319. Personal inheritance

Chen Ren had many thoughts about how the meeting with the lords would go.

He had fully believed there was a good possibility that at least some of them would rise from their seats and become aggressive. If that happened, he would have no choice but to use his authority over the pagoda to suppress them, and that would thoroughly damage any relationship he was trying to build.

Chen Ren understood the art of social relationships very well.

All the floor lords were his employees now.

Important employees, yes. Powerful employees, definitely. But employees nonetheless. Subordinates who could not truly talk back to him if he decided to use the full weight of his position.

That was honestly a good position to be in.

But Chen Ren also understood something else. Taking advantage of authority too much would only build resentment. And resentment at the lower levels of any structure was a good way to make the entire thing collapse one day without warning.

He couldn't allow that.

Even beyond those practical concerns, he wanted a decent relationship with the floor lords.

Truthfully, the pagoda was too large for him to manage alone, and if he wanted to become truly useful, then he needed the people who already knew its floors better than anyone else.

Them not trying to attack him outright was already a major positive.

The second major positive was the fact that they had actually listened to him.

Chen Ren had not truly expected that.

But as it turned out, they had been bored inside the pagoda for far too long.

The pagoda was huge, but each lord still had to remain tied to their own floor and couldn't move around for a long time. For centuries, there had not even been climbers to keep them properly entertained. They managed their territories, argued with each other, slept, trained, collected things, ruled their people, and repeated the same routines again and again.

Even puppets could grow tired of that.

And although they were puppets, they were not like ordinary constructs.

They knew there was an outside world beyond the pagoda. A vast world with real empires, sects, cities, monsters, wars, markets, politics, and people who had never stepped into their floors. Their minds were far sharper than ordinary NPCs of the pagoda, and they had far more awareness than simple puppets should have possessed.

As a result of it, Chen Ren guessed the lords must have thought about leaving the pagoda more than once.

They had probably wondered what the outside world looked like, and whether the sect that created them even still mattered. Beings at their level would never enjoy being bound forever, especially when the people who made them had been dead for centuries.

That was why Chen Ren had offered them a chance to go outside.

It would be under supervision, of course. He was not foolish enough to let powerful floor lords wander freely through the empire without limits. Still, even with that condition, they had reacted far better than he expected. Some looked doubtful, and that was fine. They did not know yet that being the owner of the pagoda meant Chen Ren could truly bring them out if he wanted to.

To make things safer, he had the Watcher explain that only two lords could leave the pagoda at the same time unless there was an emergency.

Chen Ren needed that restriction.

He did not want to create a disaster by letting out more power than he could handle. Although he had authority over the lords, they were still extremely powerful beings. In the outside world, most of them could probably stand alongside core elders of Guardian sects. If too many of them appeared at once, they would attract attention from every major force in the empire.

And attention was exactly what Chen Ren was trying to avoid.

Fortunately, every lord gathered had agreed to the offer in the end, though not quietly. More than a few arguments broke out over who would be allowed to leave the pagoda first. Zombie Queen Vesrya claimed she should be the one since they already trapped her on her floor. City Lord Xiangrui insisted that he wanted to get a better idea of more outsiders. Shrey argued that a merchant should clearly be the first to study the outside market.

Chen Ren let them argue for a short while before cutting in.

He would be the one deciding. That shut them up.

After that, he moved on to his plans for the pagoda. He didn’t want it to remain only a trial ground where cultivators came to risk their lives and leave with whatever treasures they could grab. That had value, but it was too limited. In Chen Ren’s eyes, the pagoda had far more potential than that.

He didn’t plan to make it so that anyone could enter the pagoda.

That would create too many problems. But there were far more low-realm cultivators in the outside world than the number currently inside. If he could bring more of them in, and if he could make climbing the pagoda feel like something they could actually attempt without dying immediately, then everything would change.

More climbers meant more trade, more trade meant more tokens, and more tokens meant more profit.

He also planned to tax the floor lords ten percent of their earnings from cultivators every month. They clearly did not like that part. But he didn’t care much.

In the first place, the lords had already become far too wealthy already. The Watcher had told him that whenever cultivators died on a floor, the pagoda absorbed their wealth and artifacts, but the lord of that floor still received a share or a first pick from the remains. That meant every floor lord had been gathering resources for centuries.

City Lord Xiangrui alone was extremely wealthy.

