The Innkeeper

For a majority of the guests at the Inn, their change of breakthrough did not last long. From a few minutes in the case of mortals, to a few hours at most ranging from Body tempering to Qi training.

Though the mortals had, overall, gained in strength, they were too exhausted and drained at the moment to do much of anything. Most of them retreated to their rooms to sleep, while a few who had not booked a room had to retreat from the Inn.

The kids on the spaceship had fallen asleep right where they fell. Considering the severe lack of personnel at the Inn, it would have been extremely unsanitary if they remained where they were, for all of them had thrown up right there. Fortunately, the ship’s cleaning function was exemplary, and far surpassed something mundane, like vacuuming robots.

In a few minutes, the kids, though still asleep randomly all over the ship, were as clean and spotless as when they arrived at the ship, though it was a shame no one was around to see how it happened.

Soon, the numerous rabbits aboard the ship recovered and began moving the children into the napping stations.

The thousands of mortal guards Lex had hired, under the assumption that they would be the most helpful for he did not imagine that mortals would also be affected, were thoroughly weakened and exhausted. But they quickly injected themselves with stimulants and forced themselves to perform their duties. Though they were all excited about the changes in their body, their job came first.

The quickest to recover after them were the Inns workers, whether they were mortal or cultivators. From the moment of their creation they were inside the Inn, and everything they ate and drank also came from the Inn. They were safe from any pollution and impurities the outside world threatened, and so the changes they went through were less drastic.

𝒩𝑜𝐕𝓵xt.𝗇𝓔t

Most of them had also been cultivating as well anyway, though not everyone was as adept or successful as Gerard or Z. With this recent upgrade, most had firmly reached the peak of Body tempering, or entered Qi training. It could be imagined how in a few decades at most, all of these workers would become an extremely powerful force, but that was for the future.

Speaking of Gerard and Z, both were undergoing breakthroughs as well, though in ways that were completely unexpected. Instead of raising his cultivation, Gerard’s bloodline was experiencing another change. His previous advancement already made it so that he could face Nascent cultivators back in the Qi training realm. It was completely impossible to predict how his latest advancement would affect him.

Z on the other hand was experiencing an epiphany. While he had a minor breakthrough in his cultivation, a majority of the change he experienced was in his mindset. He had been busy contemplating a new, secret ultimate attack when the change happened. As it happened, the change was just the spark of inspiration he needed, launching him into a profound state of discovery and creation, where he could make his ultimate attack according to his desires.

Abroar, the spirit and newest permanent resident of the Inn, also experienced an evolution – one completely unlike he had ever known. It was a shame that he lost all the senses he had with his previous cultivation, or else he could have gained even more.

Whether it was the baby Chthulhu, Antia, Qawain, the Galactic Sovereign turtle, Ragnar and all the rest, everyone was caught up in their own experience.

Yet, oddly enough, even with realms much higher than the Earth Immortal realm, none went through the level of change that Lex was experiencing.

The moment he crushed the token and the change happened, he finally stopped suppressing his breakthrough and let it happen. The result was an instantaneous eruption of spirit energy within his body, which was then, immediately after, replaced by an imperceptibly purer form of energy, before a vortex formed around Lex’s body, rapidly absorbing all the surrounding energy.

Lex became a bystander as the process happened, for the force of his breakthrough was so massive, should he try to influence it at all, it would only result in injuring him.

For humans, cultivation up until the Foundation realm had all been about preparing the body for the cultivation journey ahead.

From Body Tempering, which strengthened the body from the inside to sustain the pressure and influence of external spirit energy, to Qi tempering, which pushed the bodies limits over and over again, one Qi strand at a time, until the body was capable of holding steams of energy, until the Foundation realm, which used all the energy to turn the body into a Foundation that can support all future cultivation realms.

These few realms, despite their seemingly weak power, could be said to be the most important cultivation realms a human would go through, because they would directly determine how high a cultivation realm that person could achieve. Even the slightest flaw in any of these realms would drastically affect the peak a human could reach. That was largely one of the reasons Alexander was cultivating once again, as well as the reason Lex’s mother had his father cultivate from the beginning again as well.

So, if these three realms could be described as setting the stage for the future, the next three realms of Golden Core, Nascent, and Earth Immortal, could be loosely described as rapidly transforming a cultivators strength and turning them into a higher form of living being. Of course, this was only a loose description as more than just that happened at each successive realm, for they involved far more than just that.

Still, to the common man, the deeper intricacies did not matter, as even the more obvious and immediate changes were enough to consume all that they could conceive. After all, it had to be remembered, on a planet like Earth with incredible weapons of mass destruction, it was still Golden Core cultivators who were considered the peak of society, and it was the Nascents who controlled the entire planet.

The change that the Golden Core realm brought was that, once the body had a strong enough Foundation to support it, it began to concentrate spirit energy not across the entire body, but in one specific core.

Just because the area that the energy occupied was smaller did not in any way mean that the energy was less in quantity or concentration than the rest of the body. In fact, it was quite the opposite.

The Golden Core, in spite of many misconceptions, was not actually formed of energy, and was instead a container that the body naturally formed during a process that would only occur once during the breakthrough process. Since it only ever happened once, damage to the core was one of the most difficult things to cure within the cultivation journey.

This was because of how unique the Golden core really was. Not only did it store a massive amount of spirit energy that was dozens of times more in quantity than the Foundation realm even as early as just the beginning of the Golden core realm, but further influenced that spirit energy in a way that had only barely begun in the previous realms.

The stored spirit energy took upon any affinities that the cultivator, or cultivation technique imbued, and turned that energy into a unique state owned only by the cultivator. By doing this, it also further evolved it from the most basic and lowest level spiritual energy which could be commonly found across the universe. This was the first step the cultivator truly took towards higher forms of energy than just the common spirit energy.

Of course, due to the nature of this energy being superior to ambient spiritual energy, it made cultivation much more difficult as well. After all, if previously a cultivator took in 2 units of energy from the atmosphere and was able to retain 1 unit of it within his body, allowing the rest to escape back into the atmosphere, now the cultivator would have to absorb anywhere from 10 to 100 units of spiritual energy just to be able to convert it into 1 unit of energy that was kept within his body.

The units mentioned here are any generic measurement, meant only as an example to show the drastic scale of change that occurred.

This was in an ordinary state of events. So then, how was Lex’s situation different from the norm, so much so that it eclipsed the change experienced by every other cultivator in the entire realm?

It was simple. Normally the Golden Core was formed naturally by the cultivators body during the breakthrough, and the formation was fueled by the energy being absorbed by the body. But due to the fact that Lex’s Foundation, and thus his body, contained physical manifestations of laws, as well as the fact that there was a massive shift in laws taking place at the Inn at the moment of breakthrough, not only was Lex’s breakthrough absorbing spiritual energy to fuel the formation of his core, it was also absorbing laws.

This was a change Lex was much too low leveled to influence at all, or even notice for that matter.

The rest of the Inn, as well as the Origin realm, however, definitely noticed.