The Innkeeper
chapter-453

"Lex, will you come for the opening ceremony?" Mary asked, as she appeared in his meditation room. Although his shirtless state made her feel slightly embarrassed, she had encountered him admiring his abs enough times to learn to ignore it now.

It was not something he could explain to her. As someone who always wanted abs, but had never achieved them, the excitement he felt whenever he saw them was not something that would wane easily. Moreover, after the latest series of 'body sculpting', as Lex called it, carried out by the Lotus, his body looked even more impressive.

The greatest tragedy was that usually he would either be in Leo form or as the Innkeeper, so the universe was deprived of his dashing good looks.

"Not for this," Lex answered as he lowered his body to the ground and finally sat down. "As the Innkeeper, if I make an appearance for every little thing, then it would be considered a waste of my time. I'll make an appearance when I'm about to use the star increase token."

In fact, there was one more reason why Lex was avoiding making a public appearance. Though a lot of time had passed by, he was still not able to adapt to his new physical strength completely. The pushups he was doing earlier were actually a part of his training regime to improve his control over his strength and balance.

If it were a minor issue Lex could still ignore it, but he had accidentally snapped a tree during the last week, and he didn't want to take such a chance with a guest.

"Send Luthor to give the opening speech, he should be able to handle it. I made a small mistake with the timing, so the hired security personnel will only show up once the event actually starts. Make sure to brief them immediately and have them spread out across the Inn. Have someone from the Inn's Security team with them at all times so that if they need to teleport in case of an incident, they can."

Although the event would actually begin today, the first week was more of a soft opening, with the real purpose being to give others enough time to come to the Inn in time for the star increase token to be used.

As such, while no major activity was planned during this time, there were countless small ones.

There would be countless tournaments that would span the week, starting from traditional card games such as poker, to more niche games that involve trading cards. There would also be actual sport competitions, including various sports from earth as well as other planets. Video game and virtual game tournaments were, of course, also being held.

There would also be an art competition, with various fields such as painting, sculpting, gem forging, which was a thing in the universe apparently, and more.

Other than competitions, there would be countless stalls set up across the Inn filled with games and activities. There would also be a number of lucky draws, awarding guests MP prizes and free stays at the Inn, musical and theatrical performances, local markets which would actually allow guests to set up stalls and, finally, firework competitions.

Of course, they would not be real fireworks, but illusions cast by cultivators. Still, they would be judged for their beauty and performance.

While such events would continue all three months, Lex had planned other larger and more significant events later on to keep things interesting.

This should keep things interesting and keep his early guests satisfied until the main event starts.

While Lex was not making an appearance at this time, it did not mean he would be ignoring the event. He took a quick shower before he dressed up in his Host Attire and teleported to his office.

From his chair his connection to the Inn would be increased, and would allow him to respond to any developing situation immediately.

"By the way, did you think of any good solutions to the teleportation issue?"

That was something he wanted to resolve before the event began, whether he had a perfect solution or not. He could not afford any mistakes when potentially millions of guests were about to arrive at the Inn. He and Mary had exchanged multiple ideas over the course of the past week.

"The best solution, for now, I think is the one we discussed about authorization. When a guest is returning, the Inn should determine if the guest has the authorization to go to the location he is teleporting to. If not, he is teleported to the nearest area that he does have the authorization for."

"It's too vague, what if they get teleported to the vacuum of space? We'd be killing off our guests."

Lex sighed. In fact, there were proper solutions to this, but the issue was that the Inns teleportation ability seemed incredibly powerful, but was actually severely stunted. To teleport to and from anywhere, the system required an anchor. The planets that were connected to the system were anchors, and any place a guest teleported from automatically became anchors, but anywhere else in the universe was not an anchor.

This was information he received when he previously tried to edit the teleportation ability. Apparently, once the system recovered some more this issue would get easier to resolve. Until then…

Lex wrote a long and as thorough document as he was able detailing a safe way to use the authorization technique Mary previously described. He tried to cover as many possible loopholes as possible that would end up killing or harming the guest or anyone else and provided as many fail safes as possible.

Once he was done, he submitted it to the system and completed his quest. The Inns' teleportation ability had been slightly altered. Hopefully it wouldn't cause any issues.

On the bright side, his latest reward allowed him to upgrade his Butter knife once again.

His last upgrade had converted it into a Fruit Knife and allowed him to one shot golden core cultivators at the Inn. He was looking forward to seeing what the next upgrade would bring.