Chapter 1533 — 1533: Non renewable resources

The Innkeeper turned to look at the box, even as the Gardener and Ash turned to look as well. The rest of them could feel nothing from the box, for it was supposed to be a perfect insulator, lest the primordial aura trapped within fades.

That, of course, did nothing to prevent the turtle from being able to sense the Primordial Aura, because why did making sense matter to the turtle?

"That is the Gabana fruit from the Primordial Garden," said the Innkeeper with a fond smile. "It is a gift from another guest, hoping to establish a working partnership with me."

The turtle continued to stare at it for a while, almost as if lost in thought, until eventually its shoulders slumped as if depressed.

"I cannot create an environment suited to nurturing that fruit's seed. How disappointing."

The Innkeeper chuckled, and then held out his hand and allowed the box to float to him. As much as he would like to just give the fruit to the turtle, he had other uses for it - if he decided to ever use it to begin with. Plus, for the first time ever, he had encountered a situation where even a Sovereign was helpless, so it was probably pointless to give it the fruit anyway.

The moment Lex touched the box, however, something unexpected, yet totally predictable happened. He heard the familiar sound of new notifications! The only thing that surprised him was that it wasn't a single notification, but the sound of multiple notifications!

Lex, however, ignored the notifications for now, despite really wishing to look at them. He didn't want to distract himself at the moment.

He had no doubt that he'd received a quest or two, but wanted to finish one quest before focusing on the next. He sent the box into his spatial ring.

"You should not worry over such things," said the Innkeeper, as if consoling the turtle. "Life has a way of working things out. Besides, right now, you're focused on the project of recreating a Heaven. If you started to recreate Primordial aura, I don't think you'd be able to focus on or complete either of them."

The turtle looked away with a clearly forlorn expression that made it look adorable, causing the Innkeeper to chuckle. It wasn't everyday that he saw the turtle lose out on what it wanted. In fact, this may possibly be the only time he would ever see such a thing.

Thus he enjoyed the moment, but then got back into the thick of things.

"Like I said, if you have any questions, you can ask them now."

Ash raised her hand, which made the Innkeeper chuckle again.

"You don't need to raise your hand, Ash. Go ahead, what do you want to ask?"

"Designing special services to promote and strengthen mortals is not tough. Everything within the Midnight Inn, from the air, to the dirt and the water, to everything else practically improves mortals in every conceivable way. So what I need to know is the parameters of the services to design.

"What resources from the Midnight Inn should I utilize? Using the more common resources is fine, but looking at things long term, depending on the number of mortals we help, there will come a time where we will start to even run out of dirt. It may be a thousand years from now, or a hundred thousand years from now, but each grain of dirt used to initialize a mortal's bloodline is a grain of dirt we're never getting back."

"Your point is valid," said the Innkeeper appreciatively. "But the resources from the Midnight Inn are not as non-renewable as you think. To answer your question, all resources can be utilized. From the air, dirt and water, like you said, to the rarer and more valuable elixirs, resin, minerals and ores, all can be used to create new services that can help our guests.

"This will actually require an element of research and development as well, for we have never really utilized all our resources to help mortals like this, and the possibilities for how they can be utilized is endless.

"That is, in fact, why I also asked the Gardener to come to this meeting as well. While the turtle can help by designing environments which can be used for the mortals, empowering them despite not reaching a full Heaven state, the Gardener's deep understanding of all the various environments and resources, and how they can be used in conjunction with one another.

"Rather than worrying about that, what you need to do is focus on the price points for each service. Compared to our other services, such as healing and training, any service we come up with that utilizes the resources of the Inn itself needs to be at a much higher price point. Specifically, the price should reflect the rarity of what our service achieves.

"With the various rewards being offered to the soldiers fighting within the Midnight Games, there has already been a lot of marketing for what we can offer. What I want you to do now is prepare three such services to launch during the Midnight Games finale."

While Ash and the Gardener reflected on what the Innkeeper said, Lex's thoughts went back to the matter of what Ash had pointed out. The resources of the Inn could not be used indefinitely.

Even the grains of dirt, as numerous as they were, would eventually run out if they kept being reused without being replenished. It may take trillions of guests to do so, but the universe was not lacking in mortals.

It was something he had already considered. In fact, what Lex had thought about was the fact that as the Midnight realm matures, it would slowly lose out of the numerous rarities a newborn realm offers.

Obviously, in exchange, the upper limit of the realm would grow, and the realm itself would move towards stabilization. That was the ultimate trade off in a realms lifecycle. The individual worth of the average item in the realm would be reduced, and it would contain less energy, but the realm itself was more stable.

That did not mean that mature realms did not contain absolutely incredible treasures - naturally that was not the case. This was only a comparison of averages. The point, however, was that one day the Midnight realm would lose the many valuable resources it had.

Lex thought about harvesting and mining them all, but then ultimately decided on a better solution. One was to gain more information about realms and their maturing process, something Ripley, the auditor from the bank, had pointed out that the Inn workers sorely needed. The second was… well, he was a system user, so it would be pretty pointless if he didn't use the system.

To be more accurate, his system had gained a very powerful feature called Realm law replication. He had used it once before to copy the laws in a special region within the Midnight Realm where the laws behaved in such a way that everything was 2 dimensional

Within the Midnight Inn, Lex had created a special zone, and anyone who entered that region would experience the special laws of that 2D zone.

He had thought about using that very feature to copy the laws of the Midnight Inn, and then permanently create a zone that would forever have the special laws of a newborn realm.

There was one reason why he hadn't done it yet, though.

The Realm law replication worked to perfectly copy the laws operating within a certain zone, but perhaps because it perfectly copied the laws of its targeted zone, it would not need to be used twice in the same area. As such, if Lex copied down the laws of the Midnight Realm as it was right now, later on if the Realm developed certain laws that he wanted to capture, he would be unable to do so.

This was an unexpected quirk of the feature, and Lex had looked into finding various loopholes in it, such as capturing the laws of the Midnight Realm within a certain region to capture the laws of a newborn realm. Yet due to the nature of the laws, the feature recognized any space with the same laws as a single region, even if Lex only targeted a small area of it.

Ultimately, he had decided to wait until he was certain of what he would gain or lose out by copying the laws of the realm at any given time.

Once the laws were replicated, he would be able to, theoretically, harvest resources from that specially created zone indefinitely.

Just in case things did not work out like that, Lex needed to think of other ways to replenish the Midnight Realm as he used its resources. Unfortunately, information related to realms and their development was not something that was readily available, so it was up to him to figure things out.

Fortunately, however, he already had some ideas as to how he could do such a thing.

"As I expect these services will be out of the means of most mortals themselves, we need to come up with alternate payment plans. Naturally, those mortals who are sponsored by more powerful organizations won't have any such problems. But for those who aren't, I intend on offering them Trials to pay for the services instead."