The Innkeeper

Chapter 2011: Trojan Curses

After listening to Lex’s savage words, and witnessing his immeasurable strength, the Celestials became completely desperate. They brought out all of their contingency weapons and tools - not to attack him, but to run away.

These tools were extremely powerful, one time use items which is why they had been preserved for moments exactly such as these.

There was no forewarning, so as the Celestials suddenly burst through his protective barriers and zoomed off into the distance, Lex was just left standing there, watching. The funny thing was that one of the Celestials actually used one of the golden keys of the Midnight Inn to escape!

Even the Gorilla, who had previously been firmly caught within Lex’s grip, managed to escape using even more desperate means, sacrificing a large chunk of his cultivation.

After only a few seconds, Lex was left there, alone.

The truth was, if he really wanted to, Lex could have stopped them from leaving. He could have gone for a fight to the end, though he had a feeling that killing a Celestial would be a lot harder than just fighting them. Regardless, he didn’t stop them on purpose, because within their beings, he had left traps.

Whether it was in their karma, in their bodies, in their blood, in their spirit energies, in their souls or in their spirits, Lex had left behind curses, seals, traps, locator tags and more. He expected that, after a thorough scan, many of the traps he had left in their bodies would be discovered. Maybe even all of them would be discovered.

But on the off chance that they weren’t, these Celestial Immortals would become his version of Trojan viruses. His karmic curse would spread, his soul traps would spread, his reach would spread, and one by one he would identify all those who had conspired against him.

Furthermore, he had to make sure that his message to Damian would spread too. After all, he had learned something new from Gerard in his last visit to the Inn.

Lex had given the old man his Burgundy Violin, a quest reward. Honestly, he expected that it would be a great tool, but he did not have the time to experiment with it, and so he left it in Gerard’s capable hands. In the end, that decision justified itself.

It seemed that the Violin allowed Gerard to influence causality, linking words, poems, lyrics and songs with powerful causality. The very first, most direct example that Gerard could think of was linking one’s life to a song. As long as the song existed, it would be impossible for one to completely die!

That could then further be linked with other laws to hide the connection from being detected, making it an incredibly covert way of preserving one’s life. Unfortunately, the amount of control and energy required to do something like that was beyond Gerard, or even Lex at the moment.

Based on his estimates, it would probably take a Demi-Dao Lord or even a Dao Lord to link Lex’s life to a song, because Lex himself was too powerful to easily fuse the causality of his life to a song.

Linking a curse to a few words, though, was no problem. So the message that Lex had left for Damian about him being a nightmare from which Damian could never wake, they were linked to a very subtle, very weak curse. The point of the curse was to be undetectable, and slowly fuse itself with the core of his being, making it harder and harder to remove.

Lex had learned a lot from the annoying Go board guy, and one of the things was to be incessant and annoying in his attack. He could never rest, and never wait for an opportune moment to present itself. Instead, he had to manufacture such a moment through his own efforts.

If others could conspire against him, then he could do the same. He was powerful enough now that... he did not need to cower anymore. Especially with the Butter Knife now available to him, there were many things he could do.

Lex was planning on making a tavern that he could carry with him, like a tavern in a bracelet or something like that, so that wherever he went, he would have the Inns territory with him. It was a convenient workaround for the limitation of only being able to use the Knife on Inn territory.

Of course, not being afraid did not mean he would actively go and provoke people. It was still best to maintain the peace for as long as possible. Right now, time was his best friend. The more time he had, the more he could grow. If he had another hundred years without facing any big problems, then he’d be in a much better position to face the universe. If he had a thousand... well, even he did not know where he’d be at that point.

For some reason, though, Lex kept feeling like there was something dangerous in his future. It wasn’t the conspiracies that troubled him as much as that one, fleeting moment of danger during his tribulation.

He needed to make a few contingencies of his own. After thinking about it for a few moments, a new quest appeared on the boards within Obsidian.

Then he turned around and faced the star. Within that was one of two remaining clones of Moon. If he wanted, Lex could just destroy the whole star, alongside the base and the clone within it. He certainly had the strength to do that kind of thing now.

But what would be the point? Lex was not the sort to spread pointless, wanton destruction wherever he went.

He took a step forward, and instead appeared within the base hidden inside the star’s core, and found that it was still active. There were no people or living beings inside, but there was a lab run by machines, all focused on keeping the single Moon clone alive.

Lex spread his spirit sense around, reading all the data they had collected on the clone, and all their logs. He understood immediately that they knew nothing. They could not understand why every technique they had used, every method, all failed to replicate the abilities contained within the original samples from which the clone body was made.

How could it be so easy? His mother didn’t even dare utter the words involved in forming Moon’s physique, whatever it was, for she feared leaking her secrets. To replicate that, the amount of resources required were probably far beyond what these low level researchers could probably even imagine.

Gently, Lex picked up Moon’s clone after scanning it to make sure it was fine, and then disappeared to the Midnight Inn. Rather than destroying the clones, allowing Moon to reabsorb them was a better option. Although the benefit was not great, at least it would allow her to reabsorb the original samples that were taken from her.

Lex was concerned that there may be traps left within the clone for just such an event, so he scanned it again with his system just to be sure, and found nothing amiss.

Lex returned to the cloning facility, removed the barriers that kept it safe from the heat of the star and watched it melt, before heading towards the second clone.

He was expecting a similar, maybe even stronger ambush waiting for him by the second clone, yet when he arrived, he found nothing. In fact, signs indicated that there had been a large force here just a short while ago, but they had all since escaped.

Lex smirked in amusement. As if they could escape from him. But then... he decided to spare them.

Instead of going after them, he simply locked onto the karma of everyone who had been hiding the vicinity a short while ago, and through their karmic strings sent a small hint of his Domination - just to let them know that if he really wanted to, he could hunt them down.

Of course, hidden deep within that domination was also his karmic curse. Just because he wasn’t hunting them down didn’t mean he couldn’t use them as trojan horses.

He returned the second clone to Moon as well, and then when he was done, went to the Infinity Emporium. It had been a long time since he last saw Powell, so he was looking forward to catching up.

What he didn’t expect, when he walked in, was to see a very desolate scene. The once glorious, once expanding emporium now looked barren, and even the lights in the showroom looked dimmer.

Powell, who stood behind the counter waiting for Lex, had deep eyebags and looked like he hadn’t slept in days or maybe even weeks.

"Ah, my good friend Lex, how have you been?" Powell asked in a raspy voice.

"Much better than you, it seems," Lex said, scanning the room and even Powell, even though that might appear rude. "What happened to you? Last time we talked, you were getting ready to expand into another realm. How did you go from that to this?"

Powell shook his head, as if thinking about a sad story.

"It was exactly that. The realm we expanded into... went to war. The entire Emporium branch in that realm was annihilated. We lost a lot of manpower, and a lot of our systems were damaged. We are now... recovering back within the Origin realm."

Realization dawned on Lex about what had happened. If he was correct about his theory that the Emporium was powered by a system, then the system was likely damaged. The same was likely true for Powell - he was badly hurt, that much was apparent at a glance.

If that was the case... a plan began to form in Lex’s mind.