The Innkeeper

Chapter 1673: A change

Family was a complicated topic for Lex. His parents were jerks, his grandfather was worse than a pig, and though his ancestors hadn’t done anything to provoke him, he just had developed a general distrust of his own family.

That said, he had a decent relationship with his sisters, mainly because they were just as much victims of his terrible family as him - if not even more in Moon’s case. He’d also learned that his family had some apparently mysterious background and that if anyone in other realms detected that he was descendant of the Sephore bloodline, he could attract trouble.

Lex didn’t pay too much attention to that, though. He had no problem attracting trouble without needing to rely on his ancestry to help him out.

Even so, for the first time, his family had managed to attract his attention because this Flow was by no means a normal technique. Even he, who had seen no shortage of incredible feats and techniques from talents across the universe, was impressed.

As soon as he extended the Flow state beyond his body, Lex had to divert a majority of his brain power on processing all the information he was getting. It was as if the state allowed him to read the flow of every form of existence he could naturally sense.

So he could see how light was traveling. He could sense how sound carried across Abaddon. He could sense the countless forms of energy in the air, flowing with furious currents, waging an unseen, undetected war all around them. Through his tenet, he could even sense how the laws were changing from moment to moment.

These were all things he could already sense, to a degree, but entering the Flow state multiplied the extent manifold. Much more important than that, though, were the patterns Lex saw in everything.

It was as if... he could see the path of least resistance, but in everything. Since this was the first time he used the ability like this, and hadn’t been looking for something specific, he was just overloaded with every single possibility around him.

But, being in the Flow state as he was, he adapted instantly and returned his attention to the portals. Whereas the ability of his left eye previously allowed him to gain a tremendous amount of information about whatever he looked at, including weaknesses he could exploit, the Flow state just took that to a whole other level. It was as if, among the weaknesses he could detect, Flow allowed him to be able to pick out what was the best one.

In his Flow state, as he looked at the portals, he detected that using the array was not actually the best way to get rid of the portals. In fact, his own mastery of space should have been the first thing he thought of using, and it should have been an obvious choice.

But Lex hadn’t even considered that, only thinking about the characters. He suddenly realized what Kaemon meant when he said that the weight of knowledge was not so easy to endure, and that whether he wanted to or not, he kept thinking about the knowledge he had attained in those ruins.

Even now, when Flow had shown him that simply using the laws of space it would be infinitely easier for him to destroy those portals than to try and use the characters, Lex did not want to just give up. Though, he attributed that to his stubbornness and not the weight of the knowledge itself.

Since he had spent so long trying to use the characters, he wanted to try one more time. If it didn’t work, he would give up for now since a better alternative was present.

The moment he decided on the course of action he wanted to take, he could immediately see countless pieces of information that would help him. Since an array was something he would have to create, and not something that existed in his surroundings already, the Flow state couldn’t help guide him on how to use it. Nor could the Flow state tell him which array to use, or how to make it. Instead, he just made him more aware of the things that were most relevant to what he wanted to do, picking out the minutest of details amidst a proverbial endless sea of information.

Even Lex himself could not pinpoint relevant hints with such accuracy despite his many advantages. It was as if he was tapped into the universe itself, and was getting constant, live feedback. Oh, and he had a search bar to narrow down just what he wanted.

Lex began the array once more, this time guided by the many hints the Flow state was giving him. The state wasn’t a complete cheat code, and Lex still had to decide on his course of actions as well as think of a new way to use the characters. But the Flow state did eliminate a lot of unnecessary noise and help him focus a lot better.

In fact, if Lex weren’t in the Flow state, he would probably be wondering what effects the other states he had would have outside his body. After all, besides Flow, he also had Overdrive and Berserk states as well - both states he didn’t use nearly as often as Flow.

In fact, considering how Overdrive increased the computational power of his brain, as well as allow him to consider things he normally wouldn’t have, it might have been the better option for what he needed right now.

But since he was in his Flow state, he wasn’t thinking of any of that. He was simply taking the quickest, most efficient series of actions to complete his objective.

A few seconds later, a new array was ready. The very moment he activated it, there was finally a change that could be felt in the very air around them. His characters, living up to the name of the book they had come from, finally brought about a change.