There was an awkward silence in the hall, following Lex's questions. Well, this much was to be expected. He more or less knew that these noble born kids who had been spoiled rotten would have never even perceived that they would ever need to do such things.
However, what Lex didn't know was that he still overestimated them. Let alone have experience in them, this was the first time they had ever heard of such chores? Scrub the floor? Clean windows? Wash... dirty dishes? Were these things that actually had to be done?
"I have a lot of experience overseeing groceries. I can help with that," said one of them weakly. Only he knew that the extent of his experience was borrowing from his father's warehouses without showing any discrepancies. Unfortunately for him, that was one of the departments that the system handled for Lex, and since he had more or less given up pretending to be ordinary, he did not need to put up that front.
"I... I've hosted a few orchestras. I can probably arrange good entertainment," said another.
"I can probably source excellent wine."
"I can..."
"I have..."
"I..."
Once they started, they went on a roll, but almost all of their experiences were utterly useless to Lex. In the end, Lex decided to give them the absolutely most basic jobs, making it more difficult for them to mess up.
"Stop, all of you, just stop," Lex said, hushing their attempts to list their 'skills and experience'. "I'll give you all simple tasks, but I doubt you'll be able to master them, so we will treat today as training. Training days won't count towards your week long punishment, so I suggest you pick up your tasks as soon as possible."
All of them, except the one who knew an orchestra, and the original offender who assaulted Nini, were tasked with various cleaning duties, from cleaning rooms, taking out trash, making the bed, clearing the kitchen, washing dishes, and more. The triplets and Rick were tasked with teaching them and overseeing their duty.
He had to say, he was actually quite satisfied with how hard the girls worked, and was actually planning on increasing their salary right from the beginning. Currently, they were each being paid 1 silver coin each for a week's work, and he planned on doubling it.
As for the two remaining miscreants, Lex was actually quite interested in arranging a musician to visit the tavern regularly, so he tasked the one who arranged orchestras to find him a musician willing to play at his tavern. Lex would then see how well the musician performed. As for the guy who tried assaulting Nini, Lex had him scrubbing the main hall floor - with nothing but a towel rag. That would be his only duty for the entire week, and Lex had no intentions of letting him take breaks or clean half heartedly.
Besides that, today Betty, Big Ben's wife, would be in charge of the cooking. She applied for the position when Big Ben was hired here, and Lex said that he would decide based on her performance. A few others were also scheduled to come today to interview for various positions. It would be a full day.
*****
Although it was not cold, Anakin folded his cashmere scarf - one of the times he stole - inside his velvet coat and buttoned up. He picked the gold embossed smoking pipe from his mouth and blew out some smoke into the wind. With his free hand, he reached into his coat pocket and lifted the jewel encrusted pocket watch and checked the time.
His latest business associates were late, and he could not really tell by how much because his pocket watch had no batteries in it, which annoyed him. He slid the watch back in his pocket, put the pipe back in his mouth and continued to smoke.
He did not mind his associates being late, for the Lady Cosmos competition was on break. The contestants needed to replenish their strength and be completely rejuvenated for the last portion of the event. Therefore, he really had nothing else to do.
It was not his intention, but circumstances forced him to relax in decadent luxury.
He did not have to wait much longer though, as the three men he was waiting for quickly entered his sight. To be specific, they didn't really agree to work with him, but he told them where to find him when they could not figure out a solution on their own.
Eventually, despite their reluctance, they ended up coming here. To be clear, Noman had no issue he wanted to resolve, but no one else dared let him roam free and unsupervised. After all, if he truly knew their secrets, or at least some of them, they would have too much to lose. He was, however, mildly interested in the business opportunity Anakin mentioned, for he wasn't lying when he said it.
"Gentlemen, I see you finally decided to avail my services," Anakin said in an extremely practiced manner. "Before I tell you the solution to your problems, and guide you through them, I have prepared a small contract. I believe we'll be able to enact it through the Guild room. You can read it at your leisure. It's just the basics, really. I'll accept a 1000 MP payment from each of you, up front, and you'll share any expenses incurred during the resolution process on my behalf."
