The Innkeeper
chapter-554

After a short time, the second round of the fishing event started. Although the event had somehow attracted immeasurably more attention than Lex had planned, it still continued at its leisurely pace. After all, fishing was not supposed to be an extreme sport. Emphasis on 'supposed'.

Due to the valuable nature of the items the contestants kept pulling out, Lex did implement a single change. All participants needed to wear the Clark Kent glasses, and all their names would be substituted with fake names. It would not do well for participants to be targeted after they drew out a valuable treasure.

But the start of the second round of fishing did prompt Lex to wake from his overly concerned state. He avoided panicking, due to all the immeasurable experience he had garnered handling emergencies, yet he could still do a little better.

His latest outing to the pagoda had shown him that his lack of relevant techniques was a critical flaw in his repertoire. Although his own defense was incredible, he could not leverage his exquisite mastery over defensive techniques properly if he didn't have techniques suitable for his realm.

He teleported to the Midnight library, which was much fuller than last time he was there. Anita had been originally hired as a historian, and although she had been assigned other jobs as well recently, she had not neglected her original duty. Lex had not asked her the details of how she collected the relevant information, but she had been slowly and steadily adding the history of numerous planets connected to the Inn.

In fact, she had not limited herself to just planets. Various sects, businesses, interest groups, and more had bits and pieces of their histories added to the library. One such example was the somewhat lacking biography of Booty from the Iron heart pirates.

But Lex's goal wasn't history. No, he walked into the techniques section, and it was massive! In one of his deals with the Infinity Emporium, Lex asked for as many spiritual techniques as possible, specifically for the Golden core realm and below. The thing was, the deal was of such a monumentally massive amount that the number of techniques he'd collected so far was already in the millions! Yet the deal was far from complete, and Lex extended to get many more over the coming months.

He had two reasons for doing this at the time. One of his reasons was to prepare a selection for himself when he needed, but also because he wanted to build one of the largest collections ever. Although he expected 99% or even more of these techniques to be extremely generic, he was sure that he would soon have something suitable for everyone. Moreover, he did plan on collecting extremely high quality techniques as well, but over time. He was inspired by his own constant issues of having no one to guide him, or no source of decent techniques, and wanted to provide a place where lone cultivators could get some help.

He expected that in the future, the Midnight Library would become one of the most sought after places to visit, not only in the Inn, but in every realm it was connected to. For now, it had not attracted too much attention, as the Inn usually had guests who were here on vacation. Only a few book worms had taken notice of how expansive the library was becoming, though granted in only a few fields. They naturally would not publicize the information on their own initiatives so that they could continue to enjoy the library in relative privacy. Lex too was content to let matters stand, at least until the library accumulated a lot more books.

Although Lex had an additional benefit due to the Host Attire being connected to everything inside the Inn, the library's interface was quite intuitive as well. Instead of walking through endless shelves, Lex entered a private reading room and accessed a tablet that was in the room.

Through it, he specified that he was searching for defensive techniques in the golden core realm, and then chose to sort them based on their highest defensive capabilities.

That eliminated most of the books, but the list presented before Lex was not small either. Moreover, while he expected most books were generic, that did not mean there weren't any exceptional books available.

The first technique that Lex saw, sorted by the library as having the highest defensive capability in its list, was actually quite broken. It was not broken in the sense that its defense was exceptionally high. No, it was broken because anyone who successfully cultivated would have their body become exceptionally hard, to the point where they would often lack the strength to even move their own bodies! In fact, the amount of strength required to even pump blood across the body would become such a difficult chore, that they would often just die of heart failure!

In exchange, they got a body that was able to survive through even the most extreme situations. Only absolute brute force in terms of any kind of element would be able to damage the body.

Only a crazy person, or someone absolutely confident in their strength would cultivate this technique. Or, in this case, someone like Lex who had such an abnormal affinity with defensive techniques that he could rearrange techniques on a whim. Not that it mattered, because even if Lex didn't have a way to rearrange the technique so that it would actually become usable, just by reading the technique once, he was able to learn it! That had always been the case when Lex encountered defensive techniques, and it had not changed yet.

After Lex changed it, the technique became an active one rather than a passive one, meaning Lex could turn it on and off on a whim. Moreover, it would not end up being a burden to his own bodily functions. The technique was originally called 'Rebirth of the Mundane: Supreme Immortal Body of Invincibility'. For the sake of his own sanity, Lex simply decided to call the technique 'Harden'.