Compared to that, a ten percent tax was cheap.

If Chen Ren had followed only his greed, he would have asked for thirty percent at the very least. But he had conceded because he needed cooperation more than immediate wealth. There was no point squeezing the lords too hard when he had only just taken control.

After that, the meeting went more smoothly than he expected.

None of the lords were truly on his side yet. Most were still cautious, doubtful, or quietly annoyed by the sudden change in authority. The only exception might have been Shrey, who found Chen Ren after the meeting ended.

The merchant congratulated him first. Then he told him to hand over copies of Lord Yorren’s books as soon as possible as their agreement.

At first, Chen Ren thought Shrey had only come because of the books. But the man stayed longer than expected, speaking to him about the responsibilities of being the pagoda lord. He did not flatter Chen Ren too much, nor did he pretend the position would be easy. He simply said the pagoda needed someone who understood both climbers and business, and that Chen Ren might actually be a good fit for it.

Before leaving, Shrey also told him to ask for help whenever he needed it, and that he would always be on the second floor.

Chen Ren almost felt as if he had made a friend when Shrey left.

That gave him more confidence. If someone like Shrey could be reasonable, then with enough time, Chen Ren should be able to bring the other lords to his side as well. Just thinking of them as true allies was enough to make him realise, once again, that coming to the pagoda might have been the best decision he had ever made.

After that, he had a lot of other things to do.

For the next two days, he barely had time to rest.

Most of that time was spent going through the functions of the pagoda and learning how everything worked. The Watcher showed him where important controls were, what each floor could do, how emergencies were handled, and what hidden mechanisms had been built into the structure over the centuries

The Watcher was thorough. Almost too thorough, he thought. Because he made sure that Chen Ren understood not only what the pagoda could do, but also why those functions existed in the first place. According to him, since Chen Ren owned everything now, he should not become a lord who held the title in name only.

Chen Ren agreed with that.

So he worked hard to remember everything.

Some mechanisms interested him more than others. One of them would only activate if the pagoda was threatened from the outside. When Chen Ren had first seen the pagoda from the Corpse Lands, he had known it was a miraculous structure, but he had not realised how many defensive measures were built around it.

There were layers upon layers of formations, hidden spells, spatial traps, puppet armies, barrier cores, and reserve qi stores meant only for emergencies. If all the Guardian sects moved to assault it together, Chen Ren was sure the pagoda would survive for quite a while.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

He hoped nothing like that would ever happen.

The last thing he wanted was to test the pagoda’s defences against the strongest forces in the empire.

Once he finally got a decent grasp of how the pagoda actually worked, Chen Ren shifted his focus to two things.

The first was checking the reaction to Eternal’s appearance. The second thing was going through Sect Leader Yuren’s inheritance, something Chen Ren had been putting aside until now.

A couple of days had passed since the announcement, and by then, things inside the pagoda had settled a little. There were no sudden changes yet, no new rules forced onto every floor, and no dramatic punishment falling from the sky. For most climbers, Eternal’s appearance had become the centre of gossip, with different groups throwing out guesses about who he was and what he wanted.

Only the Guardian sects seemed to be taking it truly seriously.

According to what Chen Ren saw through the screens, they had already held more than a few meetings about Eternal. They wanted to know who he was, what his existence meant, and whether his appearance changed the way they should approach the pagoda. Since the Guardian sects clearly wanted to conquer the pagoda themselves, they seemed willing to put their differences aside for now and gather information together.

He doubted they would find anything useful.

Honestly, if they knew who Eternal truly was, some of them might go mad from frustration. Other than the Guardian sects, the person Chen Ren kept a close eye on was Jun, and as it turned out, the man had left the pagoda.

Chen Ren found out that the man had used a return ticket not long after the announcement as Eternal. It might have been a coincidence, but Chen Ren doubted that. There was a good chance Jun had realised who Eternal truly was and decided that chasing the medallion inside the pagoda would no longer work.

That was the obvious conclusion. Even Wang Jun agreed with it.

Chen Ren would have liked to ask Zombie Queen Vesrya about what happened between her and Jun, especially since he had seen them speaking about the master lift. But he and Vesrya were not close. If he used his authority on her this early, it would ruin any chance of building a proper relationship with her later.

So he avoided it.

In the end, Chen Ren now had access to a lot of information about what was happening inside the pagoda.