The three men glared at him angrily, but Anakin was immune to any such looks. He was a self-made man, so even when he gained a lot of wealth, he kept an eye out for more opportunities.
"What assurance do we have that you'll actually resolve the problem?" asked Rafael. "Moreover, how will you ensure that this one never interferes with my business again?" He asked, pointing towards Noman. "Even if the problem is resolved now, if he keeps going around spouting nonsense around me, it'll affect my business."
"For the resolution, you have no choice but to trust me. As for future encounters, I believe Mr. Butt and I will be business partners in the near future, so you won't need to worry. I'll make sure he no longer shares his gift with anyone for free."
The rest grumbled but, eventually, gave in and signed the contract. Pleased with the small fortune he just made for himself, Anakin took a moment to dwell in his accomplishment, before he became serious.
He had the trio follow him until he brought them to a building at the Inn they'd never seen before.
"Gentlemen, the building behind me is like none other. It is an exclusive feature of the Midnight Inn and is known as the Chamber of Secrets. Within it, you can deposit any knowledge you have to store, effectively removing it from your brain. Moreover, at the time of the deposit, you can set the required conditions to reclaim the secrets.
"So, to resolve your situation, you can openly ask each other any questions you need to relieve your concerns. Once you're convinced, everyone in the know can go into the chamber and directly deposit all sensitive information related to each other, with the condition that it cannot be retrieved unless all three of you agree. Naturally, you can skip the sharing process and directly go and deposit the secrets, but where's the fun in that?"
For a moment, everyone was dumbstruck. Did they just pay 1000MP... to learn about something they could have found out for free? No wonder there was a no refund clause in the contract.
*****
Lex was in the kitchen trying the soup Betty made, which was really very good, when a sudden ruckus from the main hall attracted his attention. There were multiple voices yelling and a woman screaming desperately above them all. Lex's heart dropped, and he suddenly thought of the serial killer on the loose.
He bolted to the hall, ready for a fight, but the sight that awaited him was not of a murder, but of a family with many small children.
The mother, who had a baby strapped to her chest and was holding several bags, kept the main door open using her body while four prepubescent children ran in the hall. A couple of older kids, teenagers seemingly, trudged in as well, over encumbered with bags and boxes, barely able to see where they were going.
Outside, there were a series of carriages and more families disembarking. There were numerous kids, the source of most of the yelling, and several mothers as well, trying to reign in the kids.
"Excuse me," a man yelled over the noise, finally attracting Lex's attention. The man looked battle weary, though maybe that was just the result of the many kids.
"Do you have any rooms available? If you do, we'll take them all. We got lost in the darkness and barely made it to town. Most of the other places we've run across so far are full up, with everyone waiting for the darkness to pass. If you can fit us all in, I'll pay extra."
Before Lex could reply to the man, one of the kids ran headfirst into the bar and started crying, attracting the man's attention. Then another one puked.Lex had seen the hell of battle, but this was a kind of anarchy he had never beheld. If only things had ended with one kid crying and one vomiting, it would not have been so bad. But, as if inspired by the first child, every kid in the vicinity started crying. Some kids who were still outside, and had not yet entered the tavern, also began to cry.
But the crying was independent of running, as they continued to do both actions separately. Even the kids who vomited started crying and running, leaving tracks behind him.
"George, make them stop," yelled a woman from outside.
"I'm trying," responded the man who had been talking to Lex. But between checking up on one kid's wound and tapping another on the back, trying to calm them down, he was incapable of reaching the one, leaving a trail across the hall.
The teenagers ran after that one kid, but he seemed adept at dodging, and navigated the hall like a battlefield, narrowly avoiding capture.
But all was not lost, for in the moment right before the mother collapsed, like angels sent from the heavens for salvation, the triplets swept in. With a practiced hand, Naki grabbed the evasion expert directly by the ear, though she did not pull, and only used it as a threat to hold him in place. Nami used a napkin to cover the wounded child's bleeding nose, and started complimenting him on his bravery. Nani rubbed her cold hand across a crying child's neck and massaged him. The cold hand grasped the child's attention, and the massage soothed it.
