Dao of Money

264. Unwilling alchemists

Tau Liu had no idea what he was doing on the third floor.He should have been back on the fifth, inside his new alchemy chamber, doing something far more reasonable—standing over rows of cauldrons while the others refined pills for the Divine Coin Pavilion shop. For the first time in what felt like forever, things there had finally become stable enough that he was not needed for every little step. He could have spent the day supervising, correcting mistakes when they happened, and otherwise doing very little at all. He had even planned to set aside some time for himself. A bit of cultivation. Maybe a walk through the city. Maybe sleep without someone shaking him awake because another batch had gone wrong.

Instead, he was walking through a forest on the third floor with no clear idea why he had agreed to this, half expecting a beast to leap out of the trees or one of the newly arrived climbers to attack them on sight.

That was what he kept asking himself.

For the past few weeks, he had worked himself into the ground. As demand for pills kept climbing, he had ended up taking center stage in production whether he wanted to or not. One order became three, then five, then more than he could keep track of, and before long the days had blurred together into heat, smoke, bitter medicinal scents, and endless refinement. There had been stretches where he barely slept more than a few times over the course of two days. After the climb through the pagoda, he had thought the worst was behind him. Instead, the fifth floor had become a different kind of hell.

Not just for him, either. The other disciples had been pushed nearly as hard.

In the end, the one who had actually done something about it had not been Sect Leader Chen.

It had been Anji.

Seeing Tau Liu and the others running themselves into collapse, she had started recruiting more alchemists to help with production. That alone had earned her more goodwill from him than Chen Ren had managed in quite a while. Of course, she could not recruit from among the climbers.

Letting outsiders too close to their methods was dangerous, especially when the Divine Coin Pavilion attracted so much attention. Even the Emerald Sun Sect, famous for producing some of the finest alchemists in the empire, had attempted to bribe some of them for recipes. So Anji had looked elsewhere.

Through Du Rensheng’s connections and influence, she had recruited pagoda natives instead—men and women looking for work, people with enough skill to be useful and enough need to keep them loyal. It had worked better than Tau Liu had expected. Once they were trained and the pressure stopped falling on the same few shoulders, everything became easier.

For the first time in weeks, he had been able to sleep. He had slept for three straight days, and not a single person had dared wake him.

His junior disciples had felt much the same. They had all but started treating the pagoda like a long-overdue vacation—one they meant to enjoy while they still could, before they eventually had to return and throw themselves back into their master’s eccentric research and increasingly unreasonable experiments.

Tau Liu had intended to do the same.

Then, just as that easier life had begun to feel real, Sect Leader Chen had gathered them together, handed over a map, and told them to go collect treasures for him.

Tau Liu was not exaggerating when he thought the man had looked like a demon in that moment.

Chen Ren had said it so casually too, as if sending a group of exhausted alchemists into the wilds of lower floors to chase after hidden valuables was the most natural thing in the world. Worse, he had told them to be back within a day because he intended to send them to other places after this one as well. Tau Liu had tried to protest. He had made a very reasonable attempt to explain that they were alchemists, not treasure hunters, and that these were in fact two very different professions with very different skill sets.

Chen Ren had not listened.

He had simply patted Tau Liu on the shoulder and said he believed in him.

After that, there had been no good way to argue.

And so Tau Liu had found himself taking the lift down to the third-floor forest with five of his junior disciples trailing behind him, all of them carrying the same doubtful expression he imagined was on his own face. Another team had gone to the fourth floor, and Sect Leader Chen had somehow even convinced Anji and Li Xuan to join in this madness and search for treasures as well.

Tau Liu still did not know whether there were actually any treasures waiting to be found.

He understood even less how Chen Ren had gotten his hands on the maps in the first place. They had looked hand-drawn too, which only made the whole thing stranger. Tau Liu had spent the better part of the last few hours wondering whether Chen Ren had somehow made them himself, and if so, based on what.

As though sensing the shape of his thoughts, one of the junior disciples spoke up from behind him.

