The Innkeeper

Chapter 2508: Title Here

Although it was not a part of Lex’s plan, he and Liz spent most of the day together exploring the mansion as well as the mountain basin within which it existed. Although Lex knew everything that existed within, he had never properly explored it. He never had the time to do so.

Today, finally, he got around to exploring, mainly because Liz was especially fond of animals and beasts. He never actually got around to showing off his collection of treasures since Liz didn’t really care about them.

Although Lex felt like he had a lot that needed to be done urgently, he could spare a day. Thus, it was late at night when Lex returned to his cultivation room, sat upon the Gabana fruit, and surveyed the Inn.

Lex was not unaware of the Tribulation Fiends residing within the Inn as guests, not to mention the incredibly suspicious sentient mushroom Mushu, or any number of other strange things happening inside the Inn.

But he sensed no danger from them. In fact, he felt safer leaving the Tribulation Fiends alone rather than doing anything about them. Based on what he had investigated, the only thing keeping them placated with the subtle Primordial energy nourishing them via the sunlight from the Primordial Sun crow.

It was for that very reason that during the regulated night cycle, wherein the Primordial Suncrow moved to a different part of the Inn, they followed it. He thought that maybe having them as guests might have gotten him some kind of reward from the system, but that didn’t happen.

Since he had already hosted Heavens Puppet as a guest before, he supposed it covered all Arch-Heaven related guests.

That didn’t mean that hosting them was without benefits. Not only were all of them paying for their stay in full - although he had no idea where they got MP from - their very presence added great prestige to the Inn. Moreover, Lex had a very strong feeling that them being guests at his Inn now might benefit his resort inside Arch-Heaven in the future.

At least, he hoped so.

Lotus was in the process of cultivating Regal Embrace, and Lex was using his own experience with the technique to help Lotus through the bond. Thus, he was aware of its progress.

Thus, while there were many tasks that required his attention, the most urgent ones were taken care of, allowing him to finally get to the teleportation issue.

He studied his system seriously and found another notification. Someone else had, once again, submitted a method to avoid universal detection for systems, but the quest was still active. It was just that the reward level had been dropped to Oblivion level.

Lex dismissed that and, instead, focused on the information given to him by his system regarding the internal working of systems, and considered how to manipulate the teleportation as he wished.

He thought of a couple of ways that might work, but considering that they were quite time consuming, Lex tried out a much simpler method first - one that, apparently, worked for Sovereigns and races very high up on the Cosmic Ascendance Spectrum!

"I want you to open up teleportation permissions to me," said Lex, focusing on his system. "I want to be able to teleport anywhere I wish in the universe - or at least directly teleport to any realm I can form some kind of connection with."

The reason he said ’connection’ was because he had no idea which realm Belle was actually in, so he could not find any object that had that realm’s aura at all. Moreover, much of the universe had lately become blocked to the Inns normal teleportation. He needed some way to avoid that.

He waited for a moment and, as expected, he soon heard the sound of a system notification. The contents of the notification, however, were not what he had been hoping to see.

New Notification: System operations normal.

Remarks: I wish for a host with a working brain. Alas, some things are out of reach.

Lex resisted the urge to let his lip twitch. He had expected that such an immense request to not be granted even if his position on the Spectrum was now higher than it used to be, but he certainly hadn’t anticipated the return of the snarky comments.

Was his system pretending that everything was normal while the System Network was up and operational? While his true personality was timid? Who knew that even his system knew how to pretend.

Lex clicked his tongue and began to work on the system immediately. He unleashed Domination and focused on the object in his soul, observing its inner workings.

In truth, his teleportation ability was high enough. What Lex wanted was the ability to accept and reject certain people from being able to teleport in and out without having to lock down the system.

That way, he could prevent others from coming into the Inn while he could still teleport out of it. Also having the system detect realms he could form some kind of karmic connection too would also be nice.

He couldn’t properly tamper with his systems workings just yet, but he could understand it enough to figure out what he wanted. Thus, the hours slowly ticked away.

Far away, within the Nexus, Jack was having a whole lot more success than Lex. His task was not difficult, nor did it involve solving some problem. He merely needed to take all the resources he had gathered and build the Midnight Castle, and place the Chamber of Rebirth within it.

Originally, this would not have been such an easy task for the resources were quite rare and hard to find. But ever since becoming a Celestial Immortal, Lex found it much easier to teleport items between his real body and Jack.

The fuel was always divine energy, but within the Midnight Inn Lex had many ways of getting his hands on that. Moreover, with access to the Dream Badge, Lex could always hop on over to the Dream realm to buy something if he was lacking anything - not that that was the case at the moment.

Thus, compared to his teleportation progress, the construction of the Midnight Castle proceeded smoothly. During the process, Jack not only focused on building it, but also studying what exactly made it special.

This building was different from all other Midnight Inn structures because it was the only one that didn’t need to be on Inn territory to function. Perhaps it was similar to the taverns in the sense that wherever it was located might automatically become Inn territory.

In truth, that was most certainly the case. However, Jack suspected that it wasn’t so straightforward. There was something different about the castle, and he wanted to figure out what.

While working, Jack also studied the environment inside the Nexus. Originally, there hadn’t been much. Once the dagger disappeared, the Nexus was left as a barren place, devoid of purpose and much else.

Yet shortly after Eclipse killed Destiny, and the Nexus event ended, a subtle change began to take place. An invisible stream of some unknown liquid appeared within the Nexus, originating from some unknown place and heading to an unknown destination. He originally hadn’t even noticed it, for neither his vision nor his spirit sense could detect the stream.

It was his wings that ultimately picked up on the strange stream, and alerted him to it. The number of things which could escape his senses these days was quite few.

What appeared within the Nexus was merely a small portion of it.

At first, Jack felt like it might have something to do with destiny. He didn’t know why it was just a feeling he had. He did not approach it, and only studied it from afar just to be safe. The Nexus was a strange place, far beyond his level of understanding, and he didn’t want to risk causing any unexpected changes in the place that was meant to be his last resort.

As time passed, however, and as the stream grew larger, Lex realized that the stream probably had nothing to do with destiny. Instead, it was related to some strange and esoteric law that he had never encountered before. Its progress seemed related to the universal transition.

This was, once again, something Jack concluded based on his intuition, and not his observations. After all, no matter what the stream was, its level was far beyond Jack - or even Lex.

The only concern he had was that if the stream kept growing larger, it might one day touch the Castle. He did not know what the repercussions for such a thing might be, so he made a mental note to test out the stream once he was done building the castle. As it was, he would need only a few more months to finish the castle.

That was for the best because Jack wanted to return to the Folklore realm before the few decades deadline.