Chapter 1541 — 1541: About time

Orin crushed the platinum key and vanished, gone to take the test to join the Midnight Inn. Lex withdrew his projection of the Amber Chaos Resin, and leaned back in his chair. He didn't have many pieces of the resin left, and each one was beyond extremely valuable.

The reason he was willing to use it for the creation of this bead was because Lex had taken a great interest in Karma and intended on using it long term.

Unlike arrays, which had once served him very well but ultimately reached a plateau in terms of strength, he felt like he could use Karma indefinitely. The reason arrays plateaued in strength, he eventually discovered, was because the characters that arrays were formed of were a sort of manifestation of certain aspects of specific laws.

One could even say that using laws was an upgraded and more potent version of using arrays.

But Karma was Karma. There was no upgraded or deteriorated version of it, and was so powerful that even Dao Lords feared and respected it. Such a field was worth learning and investing in.

A gleam flashed through Lex's eyes as he thought about his future plans. While he did not think that he was worth studying, the way Licanderoth had claimed he would be studied, but it was true that Lex was perhaps at his best when he was planning some kind of revenge.

What could he say? Vengeance was a motivator unlike any other.

"Mary, send in the next appointment," he said, getting back into the Innkeeper persona.

John walked into the Innkeepers office, his expression neutral, though Lex could see enough to tell that he was pleased.

John had slowly faded out of view from daily life at the Inn after he lost his system, though after a chat with the Innkeeper, he eventually found his drive to return to his former self. The problem he was facing was that even though his cultivation had fallen, his tenets had remained the same.

That meant that even if he regained his cultivation, he would have to continue on the path that his system had set out for him.

For a very long time, John had been training and cultivating, back from scratch. He had been sent to the Temple of Fasting the moment the Inn opened back up so that he could get even better guidance than before.

Now, finally, he had returned to his former peak cultivation - though without his system, his strength was not what it used to be.

"How are you adjusting?" the Innkeeper asked warmly.

John looked at the Innkeeper for a moment, and then sighed.

"It's good to have my strength back but I… I feel a little lost these days."

"It's because you have spent too much time in isolation. What you need to do now is return to the Inn, and allow yourself to rest as you interact with the Inn workers and its guests. Your own assistant, Doe, has specifically stated that he wants to continue working with you, so should you reopen the Battle Ax, he will resume his old post."

John hesitated for a moment, but then nodded.

"Do you feel ready to resume work properly?" the Innkeeper asked, his tone becoming slightly more solemn.

"Yes, that's the one thing I have no doubts about. Until I surpass my old self, I'll always feel incomplete. Working will help distract me from that."

"Good. In that case, I'm going to be sending you to the two Rhinocentaurs. They're going to give you a device that will help you detect systems. Your new job, when you're not running the Battle Ax, will be to covertly search for system users in the Origin realm who are… very liberal with their morals when using their systems."

John's expression also turned solemn as his fists tightened.

"You only have to find them, and nothing else. This is what we're going to do…"

The Innkeeper informed John about his role in an elaborate plan, where hardly anyone involved within actually knew what they were doing. In fact, even John himself did not know what the end goal for searching for system users was.

All he knew was that from time to time, someone would forward him a list of leads from across the Origin realm. The Midnight Inn had already been connected to many random planets in the Origin realm, and Lex planned on increasing his reach by connecting to random planets across the galaxies.

Once John had a lead, he would use the lifetime of experience in covert operations to secretly scan the target to detect if he was a system user or not using the device given to him by the Rhinocentaurs.

The Innkeeper informed him up front that the chances of actually finding a system user was less than one in a thousand, but the task needed to be done even so.

In truth, what Lex had planned was an elaborate scheme. Since the two Rhinocentaurs needed systems to upgrade their security clearance to get more information, Lex had more or less decided to get them a couple of weak systems.

Of course, Lex was not a thief. He would not go around stealing systems from any random system user he came across. Lex had, in fact, let a few system users even go despite discovering them.

However, if the system user was a criminal, or a generally scummy person such as the Nas who had targeted Lex, then there was no harm in dealing with them.

Up until now, he'd been reluctant to repair his system because the stronger it was, the more forceful it would be with his quests. Although the system stopped doing it, he couldn't forget what it felt like when the system had warned him that the punishment for failing a quest was death.

Although, by now, the system didn't do stuff like that anymore, the arrival of the Joint quest proved that mandatory quests were still a thing. It was best to be careful.

Yet caught in the web of powerful organizations, Lex had no choice but to power up. Besides, it was better to know the location of a bunch of systems and not need them, than to need them and not be able to find them.

He had tasked Roland with finding anomalous people and organizations, in any regard, all across the Origin realm. Such a general task was too difficult to quantify, for simply finding anomalous people was not enough.

The anomaly factor had to be great enough for him to suspect the involvement of a system. He had come up with a complex mathematical formula to calculate how much a certain situation deviated from the norm. Only results that exceeded 250% of the norm could end up on the list of leads, which would then be forwarded to John.

John would then verify their veracity and forward the list to the Innkeeper. What to do with the list of confirmed system users after that was entirely up to Lex.