that’s just my fate. But we can pull it off. The lord isn’t supposed to be out in the library all the time. According to Shrey, he goes into hibernation. Even if he notices the books are missing and comes after us, we only need to make it to the master lift and get out.”

Yalan’s tail flicked sharply. “All I’m hearing is that we’re going to be running for our lives while a floor lord hunts us down.”

Chen Ren couldn’t really argue with that. It was far too likely.

Still, he opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, movement ahead caught his eye. The twins were hurrying toward them through the library, both of them looking pale enough that Chen Ren immediately knew something had gone wrong.

He barely had time to ask what happened before Li Qingfeng spoke.

“Sect Leader Chen… Princess Yanyue—she’s gone.”

***

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