“Senior Brother Tau, do you think we’re just walking for nothing? It’s been three hours and I still haven’t seen any elk tree.”

Another chimed in before Tau Liu could answer.

“Yeah. And I think some climbers were tailing us earlier. I don’t sense them now, but they might be waiting to ambush us.”

Tau Liu did not turn around, but he wanted to agree with them.

There had been so many climbers entering the pagoda lately that even stepping off the lift on the third floor had earned them more than a few sharp looks. Most cultivators moved upward, not down, and a group doing the opposite was always going to attract attention. If some of those people decided to follow them and see what was going on, Tau Liu could hardly call it surprising. So far, no one had made a move, but he was not naive enough to think that would hold forever.

At least they were strong enough to deal with the kind of cultivators likely to attack here. Anyone still lingering around the lower floors would not compare to the ones who had already climbed higher.

That did not mean he wanted a fight.

Tau Liu was perfectly content never entering one for the rest of his life if the heavens were kind enough to allow it. Unfortunately, the heavens did not seem overly concerned with the wishes of exhausted alchemists.

So they kept walking.

Every so often, Tau Liu would pull out the map Sect Leader Chen had given him and stare at it again, hoping that this time something on it would prove more useful than before. It never did. The thing showed little more than a straight path leading toward an elk tree where the supposed treasure had been marked, which would have been fine if he had been traveling across an open field instead of through a forest thick enough to swallow any sense of direction after a few dozen steps.

How exactly was he supposed to follow a straight path with trees in the way at every turn?

The deeper they went, the less this felt like a treasure hunt and the more it felt like punishment dressed up as one.

The only part of the map that seemed remotely helpful was the note that the elk tree stood somewhere near the center of the forest. So Tau Liu did the only thing he could—he kept leading them inward. Every now and then they would stop so one of them could climb a tree and look out over the forest canopy, checking whether they were still moving in roughly the right direction before dropping back down and continuing on.

But no matter how long they walked, no matter how many times they checked, the elk tree never appeared.

Even after Tau Liu became certain they had reached the central part of the forest, all they saw around them were ordinary trees. Nothing like the elk tree they were supposed to be searching for. At this rate, he was starting to think they might never find it at all.

Tau Liu frowned and came to an abrupt stop. One of his junior disciples bumped into his back before quickly stepping away.

Then Tau Liu turned to face them.

“This isn’t working,” he said. “Stay here. I’m going to find where the hell that elk tree is. If I can’t find it, we’re leaving. I’m sure Sect Leader Chen has better people for this sort of thing.”

All of his junior disciples nodded at once.

Tau Liu immediately looked toward the largest tree nearby, judged the distance, and leapt. His hand caught a branch, and he used it to pull himself higher before beginning to climb. It took time. Some of the branches were slick, and more than once his footing nearly slipped out from under him, but eventually he reached the top and let out a breath of relief.

Then he looked around.

The forest stretched in every direction, wide and seemingly endless, but taller trees rose above the rest in several places, blocking his view and swallowing whole sections of the land beyond them. Tau Liu stared for a moment, then sighed. There was only one real way to find out whether an elk tree stood somewhere nearby.

He pushed qi into his legs.

When enough had gathered, he bent slightly and jumped, using the burst of force to launch himself higher and higher into the air until the forest below finally opened up before him. As he began to fall, his eyes moved rapidly across the landscape, searching for the shape of the elk tree.

For a second, he thought he saw it. Then the ground rushed up too fast.

Tau Liu threw out a hand and caught one of the branches. The impact tore through his arm and shoulder hard enough to make his muscles scream, but the pain was nowhere near enough to make him lose his grip. He hung there for a moment, body swaying with the force of the stop, before steadying himself and starting down. By the time his feet touched the forest floor again, he was breathing a little harder than before.

His junior disciples all looked at him.

“I think I saw it to the left,” Tau Liu said. “It shouldn’t take long to get there. Let’s just get this over with.”

