The Innkeeper
Chapter 1674: Lex is 25 years old

Chapter 1674: Lex is 25 years old

By now, Lex had seen the characters at work over a hundred times. They hardly ever worked with a bang. Instead, the array would dissipate into the environment, correcting the wrongness as it did.

This time, however, the characters weren’t correcting a wrongness. No, they were making a change forcibly, even if the method was designed to be as smooth as possible. As such, it was inevitable that as soon as the array started working, its effects would not be inconspicuous.

Flashes of red and orange filled the sky, cutting through the darkness of the night. Various colors began melding into the black lightning bolt that was frozen still, not only disrupting its existence, but interfering with the portal hidden within it.

The icy glacier beneath their feet, too, began to change. It remained solid, but instead of the hard and impenetrable, the ice became soft and wobbly. The ceiling of the cave entrance began to droop, pushing down some of the chimera at the mouth of the cave who were attacking Lex’s barriers.

Lex had anticipated that he would face great resistance to initiating a change, even possibly attracting the wrong kind of attention from Abaddon. Instead, it seemed that Abaddon found the state of change that Lex initiated perfectly normal.

In a way, Lex really was correcting a wrongness, for Abaddon was a place of flux, and forcibly creating portals was temporarily ceasing that flux state.

It seemed to have detected the change that Lex had initiated, but It did not seem too bothered by it. Instead, the countless bodies It possessed merely smiled in an even more horrifying way.

Lex could not help but feel like It was studying him, and revealing more about himself seemed like a bad idea. Even so, it wasn’t as if he could simply ignore an attack on the tavern either. It was an open conspiracy, and one he couldn’t do much about at the moment.

Lex, however, wasn’t really one to allow an enemy to gain the upper hand. Since It preferred the route of an open conspiracy, he could take the route of a hidden one. After all, just as It was studying him, he was also studying It.

Gradually, the two portals changed so much that they ceased to work, finally alleviating a huge burden that the entire mercenary group was under. But while the threat of more chimeras was gone, the existing ones were still a threat they hadn’t dealt with.

Lex thought of a few different solutions, but before committing to one, tried to use the state of Flow to study the chimera. They truly presented themselves as an unstoppable force, with no apparent weakness for them to exploit. Even so, with the guidance of his instincts, he studied his surroundings before arriving at an answer that made perfect sense, but that he would not have thought of on his own without Flow.

Lex could not help but sigh as he exited his Flow state. He wondered how much easier his life would have been if he’d been using his Flow state properly from the start.

Then again, he really couldn’t be blamed. His strength was always growing so rapidly that he barely ever had time to fully familiarise himself with his strength. If he ever wrote an autobiography, it would have to be titled ’Ah, the laments of a genius cultivator’. How else could he explain his situation? This was the cultivation equivalent of a champagne problem.

No a very serious note, he really had grown in strength very quickly. After all, he was barely, what, 25? No wait, he got his system at 25, and then a he spent a couple of years at the Inn, not to mention the time trapped in the Crystal realm, and then there was the stuff after that... and then the years within the Midnight Realm while the Inn was sealed which was over a decade... and...

Lex stopped counting. The way he saw it, he’d gotten a whole new body after the incident at the Temple of Fasting where he was turned into the patty for a smashburger, so that basically reset his age.

There was no way he was going to... going to accept that he was... he was older than...

Lex took a deep breath and pushed those thoughts away. Cultivators had long lives, and he was basically immortal, so in cultivator terms, calling himself a 25 year old was actually raising his relative age.

Yes, in the cultivator word, he could still be counted as a teenager, if not even younger. Yes, there was no way that he had entered, and then crossed, his thirties. No way, that was not possible. He was 25. He also didn’t weigh a ton - those were blasphemous rumors spread about him on the Henali portal, and nothing more.

So as a 25 year cultivator, he barely had any time to familiarise himself with all his strengths, so he graciously decided to forgive himself for not knowing about the Flow states full potential.

With that done, he turned his attention to the one man who had the capability to single handedly resolve their current chimera problem.

"Luthor, you know the castle has a dungeon, right? Why don’t you go ahead and capture the chimera and then we can treat them as prisoners in the dungeon? That way we can study what makes them so strong, and work out ways to fight against them. Not to mention, I think they’ll make good fertilizer for the castle’s personal greenhouse."

Luthor, who was outside the castle walls, fighting alongside Fenrir, trembled as he heard those words. A fire of passion, and definitely not a deep, malevolent Hellfire, lit in his eyes, evaporating the ice all around him.

Finally, he could get his hands on some prisoners. He’d given up hope about being able to capture the Dark Knight, but now he had something even better right in front of him.

"Killing them is too hard, but if it’s just capturing them, you can leave it to me," Luthor said as he patted his chest. "I will reluctantly accept this mission."

Nothing about his body language stated that he felt reluctant.