The Innkeeper
chapter-1168

When Lex appeared on Yildrim, Moon was jumping on the sofa, screaming and pulling her hair and Z was just laughing. The same anime from last time was still playing on the television, but now the main character had made an appearance just in time to keep his love interest from dying to a bad guy. On top of that, the main character was coming in from a training arc, so everyone was super excited to see how strong he was.

Lex smiled. He remembered when he saw this fight himself. It could only be described as the ultimate hype. Watching Moon lose her mind over it was quite amusing. Butt Moon, still holding her hair, suddenly turned to look towards Lex with confusion in her eyes.

She could feel something, but couldn't understand what it was. It confused her.

"Can I see you for a moment," Lex said. "Alone."

Z paused the show and excused himself. Although he could not sense the clones, nor did he extend his spirit sense outwards to check what Lex had brought, he could feel that the mood wasn't right.

That left Moon and Lex in the room, awkwardly looking at each other.

"What is that?" she asked when Lex didn't speak. "I can feel a strange connection to it."

Lex sighed, thinking of various polite or delicate ways in which he could phrase this. But sometimes, a thing did not need to be polite or delicate. Leaving it as cruel or disturbing was what it deserved.

"I used a technique to track down my blood relatives to find Liz. I ended up on a snow planet with yetis. But instead of Liz, I found this."

Lex removed the blanket, revealing the faces of the various clones. He waited for a moment to see if Moon had any reaction, but all she showed was a confused expression. Then, suddenly, something clicked in her mind and she showed an expression of realization.

"So that's what all of those samples were for," she murmured. Though even now, she didn't look upset, which for some reason upset Lex even more.

He had read Josefs memories before he killed him, and everyone else there. He knew where these tissue samples came from. Even though he himself could revive after taking a ridiculous amount of damage, most people weren't like that. Most people, even cultivators all the way up to the Nascent realm, could not just brush away having a part of their brain removed, or having a chunk of their heart cut out.

But the nonchalance with which she treated it meant that, much like him, she had been through a lot of pain - to the point where it didn't bother him anymore. Lex thought back to that moment he was being burned by dragonfire and was treating the pain like a joke. For some reason, the thought of his sister doing something like that… hurt him.

"My pet dragon told me that you could absorb them. They will help your body regain strength. One of the reasons why you are probably so weak is because your physique probably had to work overtime to continuously heal you from your injuries."

"Pet dragon?" Moon asked with shock and excitement, showing a lot more expression at that than at seeing her own clones.

Lex smiled, removed his ring and tossed it to Moon.

"Well, part dragon. He's a treasure spirit now. His name is Pel. You can hang out with him if you want. He'll teach you how to absorb the clones."

Whether or not Moon heard anything he saw was completely unknown because she put the ring on and was staring at it with gleaming eyes. No doubt Pel was talking to her.

"Hey Moon," he said, distracting her from her brand new toy.

"Yeah?" she asked without looking up. "From now on, no one is going to be able to hurt you. I'll make sure of it."

"Hmm," she said softly, but didn't say anything else.

Though she did not say it, how could Lex, who could read others emotions so easily, be unable to see through her. This… was something she was not ready to talk about yet. To avoid an awkward silence, Lex said his farewell.

"Don't leave them out too long. Hurry up and absorb them. I'm going to continue looking for Liz."

Lex teleported away, giving Moon the space she wanted. But it was almost as if she was too entranced by the ring to notice anything else as she kept playing with it. Almost, since the tears she had been holding back finally began to flow. The reason she didn't look up was because she didn't want Lex to see her crying.

Back at the Midnight Inn, Lex's soft expression turned neutral. There was no point in showing his anger now. Those who needed to see his anger would definitely see it. Until then, he kept his emotions in check.

"Lex, the president of New Earth is asking to see you," said Mary, standing there in a secretary outfit, holding a clipboard.

"Tell him yes, he can participate in the Midnight Games. If he wants anything else, I'm busy."

But Mary was not deterred by Lex's obvious bad mood. She knew he probably wanted nothing more than to go out hunting - she'd already seen how Fenrir was gathering his new pack to go hunt some back guys, as the pup put it - but she also knew that the Inn needed overseeing.

A bad mood was no excuse for mismanagement. Lex would thank her for it later.

"The spaceship has finally agreed to exposure therapy and has started flying over twenty feet in the air. Unfortunately, that means he's constantly blocking light from reaching the plants below him and the gardeners are complaining."

Lex sighed and rubbed his eyes. What kind of spaceship was afraid of heights?

"Tell him he can go to outer space where there is no gravity. That should help."

But no matter how Lex tried to get out of managing, Mary would not let him. There was only so much work he could delegate to others.

Eventually, several hours later, Lex finally got time to himself again. He returned to his meditation room, and once again employed the technique to search for blood relatives. He was either going to find his sisters, or he was going to find their clones. This was not something he was just about to give up on. But the technique was not easy to use, and required a lot of energy, which slowed down his progress.

A few days later, Lex left the Inn once more. By now Powell was prepared to help him teleport wherever he wanted, though it didn't help that this time his target was an asteroid belt in the middle of nowhere, far away from any star systems. Since it didn't have a specific teleportation formation on it, they had to get creative, but it wasn't like the vacuum of space bothered Lex by now. Even if they failed, he wouldn't really be hurt.

A few days later, he once again showed up on Yildrim, and dropped off a few more clones. The days started to roll by, and the starting date for the Champions tourney kept closing in.

After a couple more weeks, Lex finally got his delivery from the Celestial Planet's club, and began the tethering process for the planet and Moon, who was looking just a little healthier these days.

But, due to her low cultivation level, the tethering process was slowed down drastically. To speed things up Lex brought dozens or entire spirit stone veins from random, uninhabited planets from nearby star systems over to Yildrim and had a planetscaping specialist as well as a feng shui master on consultancy for how to speed up the development of the planet itself.

He would also, from time to time, bring the corpses of immortal level beings and bury them in random places on the planet as fertilizer. He even brought a special breed of earthworm over from the Midnight Inn to help speed up the fertilization process.

Like that, time slowly passed by, with the spirit energy on Yildrim becoming more abundant and Moon slowly becoming stronger. Since the tethering process was taking much longer than anticipated, Lex also started sending in more Inn workers on the planet so that they would get to know Moon.

As for why he didn't bother setting up any protection for the planet, it was because no protection he could buy would be on the same scale as the World Eater, who was lately becoming more and more protective of Yildrim. Lex wasn't exactly sure, but he was starting to think that the World Eater treated Yildrim like a pet.

During all this time, Lex never stopped looking for his siblings, but unfortunately never found them, though he found countless Moon clones. That was why Lex felt incredibly reluctant when he had to stop his excursions. But it couldn't be helped. The Midnight Games were about to begin, and next week he would be leaving for the tourney.