They all nodded, and at once the group started moving in that direction.

Tau Liu still was not completely sure whether the tree he had glimpsed was the one they were supposed to find, but he had not seen anything else around it that looked remotely similar. If there was an elk tree in this part of the forest, it had to be that one.

For the next few hours, they walked on in silence.

Every so often they stopped to make sure no one was following them, and from time to time Tau Liu climbed another tree or leapt up into the branches to check that they were still heading the right way.

Taken from NovelFire, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

At last, they reached it.

The elk tree was not as massive as some of the towering trees around it, but it stood out immediately all the same. Its trunk was broader and rougher than the others nearby, the bark split into deep ridges that almost resembled old antlers running along the wood. Several heavy branches curved outward in a way that made the whole tree look oddly deliberate, as though it had grown into the shape of something watching the forest in silence. More importantly, it was the only one of its kind anywhere in sight.

Looking at it, one of the junior disciples frowned. “Where’s the treasure?”

Tau Liu pulled the map out again. The paper had already been unfolded so many times that the edges were beginning to soften beneath his fingers. He turned it over and squinted at the instructions Sect Leader Chen had written on the back, lips pressing thin as his eyes moved across the lines. Then he looked up at the tree again, tracing its trunk and branches more carefully this time.

A moment later, he saw it.

He lifted a hand and pointed. “See that hole? It says we’ll find it there.”

One of the disciples brightened at once. “Then I’ll check it.”

Tau Liu barely had time to turn before the boy was already moving. He leapt up toward the trunk, landed lightly on one of the branches, and pushed his arm into the hollow without a second thought.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the color drained from his face.

Tau Liu felt his own body tense before his mind had even caught up. The disciple’s shoulders jerked, his balance broke, and in the next instant something unseen hauled him forward.

There was no time for a scream, no struggle Tau Liu could properly react to—just the sharp, impossible sight of a body being ripped into a hole that should never have been large enough to take him.

Tau Liu stared at the hollow.

A second earlier his junior brother had been there, crouched on the branch with one hand inside the tree. Now there was nothing left but bark and darkness.

His thoughts stumbled over themselves trying to make sense of it. How could a tree do that? An elk tree of all things?

“What the bloody hell?” he muttered under his breath and tried to make sense of it.

For one brief instant, he wondered if it was a treant. But when he sent his qi brushing across the trunk again, he felt nothing that should have been there. No strange pulse. No malice crouched beneath the bark waiting to lunge. In every way his senses could read, it was only a tree. A treant would have struck the moment they approached. It would never have sat still and pretended.

Behind him, whispering broke out at once.

“A cursed tree…”

“We need to leave.”

“Senior Brother, we should go!”

The fear in their voices hit Tau Liu like a spark to dry grass, but he didn't listen to them.

He knew what people thought of alchemists. Careful hands. Weak nerves. Men and women better suited to furnaces than danger. Maybe there was truth in that. But they were not about to turn their backs and leave one of their own inside some impossible tree.

He turned sharply.

“Shut up,” he snapped, his eyes burning with fury for his own sect’s disciples. “We’re figuring out what happened to him. I will do it myself.”

One of the junior sisters stared at the hollow with a pale face. “But what if it eats you too?”

“It won’t,” he said, and whether that was confidence or stubbornness, even he could not have said. “I’ll climb up to the hollow. All of you get onto the lower branches and hold one of my arms. If something tries to pull me in, you hold tight and do not let go. I’ll pull him back out.”

They all nodded immediately, though none of them looked comforted.

Most of them had barely gone beyond the grounds of their sect before entering the pagoda. They had no experience with things like this. Truthfully, Tau Liu did not have much either, but that did not matter. He was their senior. That meant he had to look calm even when he was not.

Tau Liu turned back to the elk tree and took a slow breath.

Then, for the briefest moment, he offered up a silent prayer to the heavens that he would not end his life fighting a tree. After that, he jumped.

