The Innkeeper
chapter-334-30041322

The person outside Remy's cabin waited for a while until yet another person appeared and then politely knocked on the door. Remy opened and welcomed his guests, but the three exchanged no words.

The three descended into the basement and each of them entered one of the rooms with the unusual environments. Remy entered the one with a lava pool and began setting up some kind of formation, while his companions did the same in the freezing room, and the room with dirt.

A few hours later, when they concluded their work, the three entered the fourth room that happened to be completely normal. There they worked together to finish setting up the formation which, when finished, created a small Minor realm around 2000 square feet large.

The three entered the realm that not only already had air and gravity, but was completely furnished with comfortable sofas, tables, various stationary, and warm lighting. Just because they were from a secret organization, it did not mean they had to meet in a dark and dingy environment.

"Remy, Remy, Remy, you've done it this time. This place is great. Once we spread enough golden keys across the galaxies, the organization will be able to exchange information and hand out tasks much faster. The bishop will definitely reward you."

"It's still not completely safe," Remy pointed out. "I have no idea if this formation and minor realm will be able to prevent the mysterious Innkeeper from listening in."

"Why would the Innkeeper even be interested in what we have to say? Besides, he's running an Inn, so I'm sure he will respect his guests' privacy," replied one of the other men. The third person had his lips stitched, so it was unlikely that he would speak.

"I'm just saying this is something we need to keep in mind. Now let's get onto business, I can't stay at the Inn much longer, I have work. If I disappear for too long, people will become suspicious."

"Fine, our most urgent task right now is to get these golden keys in the hands of as many members as possible. This is a task that will likely take years, but we must begin immediately."

"Agreed," replied Remy. "While we do that, though, I have to update you on my latest missions from the empire."

Remy was actually someone in the employ of the Jotun empire. He was usually tasked with extremely sensitive matters that involved great secrets, such as investigating the Midnight Inn itself when they suspected Lex of being a Dao Lord. Yet at the same time, during his investigation of the Inn, he directly informed Lex of his purpose, and now apparently he was also a part of a secret organization. Despite his cavalier attitude, there was clearly more to him than met the eye. Or he was just really lucky.

"There have been a lot of unusual phenomena taking place on the planet of Hozath, and the involvement of a Dao Lord is suspected. They want me to…"

*****

A few hours later, Lex exited the meditation room feeling extremely satisfied with his progress. His plan currently was two-pronged. First, it was to completely memorize an array of… arrays, all with different purposes, and practice employing them at a moment's notice. Second was to better familiarize himself with the process of creating new arrays, so that he could easily improvise a new array in an unusual situation.

He had made great progress with both of those, and was feeling quite accomplished.

It was late afternoon now, so he opened the system to check if he had any guests in the tavern while he was busy, and was taken aback by the numerous notifications.

He quickly checked them and learnt about Ragnar's visit and his requests. His request of putting up his task, but only for qualified people, was actually very simple. All it would require was further upgrading the Guild room, so that tasks could be divided into various levels of difficulty. Finding someone capable of fulfilling those tasks would be the actual hard part.

But there was great incentive for Lex to do so, because he received 1% of all transactions through the Guild room.

Mathematics was sometimes very complicated for people when involving massive numbers, especially for people who stood to profit, causing them to recheck their calculations multiple times. In this scenario, no matter how one checked their working, the answer would always be that 1% of 100 trillion MP was 1 trillion MP. That was 1,000,000,000,000 with 12 0's involved.

Lex could not comprehend such a massive amount of wealth. Even as a billionaire, he struggled to fully understand how to best use his money. He could blindly throw it at randomly upgrading the Inn, but doing something blindly, and doing something with direction and purpose gave vastly different results. The difference between the village Lex made, and how the planning division made alterations to make it more cohesive was an excellent example of this.

Still, what to do with the money was a worry for later. First, he had to acquire it. Furthermore, Mary claiming that this could solve their energy requirements made him realize a simple oversight on his part.

He was looking for energy manually here, whereas he could just simply put up tasks in the Guild room with MP as a reward. Doing things like this opened up another path for him in his quest as well. Since the same races could exist in different realms, he could search for information on Kraven from the Inn as well. While that would not tell him the origin of Kraven in the Crystal realm, having a deeper understanding of Kraven could guide his search here as well.

Before he began upgrading the Guild room and setting up his tasks, Lex checked the rest of his notifications, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of his quests that had been pending for a long time finally ended.

Quest: Host a secret society.

Quest Complete! The Host's rewarded is being calculated:

- Hosted an intergalactic secret society

- Hosted a secret society related to multiple empires

- Hosted a secret society in the first year

Reward Rank: A+

Reward: Chamber of secrets

Remarks: No copyrights were infringed upon in the creation of this chamber

He had no idea what exactly caused the quest to be completed, but he wasn't complaining. He investigated the details of his reward.

Chamber of secrets:

Some secrets can weigh heavy on your mind, body and soul. The Chamber of secrets allows users to deposit secrets, effectively erasing them from your memory as well. The secret will be protected, even from the Innkeeper, and can only be withdrawn by the user, or as per the user's conditions, at the time of depositing the secret. The price of depositing the secret varies and depends on the user's cultivation.

The chamber of secrets was an interesting reward, but Lex did not know how useful it would end up being. He placed the building which looked like a small, round chapel near the Midnight manor. Since the price of each secret would vary, Lex did not set any price variables and let this building function without any profit for him. He wasn't worried, as he didn't know how much use this building would get in the first place.

Next he diverted his attention to the Guild room. Using his increased authority, he upgraded the Guild room to level 5. This effectively divided all tasks into different levels, and changed the layout of the guild room as well.

Anyone could set a request at any level, but the moment anyone set a request at the immortal realm and above, they would need to pay a 50% deposit to ensure guests would not randomly place requests.

To view the request would, however, require relevant authority. There were two ways to get the relevant authority. The first and easiest was to be of the cultivation level or greater than the one required for the task. For example, a Foundation realm guest could not view tasks at the Golden core realm, but the opposite was true.

The second way to get the appropriate authority was to complete sufficient requests of a steadily increasing difficulty to prove that, despite a lower cultivation realm, you had sufficient strength and recognition.

This meant that when Ragnar came back, he would be able to set a request, and had to pay a deposit. While Lex would not have access to the MP in the deposit, the thought of it still excited him.

With that done, he diverted his attention back to the tavern. Even if more guests did not come, he had to interview the triplets, as well as look for more workers. The tavern required more work and supervision on his part than the Inn, but that was okay with Lex for he was the one who planned this.

He was also looking forward to meeting some guests and chatting with them. Last nights party was too hectic to do any research, but now he could take his time and get a better understanding of the wealth of this region, and more about the lords of this land as well.

Having human rulers presented a problem for him. He just ran away from Cornelius, so if the rulers of these lands had any relations with him, it might cause problems.