Chapter 2021 — Chapter 2021 Deploying the taverns

The meeting with the Governor came to a quick end once the Governor had all the information he needed. Although, originally, the Governor had planned a longer meeting, he suddenly found it much more difficult to stay within the Innkeepers company for some unknown reason, so he departed.

Lex, meanwhile, did not even try to consider the Governor's behavior. He just could not understand Dao Lords, and it was best not to pry too much. Although the Host Attire could perfectly hide him, it was best not to test his limits.

Speaking of which, in the latest Inn upgrade, all the system features had undergone another round of upgrades, and that included his Host Attire. As long as he was inside the Midnight Inn, it was even better at hiding his identity. Previously, whenever he faced a Dao Lord, the system would enter a period of dormancy and cease all notifications, doing its best to hide. After all, his system had not fused with Lex, so it was still just a treasure residing within his soul.

Now, the Host Attire could even withstand a light level of scrutiny from a Dao Lord. It would be best not to test its limits though.

With the Governor gone now, Lex had finally set things into motion, but he was far from done. With a deadline now looming overhead, Lex now needed to prepare for the Tea Party. The first thing to do for that was to prepare a special key to enter the party directly, so that he would not need to funnel nearly a hundred Dao Lords through the Midnight Inn to his tavern.

That was actually quite easy now, especially since the latest upgrade to the taverns. Lex was not sure how it worked, because he had never heard of anything like this, but the several taverns now, together, formed a pseudo-realm, which was basically a fake, normal realm.

That was not the issue. The issue was that the taverns were usually placed far apart from one another, sometimes in entirely different realms!

The fact, then, that they could remain connected to one another despite the literal physical distance between them, and still act as a single, unified realm, involved a level of laws far beyond Lex's understanding. He literally could not explain it through any laws that he understood.

Perhaps that was why the original grade of his system was Divine, but had been reduced due to its broken state. If Lex had to guess, he would say that the Midnight Inn System was operating at anywhere between SS and SSS grade for all the crazy things it was doing.

If Lex had to guess, though, then the way the tavern was operating had to be a Divine grade feature, because that was more like a miracle than any law he understood. Then again, he was only a Heaven Immortal, and hadn't even fully understood all the 8 ruling laws yet, so he had a lot to learn.

First thing was first, he had to deploy all the taverns, and then pick which one he would send to the Garden. Deploying the taverns was easy. He sent two of them to the other continents in the Midnight Realm - Jabalia and Nether.

Jabalia was bigger than Menara, which is where the Inn was formed, and actually had the largest natural population. Comparatively, although Nether was the largest continent, it had the lowest population because its environment was more prone to being extreme.

His purpose for both taverns was quite specific. In Jabalia, he wanted to start getting in touch with the locals of his realm, which is why the tavern appeared just a few thousand miles outside the largest city on that continent. Travelers to the city would stop by the tavern, while not attracting too much attention. The tavern in Nether was more like a tourist destination that guests from other taverns would go to. It would be like a safari.

From whichever tavern they were in, they could pay for a nice, unique safari, go explore Nether, and then return.

The majority of the remaining taverns he sent to the Origin realm. Previously, Lex had also sent some to the Crystal realm, but that was no longer possible. Since there was no way Lex would leave a tavern in the Primordial Garden longterm, these were his only options.

Speaking of taverns, Lex began to suspect that there was something wrong with his Treehouse tavern. The guests were behaving oddly there, and the fact that it had already been years but Tetsuya was still in the escape room. Like, Lex had made it hard but not that hard. What was going on?

Yet whenever he diverted his attention towards the Treehouse tavern, he never found anything amiss.

Well, whatever. He'd go look into it when he had time. For now, the Treehouse would remain on Arra-kiss.

There was only one tavern that Lex kept to himself. Although Lex considered bringing what had been unofficially dubbed as the Brazilian tavern, since its internal space was as large as Brazil, he eventually decided to go with something smaller and more mundane.

He doubted his taverns were impressive enough to actually impress Dao Lords, in which case he decided to go with the tavern that looked as ordinary as possible, which meant that he selected the first ever tavern he had.

Now that he was done with that, Lex turned to his system. Designing a key that took guests to a specific tavern was not difficult - it was even a feature that was already included. It just cost a lot more than regular golden keys, not that such a thing mattered to Lex anymore. The issue was of color.

He already had golden, platinum and black keys. So... looking at the simple, wooden tavern in front of him, Lex shrugged and decided to make wooden keys. For now, the keys would not work. Only when he activated them, which is when the tea party would begin, could they be used to arrive at the tavern.

Next, Lex had to write some letters.