Showing the prowess of sisters with many siblings, they pacified the hurricane into a gentle wind.
"We only have two rooms remaining," Lex informed the weary man.
Before even responding to Lex, he looked towards the exit and yelled, "Two families disembark! The rest, keep searching."
He waited a moment for confirmation, before he turned towards Lex and began listing his requirements.
"We're going to need mattresses in both rooms, and extra blankets and pillows. Also a hot shower if you have it, and food, for 16 people. Also, if you can send someone for a doctor, some of us have injuries. Also, if you have someone to carry the luggage. Also, we'll take the food in our rooms. Also, can you send someone for the news? We've been in the wilderness for too long."
The man paused, as if to question if he had forgotten anything, and then asked, "oh yeah, how much for the rooms?"
"1 MP per night," Lex responded, taking the man by surprise.
"That's a little expensive for a tavern, isn't it? You taking advantage of the fact that it's dark out? You know, that's illegal. If I report you, you can get in trouble."
"That's the price, whether it's light out or dark. Our prices are fixed, they never change."
The man was skeptical, but he couldn't take the risk of losing these rooms, so he simply accepted it.
Lex had his latest workers, the miscreants who were causing trouble at the tavern, to carry all the bags up to the last two remaining rooms, which happened to be on the highest floor. Betty began preparing meals for the new families, and Lex sent out Rick to find a doctor, as well as Roland to bring the latest news.
Lex himself temporarily retired to his own room during this because he had something indescribably important to do.
"Mary, we need to start a daycare service," Lex said very gravely.
"What?" she asked, confused. She had been preoccupied with other things, and it took her a moment to absorb what Lex said.
"A daycare service? Why?"
"Just trust me on this," he said, as he recalled the look in the eyes of the parents he just saw. "This is imperative, and will take priority for now. I want the entire planning team to come together and design a place for kids. Design it keeping various age ranges in mind, and provide a large range of activities.
"In fact, I want you to work with them as well. You're familiar with my authority and all that I can do now, so take full advantage of it while designing it. Make it so that not only are we taking care of the kids, we're helping them in some way too.
"It's fine if you have to design different areas for different races, but I want it to be great. We can even use some of those rabbits working at the greenhouse as caretakers, they seem friendly enough.
"Give me an update when you've made some progress."
"Sure," she replied, still confused about how Lex was behaving.
Only after she gave an affirmative response did Lex allow himself to relax. Yes, the tavern really was a good idea. It was giving him new perspectives already, and would be good exposure for him on the finer details of hospitality.
He thought about returning to the hall, but he trembled, and decided to cultivate instead. Recently, he had discovered a new way to cultivate that would speed up the process.
Back when he was in Qi training, he rubbed a special oil all over his body to help with cultivation. For the foundation realm, he came up with a method on his own.
He went to the bathroom attached to the room he made for himself and approached the bathtub. He summoned a bottle of expensive chilled tea, and began pouring it in the tub. A single bottle was 150 MP, a skyhigh price for the average Foundation realm cultivator.
It was, however, worth it because this tea was very rich in spiritual energy which was extremely easy to absorb. As a true path cultivator, Lex's requirements for energy were much higher, so the benefit from drinking it wasn't so obvious. So he planned on submerging himself in it, and then cultivating. Theoretically, it should boost his cultivation speed.
He had to spend nearly 23,000 MP before he filled the bathtub completely. Lex quickly stripped before submerging himself, as if the tea warmed up it would lose much of its effects.
He closed his eyes and began cultivating. Hopefully this would work, or else he'd have to use even more expensive stuff.
*****
The town of Babylon, like many other towns and cities, had a very extensive formation in place to light it up whenever the darkness fell. Maintaining and protecting this formation was extremely important, as it was linked to the very survival of the town. After all, periods of darkness could last anywhere from a few days to weeks, months or even, sometimes, years.
The formation lit up not only the boundary wall, as well as the lighthouse near the harbor, but every street, building and any other area within the town. It was so extensive, that, functionally speaking, the town was just as well lit during the dark as it was when there was light.
