The Innkeeper

Chapter 2200: Journal realm

"What exactly am I looking for?" Charles asked as he stood in front of the entrance to the Journal realm. Beside him stood Lex through his karmic clone with his arms crossed.

"We’ve lost hundreds of workers, and thousands of guests to the Dream realm," said Lex heavily, not immediately answering the question. "The Innkeeper is occupied with another task, and I’m also out for another mission, merely present inside the Inn with this clone, and so I can’t enter. That leaves us with very few options."

Charles had, naturally, heard about the disappearances. The Dream realm was an entirely foreign concept to him, as not only had he never heard of it before, he’d never given it much thought either. Even when he learned about what happened. Charles continued to focus on his own tasks.

The Midnight Inn would find some way to deal with the issue - it always did. He did not need to concern himself with the matter, except this time it seemed like he did. In fact, the matter was quite serious based on what he was hearing from Lex.

"Across the entire Inn, we have countless workers, many of whom were considered to take on this task. Unfortunately, while we have many workers, ones suitable for this task are few and far between. Your name came up. While I won’t pry into your past, it is clear that your expertise are vast.

"At the moment, you have one primary goal: find a way to rescue our targets from within the Dream realm as quickly and as smoothly as possible. We have lost a lot of very weak people to the Dream realm, and anything could happen to them at any time. It’s not public knowledge yet, but Almira has also disappeared into the Dream realm. Anita is on her way back to the realm as we speak."

Charles paused, and looked towards Lex. He, of course, knew Almira. When she was born, he had done a check up on her to make sure she was healthy. Could he be blamed? The circumstances of her birth were so unusual, with a Lich and a sword for parents.

Imagining a baby, lost in the Dream realm, all alone... If she were a normal baby, Charles was certain that she would already be dead by now. Fortunately, not only was she a High Human, both her parents were quite unique so they had employed many means to keep her safe regardless of the situation.

"I’ll do my best, but I can’t really say for certain how useful I’ll be," confessed Charles. "I have no prior experience studying realms."

Lex nodded, accepting his words.

"Do what you can. If you run into obstacles, let me know, I’ll be right here. If the situation does not improve soon, I’ll need to consider some drastic measures."

Charles wasn’t sure what the measures Lex was mentioning were, but the gravity in his voice told him that it was best to not find out. Lex, meanwhile, was somewhat regretting not choosing something different from the universal shop. The options, quite frankly, were numerous and unbelievable. However, he knew that this was the more logical choice.

After all, even if he took an item which could immediately rescue someone, he would at most be able to rescue one person. He would be abandoning all the others to their fate if he did that.

He thought of everyone he could reliably trust with a task like this, as well as information like this. As much as he disliked the idea, one of Lex’s last resorts would be to ask the Henali to lend him Jotun, and have him enter into the realm and see if he could find a way to rescue people from the Dream realm.

That was, however, something he wanted to avoid if he could.

Charles took a deep breath, and stepped through the door. Lex had called this place the Journal realm, and claimed that it was the journal of a prominent entity who was especially knowledgeable when it came to the topic of realms.

He stated that it should contain knowledge relating to realms, but beyond that even he didn’t know. Charles could only find out himself.

Equipped with a powerful suit, and some weapons given to him by Lex to protect himself, Charles felt somewhat ready to face whatever obstacles lay in his path. Unfortunately, when he entered the realm, everything he was carrying fell at the door, including all spatial equipment and clothes.

When Charles entered, he found himself wearing thin, light clothes made of some kind of natural material. More important than the clothes, however, were his surroundings which looked like he was in the depths of an artificially created forest.

Tall, straight trees rose into the sky in neat rows and columns, each one at an equal distance. The leaves, far up in the sky, completely out of reach, were green in color, but there was something unusual about them that Charles could not identify. Unfortunately, the laws of this realm prevented Charles from flying, or teleporting, or extending his spirit sense beyond his body, so he could not specifically ascertain what the anomaly was.

The doctor looked around, but found nothing too abnormal. The sun was shining in the sky, rays of sunlight peeking through the gaps between the tree leaves. A gentle, consistent breeze was blowing between the trees. He could hear the sweet melody of singing birds in the distance, filling in the silence.

Everything seemed so... normal. While that was a good thing, considering how weak and vulnerable he felt at the moment, it didn’t really help him with his task. Wasn’t this supposed to be some kind of journal?

Charles stood there for a few minutes, looking around to see if anything would happen on its own. When nothing happened, he decided to explore the forest. The first thing he did was try to identify the type of trees that filled the forest. While at a glance, they looked like a variant of pine trees, but they clearly weren’t.

Charles reached out to touch the bark of the tree - his identity as an elf in his previous life granted him a great deal of insight into plants - yet his hand went right through it.

The next thing Charles knew, he was standing inside a tall, stone structure with massive characters written on the wall reading: Void Seeds.

The structure contained a near infinite number of books, to the point that Charles could spend thousands of years reading through them. Even if the books were small, allowing him to read them instantly using his spirit sense, it would take him forever to read them. However, not a single one of the books was small.

Charles took a few steps back, and found himself back in the forest. He touched another tree, and found himself in another, identical stone structure, but the words written on the wall in this one read: Void Stability Index.

Charles took a few steps back, and returned to the forest. So each tree actually contained a massive structure, filled with information about a certain topic. Although for now, both the trees he’d visited held information about the Void, Charles guessed that both topics were somehow related to realms. That meant he merely needed to search for information related to the Dream realm.

Then he could begin his actual search. Thus, Charles immediately got to work, searching all the trees. His ignorance about the matters relating to realms meant that he had no reaction at all to the topics of Void Seeds and Void Stability Index. However, if Lex had seen them his reaction would not have been the same.

He had been educating himself on various topics, the birth and development of realms being one of the topics he especially paid attention to. Thus, he was familiar with the fact that one of the great mysteries of the universe were how and why realms could be spontaneously born within the endless void of the... well, Void.

It was like saying that the realms were just born from nothing, save the endless Chaos energy that filled the Void. However, these two topics seemed to suggest there was more to it.

Yet no matter how great a mystery they revealed, it meant nothing to Charles, especially since he was on a mission.

However, even the first step of that mission was proving to be tougher than expected. Charles moved quickly, not bothering to merely stroll through the forest. Yet four hours later, he had been through over 20,000 trees, and not a single one of them was even remotely related to the Dream realm. As if that was not bad enough, the forest seemed to extend into eternity, with no clear boundary or end in sight. It was going to take him forever to get anything done.

He thought about exiting to go and ask for more helpers to help him locate the relevant tree, but he instinctively knew that only one person at a time could enter this realm. It seemed to be one of the laws of this realm.

Outside, in the Midnight Realm, Lex had not just stopped working since he’d sent in Charles. He was not in the habit of giving up so easily.