The Innkeeper

Chapter 2489: Not so fast

"You’re telling me the Dopamine Detox Cult still exists?" Mary asked with genuine surprise in her voice. Lex could not understand why that among everything he had told her so far got a reaction out of her. Maybe there was some hidden history behind it.

"I suppose," responded Lex. "Between everything else going on, I didn’t really pay too much attention to them. They were quite weak, and mostly harmless."

Mary shook her head in disbelief, and then took a sip from her boba. Lex honestly had no idea how she could drink that thing, and he didn’t ask. He had noticed that ever since getting her body back, Mary was a lot less restrained, and allowed more of her personality to show. If that personality liked boba... then so be it.

"The Detox cult was a really, really old cult founded early in the Dawn age. It caused quite a hype because they claimed to have found a way to revive after death. In the end, to test whether it’s real or not, the members of the cult were killed repeatedly until they stopped coming back to life."

Lex paused, and found the situation to be quite unfortunate. It seemed quite rude to kill someone to test whether they came back to life. Then again, cults usually weren’t the nicest groups of people.

Lex shook his head.

"Is this really the kind of thing we should be focusing on right now? We can catch up later on, right now we have an urgent issue to resolve," said Lex, emphasising on the need for urgency. His actions were perfectly in-line with what one could expect from someone who always encountered the most unlikely of situations.

Mary, though, didn’t seem to be as concerned as Lex.

"Yes, yes, I’m listening. Continue speaking. What else happened in the Hollow?"

Lex could clearly tell that Mary was simply humoring him, but he didn’t care. Instead of going into every single detail - something that could be done later on - he gave a brief yet informative summary of everything that happened. He could have transmitted all the data to her through his spirit sense to save time, but Lex noticed that since Mary hadn’t fully acclimated to her body, her performance was quite limited.

It was closer to that of a Nascent Soul cultivator than an Immortal let alone a Dao Lord.

After listening to everything - especially about how Eclipse seemed to have baited Destiny and Death, and used them to open a portal into the past and somehow save Lunareth - she froze.

It wasn’t shock that caused her to freeze like that, but a feeling that she had something incredibly important that she needed to do, but couldn’t remember it. To be fair, in her current state, her soul was less than 1% complete, which had severely affected her memories.

She remembered much of the generic and common stuff, as well as some key, important details about her own identity. But too many memories were missing.

As her soul recovered, she may recall everything she had forgotten - only time could tell.

After a few seconds, the feeling faded, and Mary slowly exhaled, looking fatigued.

"Well, I have good news for you. It may not be a 100% guarantee that the method will work, but I think it has a fair shot at working. The only problem is that it may not be a quick fix."

Lex was surprised at how quickly she was able to come up with a possible solution to his situation. Then again, someone who could advise Dao Lords on war strategies should not be underestimated regardless of whatever her current limitations.

"Well, to start with, you’ll have to kill ’Mathew’," Mary said, looking towards Lex. "The moment he dies, Regal Embrace will reform. Since you’ve used the technique before, and are familiar with it, you may be able to influence it to stay with you. Doing that will be the first, and perhaps the most significant hurdle in this plan."

Regal Embrace? What did that have to do with hiding the system from the universe? Was his system going to cultivate?

"Then you’re going to fuse the technique with Lotus," Mary continued to explain. "Since Lotus is fused with the Midnight realm, Regal Embrace will automatically take that into consideration as it fuses with him. Given that the current threat to the realm is the universe itself, a cultivation technique of that calibre will automatically detect that, and adjust its growth direction towards covering that first. Helping Lotus to get to that point in its cultivation where Regal Embrace can protect it from the universe itself will be the second greatest hurdle of this plan."

Lex paused. Was that all? He just needed his lotus, fused with his realm, to cultivate to the point where it could hide from the universe? Or straight up resist the universe?

That did not sound like it would be a quick process. Then again, learning from Taro’s journal and trying to learn about realm processing to the point where he could combine features from the Realm Management Panel was not something that could be achieved quickly either.

Lex sighed. He intended on keeping Mathew as an example, but it seemed that it wasn’t meant to be.

Just as he was about to get up, though, Mary held out her hands to stop him.

"Do you think that’s all mister? Nope, that’s just the cover for the realm itself. The greater issue is that according to what you’ve said, systems above rank A are also being targeted. That means you might be safe as long as you stay within the Midnight realm, and the realm itself is protected, but the moment you leave you’ll become a far greater target.

"Right now, the Midnight realm has a Destiny level formation hiding its affairs which will slow down detection and buy you time to help Lotus. But unless you find a way to mask your system from being detected by the universe, you can never leave the Midnight realm again."

That... stopped him in his tracks.