Only looking up into the empty sky would remind them that it was still dark, and dangers were all about. Such thorough preparations were absolutely essential, though, for the town's survival. While it was filled with cultivators, if they had to rely on themselves, the town would be able to survive at most one week before enemies became too powerful.
That wasn't to say the town would be completely destroyed after that, but a majority of the people who were weak, relatively speaking, would most likely die.
This deadline was something that had been tried and tested over thousands of years, so everyone was familiar with it. Now, it had already been a few days since darkness fell, and it was approaching a week. The longer this went on, the more severe and serious the protection and surveillance on the formation there would be.
But even the strongest protection was only as strong as its weakest part. The serial killer, who was sitting on top of a pile of corpses, was reading a document that described in detail the light formation, and all the important parts of it that needed extra protection.
It was only natural that one of his victims should have such a document, for he was the deputy head of the constables in Babylon. He had been relentless in his search for the killer, so the killer decided to pay him a house call.
This time, though, he had killed using poison. He had no other choice, as the targets this time were too strong for him to confront head on. The fact that he was able to get his hands on poison strong enough to deal with the deputy spoke of his resourcefulness.
But while he filled his kill quota for the day, being unable to cut living flesh or taste the blood of his prey left him unsatisfied. After all, he was crazy, but not stupid. He wouldn't drink poisoned blood.
But his lust for blood had not been quenched, and that put him in an irritable mood. But that was okay, for this document had given him a new idea. He was really enjoying this darkness, and he wanted more of it.
It was well into the night when Lex finished his cultivation session. His body felt slightly bloated, but that was excusable when one considered that he had basically absorbed a tub worth of tea into his body. Or, more specifically, he had absorbed the energy contained within that tea into his body.
The sense of bloating was both good and bad. It was good because it basically meant that Lex' estimate about using this particular tea was accurate, and all he needed to do was slightly reduce the amount of tea he used the next time.
It was bad because cultivation was not a mindless process of absorbing energy. Each and every realm served a specific purpose, and cultivating within that realm had to adhere to the logic upon which that purpose was dictated. Qi training, for example, strengthened the body by absorbing Qi, and prepared it to be able to absorb a stream of spiritual energy rather than individual strands of it. The Foundation realm absorbed spiritual energy and, instead of strengthening the body, fused with it.
The fusion process of spiritual energy with the cultivator's body was roughly divided into three different realms, which made the beginning, middle and late stage of the Foundation realm.
The first stage was fusing spiritual energy in all the muscles, tissue, blood, fat and other, relatively simpler parts of the body. The middle stage was fusing energy with the bones, and the final was fusing with all the organs.
In essence, it was as simple as that. There was no higher or deeper meaning to it at all. At least, that was the case if your only purpose was to simply advance your base cultivation. As Lex had taken some courses teaching the basics of cultivation, he had a deeper understanding of it than what the Regal Embrace informed him of. After all, that was only a cultivation technique, and would not contain the deeper, more sophisticated intricacies of cultivation.
A very simple explanation of this was that the process described previously only entailed the changes that took place in spiritual cultivation, and not in body and soul cultivation, as well as in the true path. Moreover, from the Foundation realm onwards, cultivation began to be influenced by the sentience of the being cultivating.
The explanation of cultivation was beginning to get abstract, and would continue to get even more complex with each successive realm so comprehending exactly what it entailed correctly was very important.
Simply stated, the purpose of the Foundation realm was to build a foundation for the cultivator to be able to achieve higher realms of cultivation. By having the body fuse with spirit energy, it used the body itself as a foundation for a higher, more concentrated energy used during higher realms.
Similarly, in body cultivation, it strengthened the vitality of the body itself to be able to accommodate a body that would be drastically stronger, maybe even larger, and much more complex.
For the soul, it was even simpler, making it stronger in every sense, lessening its dependance on the body, and allowing the cultivator to tap into more soul energy.
The true path achieved all of these in a more comprehensive and unified manner, ensuring that the changes all complemented one another.
But that left the question of what role sentience played in all this. In theory and in practice, this was all that was needed for a human to raise his or her cultivation. If that was the case, and the act of cultivation was so simple as to simply follow a set pattern of actions to achieve ascendance, then surely sentience didn't matter at all.