The branch dipped under his weight when he landed, leaves shivering around him. Tau Liu steadied himself with one hand against the trunk, then shifted his footing until he was close enough to the hollow to reach it without overextending. Only then did he lower one arm behind him.

His junior disciples were already moving. One climbed onto the branch below him, then another below that, while one remained on the ground to anchor the whole line. A moment later fingers locked around his wrist and forearm, their grips tense enough that he could feel the strain in them already.

Tau Liu tightened his own hold in return and looked back at the hole.

It was too dark.

Not the ordinary darkness of a hollow trunk or a shaded space hidden from the sun, but something deeper. The kind that seemed to sit there deliberately, swallowing light without giving anything back. He pushed qi into his eyes and looked again.

Nothing changed.

He still could not see past the edge of the opening. There was still no sign of his junior brother.

That by itself should have been enough to make him stop.

But several cultivators were bracing him from below, and Tau Liu told himself that whatever had taken one person by surprise should not be able to drag him in so easily with all of them holding on.

So he reached forward and pushed his hand into the hollow.

The darkness felt wrong around his skin. Colder than it should have been. He moved his hand deeper, groping along the inside of the trunk, feeling for bark, roots, cloth—anything.

For one brief moment, there was nothing. Then something took hold of him.

The pull came so suddenly that Tau Liu did not understand it at first. One instant his arm was buried in the hollow. The next, an invisible force clamped down and yanked hard enough to jolt his entire body forward. A cry ripped out of him before he could stop it. He twisted at once, trying to wrench himself back, but whatever had him did not even seem to notice the effort.

Below him, his disciples shouted.

The grip on his arm tightened painfully as they all pulled together, trying to drag him free. For a single heartbeat Tau Liu thought it might work. His shoulder strained. The branch under his feet shook. Every muscle in his body locked as the force from both sides fought over him.

Then the thing inside the hollow pulled harder.

The strength behind it was monstrous. It ripped straight through the resistance below, dragging Tau Liu forward with such force that the motion seemed to travel through his entire body from the arm first caught. In the space of a breath, he lost the branch, the tree, the voices outside. Everything tilted, folded, and vanished into blackness.

For a moment—or maybe longer—there was nothing else.

No light. No ground. No sense of up or down. Only darkness pressed around him so completely that it felt almost thick enough to breathe.

Then a voice broke through it.

“Senior Brother Tau!”

The darkness began to peel away.

Not all at once, but slowly, like a veil being drawn back from his eyes. Shapes emerged first in broken lines and shadows, then in full.

Tau Liu found himself standing on cracked ground in the middle of what looked like the remains of an ancient structure buried somewhere far beyond the world he thought he understood. Broken slabs of stone stretched out beneath his feet, uneven and fractured, with the remains of toppled pillars rising here and there like the exposed bones of something dead. Segments of old walls still stood in scattered pieces, though most had long since fallen into heaps of weathered rubble. Thick roots had pushed through the rock in twisting coils, splitting masonry apart as if the earth itself had been trying to reclaim the place for ages. In the deeper cracks and along the edges of ruined stone, pale moss gave off the faintest dim glow, just enough to keep the darkness from swallowing everything completely.

Above them was no sky. Only a vast stretch of shadow hanging far overhead.

His eyes then went to his junior brother’s face who stood right beside him, pale-faced and shaken, but unharmed.

Tau Liu had barely taken that in when more bodies began dropping out of the dark above. One by one the other disciples tumbled down into the ruin behind him, landing with startled cries, hurried stumbles, and more noises. He glanced at them only briefly. His attention kept pulling back to the place itself, to the impossible shape of it, to the fact that a hole in an elk tree had somehow led here.

“Where in the ruthless heavens has Sect Leader Chen sent us?”

The words had barely left him when a growl rolled across the ruins. It was deep enough to seem to come from the stone itself.

Tau Liu went still.

Somewhere ahead, part of a broken wall exploded outward. And through the dust and shattered stone, a massive beast burst into view.

***

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