Through that, he had already learned that Zombie Queen Vesrya and Jun’s relationship was mostly transactional. Jun had been teaching her new techniques, and in exchange, she seemed to have offered him certain benefits and information. It was not loyalty, and that gave Chen Ren some hope that Vesrya would not continue working with Jun forever, especially now that he had left the pagoda.

Still, Chen Ren was not foolish enough to think Jun leaving meant he would stop coming after him.

The man was an ancient cultivator. More importantly, he had failed in his task to capture Chen Ren and take the medallion. People like that did not simply give up because one attempt failed. They tried again and again until they either succeeded or died.

And Jun would be very hard to kill.

At least Chen Ren had the pagoda now. He also had Yuren’s inheritance.

There was so much inside it that Chen Ren spent five minutes just going through the catalogue. Even Wang Jun looked surprised by the amount of wealth Sect Leader Yuren had left behind. The severed head complained more than once that Yuren had always acted as if he had spent everything he owned on building and improving the pagoda.

Clearly, that had not been true.

There were gold bars, and a lot of them. Chen Ren already had a decent amount of gold from his own businesses and the resources he had gathered, but this was on another level. There were also jewels, necklaces, rings, and other decorative items that did not have any special function. Even then, they were valuable because of the rare materials used to make them, and many could probably be enchanted later.

After that came the manuals.

There were tons of them.

As it turned out, Sect Leader Yuren had left behind copies of every manual used by the Azure Immortal Sect. They started from the most basic cultivation methods given to outer disciples and went all the way up to the techniques used by core disciples and elders. There were body cultivation methods, qi control manuals, sword arts, defensive techniques, formation guides, alchemy notes, puppet studies, and more.

There were also manuals Yuren himself had used.

Those were the ones Wang Jun told Chen Ren to look at carefully.

But the manuals that truly caught Chen Ren’s eyes were the ones involving flying swords and similar artifacts.

As it turned out, there were techniques for creating a sword directly out of qi.

Some manuals even explained how to strengthen that qi sword until it could function like a real weapon while the cultivator was flying. Others focused on using artifacts in the air, controlling multiple weapons at once, or shaping qi into temporary blades that could be replaced whenever they broke.

There were also many artifacts inside the inheritance.

By now, Chen Ren knew that was standard for any great inheritance. Weapons, robes, pills, talismans, formation plates, and strange treasures with functions he did not fully understand yet. All of it was valuable, but it was not what he was looking for right now.

What Chen Ren truly wanted was information on how Sect Leader Yuren had contacted the upper realm and how he had upgraded the pagoda.

Wang Jun was interested in that as well.

Chen Ren had no intention of opening some reckless portal and bringing demonic beings into the world. He was not stupid enough to repeat the mistake that had created the Corpse Lands. But he still wanted to learn more about the upper realms and why access to them was restricted.

It felt important.

It also felt like it might help him understand the mystery behind the medallions. The Watcher had called them keys to the Gates of Immortal, and if that name was connected to the upper realms in any way, then Yuren’s notes might contain something useful.

Even in Xianxia stories, important secrets were rarely revealed all at once.

There would be hints. Half-answers. Strange names that only made sense much later. Maybe this was the same kind of thing, and if Chen Ren gathered enough pieces, the truth would eventually start to take shape.

So he searched through the catalogue for anything that might help.

The Watcher had already said that if any information existed, it would be inside the inheritance. Unfortunately, finding it was not easy. The catalogue was huge, and Chen Ren had to go through the list one item at a time. Artifacts, manuals, resource lists, old sect records, formation diagrams, private notes, and sealed boxes were all mixed together without any proper order.

Wang Jun complained several times.

Chen Ren agreed with him.

For someone who had built something as organised as the pagoda, Yuren’s personal inheritance was strangely messy.

Only near the very end did they finally find something.

An item listed simply as a diary.

Chen Ren immediately searched for it inside the inheritance room they had been given access to. After a few minutes, he found a plain-looking book stored in a sealed wooden case. There was nothing grand about it. No glowing runes. No powerful aura. No defensive formation that tried to stop him from opening it.

It looked almost ordinary.

That made Chen Ren even more curious.

He brought it to the table, placed it down, and opened the first page.

The first line made both him and Wang Jun go silent.

“I have always been fascinated with the Devourers.”

***

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