The Innkeeper

Chapter 2541: Middle ground

Once he decided on the races that he wanted, Lex decided to revisit his worker rules. Mortal humans weren’t too dangerous, but they could manufacture weapons. Mortal weapons - even guns and the like - weren’t too effective against cultivators because to break their barriers and defensive techniques, the weapons themselves needed some kind of spiritual energy.

The problem was that Qi training cultivators barely had proper techniques, and Foundation realm cultivators had them, but they could be overwhelmed. That was only taking into consideration humans and their technologies.

Nymphs, even mortal ones, had some elemental powers based on the type of nymphs they were. For example, Dryads were tree nymphs and were generally well known. Or Naiads, the nymphs of fresh water. But then there were also nymphs of the mountains, the seas, caves, ash, darkness and so on. Depending on the type of nymph they were, even as mortals, they had some control over their respective elements.

There were also the Beastfolk all of whom had unique constitutions based on the bloodlines they had. They could be physically strong, or they could have telekinesis, or anything at all that their bloodline decided to give them. The abilities they inherited were completely random within the pool of abilities belonging to each bloodline.

In summary, even as mortals, with enough numbers, they could overwhelm the workers potentially. Although Lex could send in reinforcements, creating a weak system would compromise his quest ranking, so instead he focused.

Instead of having only the city mayors as Foundation realm cultivators, Lex made it that all workers in some kind of leading role would be Foundation realm cultivators. So that meant the city mayor, or the leader of the respective adventurers guild - a unique creation that was of Lex’s own design and not a part of the systems services or features - and so on.

But, as before, these leaders would have very minimal presence, and would only appear on special occasions. They should, otherwise, just perform their tasks from behind the scenes.

Everything else remained the same.

With everything done, he submitted the results to the system. Compared to the previous quest, this one didn’t take as long, but Lex had to carefully consider which three mortal races to bring in. The problem was that without the authority or presence of an entity like the Innkeeper to keep the peace, or the preestablished reputation of the inn, keeping these races in line would be a task of its own.

Considering that the system wanted specific rules for the kinds of workers in New Chelsea, and that it didn’t want to intimidate the guests with overpowered cultivators, finding the perfect compatibility was tough. These three also weren’t exactly perfect, and they held the potential for immense clashes. But they also held the potential to create and form a culturally rich and diverse society if order was maintained.

Quest 2 completed: Rules for workers, and number of guest races established.

Reward: Selective guest teleportation!

Setting Foundations Quest 3: New Chelsea is ready to accept guests, and the targeted guests have been selected. But for an inn to be successful, some of the guests’ experiences need to be curated, and some of them need to be left for organic development. Before the opening of New Chelsea, add the finishing touches to determine how the guests’ experiences will be.

Quest time limit: 7 days!

Quest Hint: New Chelsea will be opened to the public in seven days. Before then, think carefully about how you want the guests to experience it, and what impression you want them to have, and make decisions accordingly. Once New Chelsea is open, the host will be prevented from interfering for 1 year to determine final quest ranking.

Quest reward: Official Inn position unlocked - Recruitment Officer

Remarks: Nobody likes a micromanager, but an absent boss is even worse. Please review study material on finding a middle ground to discover what that is.

Lex smiled. As he felt the gentle wind of New Chelsea, and allowed himself to be serenaded by the sounds of flowing streams and singing birds, Lex smiled. Selective teleportation. How many years had he been searching for a way to unlock that? Even he himself did not know the answer to that question.

Now he got it after completing 2 quests from a main quest line - whatever that was. The name was enough to guess that a main quest line was more important than just regular old quests, but he got the feeling that there would be more than one main quest line, so how could any of them be the main one?

Regardless of the technicalities or semantics, he got it. The feature was not fully comprehensive, and he already ran into some of its limitations, but it was still everything he had been searching for.

Lex had the urge to laugh at how easy it had been. He could only laugh, because he’d rather dwell on the positive rather than how annoyingly difficult it had been to get here.

With a comfortable smile, Lex allowed himself to open up the interface and look at the feature. First he would use it to complete his next quest, and then decide what he wanted to do with his guests’ experience. Then he’d figure out about rescuing everyone still out there.

Selective teleportation, as it was now, allowed Lex to select what destination he wanted to allow guests to teleport from. Moreover, he could select a number of requirements or restrictions for which guests were allowed to teleport over.

These included restrictions like age, sex, cultivation level, political or religious affiliation and so forth. They did not allow Lex to check for anyone who might harbor malicious intentions, or enemies of the Inn or things like that. But even so, it was good enough for now.

These requirements would be applicable to golden keys as well as random doors and pro bono guests.

Life would be so much easier now that he could choose who he wanted as guests. Once he upgraded this feature once or twice, he may even be willing to reopen the inn universe wide. But, for now, he wouldn’t do that as he was quite happy following the pace that these quests were setting.

He had a feeling that the quests were still based on him now and not on a new system user, otherwise the one year no contact rule may not have been applied. He didn’t mind. A year would pass by quickly for him, between cultivating and studying and running his actual Inn. Hopefully, no unexpected Dao Lords would make an appearance during that time.