The Innkeeper

Lex grumbled as he walked towards the ORR. He had a stump instead of a hand. The Origin realm was waiting for him to return to. There was some critical mission waiting for him on some utopia planet. He didn't have time to be babysitting a few earthlings.

Just because they had rapidly grown in technology, civilization and cultivation without massive corporations bottleneck progress for personal gain, they all thought they were so amazing. Who even cared that in a mere fifteen years they had surpassed human civilization back on earth? Or used science to explain cultivation? Or created a machine that used dumb A.I. meaning A.I. that won't gain a soul as well as the Midnight Inn's massive catalog of techniques to create a machine that analyzes humans and designs a cultivation technique and method suited specifically for them? Lex certainly didn't.

Lex snorted once more. How dare they make a video game about the Midnight Inn and keep him as an unlockable side character?

"Mary, spread the word," Lex said as he went to get his arm fixed. "In exactly twelve hours, the Midnight Inn will be opening back up. To commemorate our reopening, there is going to be an event, and after that we will be kicking off the Midnight Games once more. But the games are going to be a little different this time. Instead of worlds, participants will be individuals and represent only themselves, or a small group."

"Any details on what the event will be?" Mary asked. Oddly enough, this was the first time Lex had mentioned something like this.

"No. The workers all just need to know that we will be expecting a sudden influx of new guests. I will try to keep the numbers low for now though."

It would be great if Lex could just open up the system, do the task in Utopia, and then lock it back down. The Midnight realm had more than everything he needed to grow, and now with the Inn being able to support tribulations once more, he could easily stay here until he became an immortal.

Unfortunately, however, he was leaning more and more towards the idea of being the best. Even though he knew that saying it was much easier than doing it, and this was most certainly a path for him to just die, just imagining a normal life seemed boring to him.

But more important than just boredom, unless he wanted to give up the Midnight Inn, he would constantly be exposing himself to all the powerful beings in the universe. This would be even more so as the system recovered greater functionality.

For example, right now he had an ongoing quest to connect 30 more planets to the system within the next 3 years, with the passage of time being based on the Midnight realm.

This was not actually difficult for Lex anymore, even if it required him to have the Inn open for a while. But it was only a matter of time before this quest evolved into connecting other realms to the Inn, this time on purpose.

If he continued to just rely on bluffing, then there would eventually come a day he would be discovered. So, very literally, unless he gave up the Inn, he would at the very least, need to reach the Dao Lord realm. But even that might not be enough.

Ignoring the mysterious guy who showed up to the Inn one day and guided him towards nabbing a dragon, back in the Crystal realm he had apparently been visited by someone above the Dao Lord realm.

Since the system was apparently open for the whole universe, it would not be a stretch to say that one day, maybe a million years later, or maybe even a hundred million years later, or perhaps much longer than that or even sooner than that, he might be visited by such a being at the Inn. If that happened, would he be able to maintain the facade?

Over the past few years, without one crisis after another distracting him, Lex had much more time to think. That resulted in him realizing that his very survival depended on two things: either he give up the system, or become drastically more powerful.

Honestly, he had grown too fond of the Inn and everyone in it, so he wasn't willing to give up. That left only one viable option - become stronger than any other foe out there who might seek to challenge him? And wasn't that essentially the same thing as becoming the best?

To that end, he had been doing a lot of research these past few years. He talked to his idiotic system and forced it to give him quest rewards in the form of knowledge that he had hidden deep within the Midnight library.

That knowledge basically only pertained to one thing: how to become the best. Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, on such a path, Lex needed to be proactive. He could no longer wait for prizes to fall into his lap, or wait to encounter good luck.

He already had possibly the best cultivation technique in existence, so now he just needed to make use of it in the best way. So, after much research, he had discovered the best conditions and circumstances under which he should become an immortal, and for that, he had to return to the Origin realm.

Not only did he need to return, he was on a time limit. His growth in the Nascent realm was much quicker than anticipated, and Lex actually had to put seals on his own body to prevent himself from automatically growing into the next level. But those seals had now begun to fail.

Lex had a matter of months to arrange everything.

So it was not just the Midnight Inn that would be returning to the Origin realm. It would also be Lex the dragon slayer, and if the amount of attention his previous stunt with the dragon attracted was anything to go by, then what he had planned for his grand return would turn him into an overnight sensation. Hence the need to forge himself a proper weapon, as well as the few other preparations he had made.