In fact, one could use various technologies or techniques to put an unlimited number of humans into suspended animation, and then have their bodies perform the required actions. That way, it would be like going to sleep, and when you wake up, your cultivation would be much higher, without requiring you to put in any effort.
Not only was this something many scientists had theorized, many organizations had put it into practice. Even the Raskals that attacked the Inn had gone through a similar process to some extent.
But while on paper, this achieved results, the end product would always be cultivators who would always be the weakest within their own realm. No amount of resources would ever make them apex predators within the same realm. They would only be good for hunting lower level enemies.
This was precisely because, from the Foundation realm onwards, it was not just the cultivation technique that determined your strength, but you as a person. While the cultivation technique established the foundation for higher realms, the cultivator himself had to set the foundation for what kind of cultivator he or she wanted to be.
What exactly that meant was something Lex had not been taught. All he was told was that it touched upon certain traits of cultivation that were best he did not dwell on for now. He had, however, been guided on how he could develop his foundation as a cultivator. It was fairly simple.
It was to select one, or a few fields which interested him and spend considerable time on it until he achieved what he considered decent progress. There was no metric for this other than his own self evaluation. For example, a painter could paint, a writer could write, a marksman could practice his aim, a fighter could refine his technique, and so on.
For himself, predictably, Lex had chosen to practice arrays.
Anyway, Lex's thoughts had gone on a tangent. In summary, the reason why feeling bloated was not good was that he could not force his foundation to form. It had to be a natural process, and any excessive pressure could end up having the opposite effects.
Lex took a warm shower once he was done, and decided to check up on the Inn and tavern. To his surprise, despite the late hour, there were still a few people sitting in the hall. Specifically, it was all the adults from the 2 families that had moved in today. They were not talking, or eating, or even drinking. They were simply sitting in silence, allowing their weary bodies and minds to slowly recover.
It was not just the kids that had caused tem endless exertion, and drove them to the edge of sanity. It was the few days they spent in the darkness. Were it not for the fact that they had roads to follow, they would have never found a way to any town. During that time they could not rest for even a moment, as they had to protect the carriages. Their families as well as the beasts pulling the carriages.
Moreover, they were all in the Foundation realm, so they weren't exceptionally strong either. They were just a group of families who had timed their vacation poorly.
Upon observing their exhausted faces, a sense of pity filled Lex's heart. He decided instantly to welcome his first guests into the tavern's backyard.
Silently, and without attracting any attention, a new door appeared in one of the walls of the hall, very close to where the families sat.
At first, nothing happened, for no one noticed anything at all. But, after a few minutes, the man who had previously talked to Lex, George, noticed something amiss. He looked beside him and saw a door he hadn't noticed before.
For a moment he was confused, for he didn't recall there being a door here. But he attributed it to him being too tired or distracted to notice. But then, his wife saw him staring to the side and took a look as well.
"Was this always here?" she asked as soon as the thought occurred in her head, bringing everyone's attention to it.
"I… don't remember… but it must have been, right?" replied George.
"I wasn't paying attention. I'm still reeling from that medicine the doctor gave me. My stomach is still burning."
"I don't recall it, but then again, I wasn't paying attention."
The conversation repeated itself a few times before George's wife stood up, deciding to sate her curiosity.
"Don't," said George. "What if it's someone's room?"
"I'll apologize," she replied offhandedly, and opened the door. What she saw caused her to tremble and weaken in the knees.
A small, cozy wooden room with a couple of changing sectionals on the side appeared before her eyes. But what really caught her attention was the hot tub right in the center. Steamy mist was floating up the bubbling water, inviting her in to rest her weary bones, while a relaxing, soothing scent oozed out the door.
The darkness had brought with it cold as well, but just the warm gush of wind that escaped the door seemed to drive the cold right out of he body.
Mesmerized, she forgot to inform George. She even forgot to change her clothes. Before she knew what she was doing, she dipped herself in and a long, deep moan escaped her lips.
She closed her eyes and rested her head on the edge of the tub. What husband? What kids? Right now, she forgot all of it and simply savored the waves of pleasure, washing through her body.