1590  Working overtime

"Mary, we have an emergency!" John suddenly exclaimed, his eyes fixed on the device. Each moment it vibrated, alerting him of another system nearby. John almost thought that the machine was malfunctioning. Almost.

As a former system user himself, he was much too familiar with the circumstances and mentality of a system user. He understood the subtle way in which they thought as they tried to fulfill their quests, and could easily notice the dazed look on a system user's face when he was actually looking at their system interface.

Of course, such things could only be noticed on absolutely brand new system users, and not more experienced ones. Even so, a single sweep around Main street was enough for him to spot a dozen such people. What's absurd was that these people actually thought they were being sneaky!

"What's wrong?" she asked, appearing above him, wearing the formal suit of a high ranking military officer. She had a dozen pins on her shoulder, and all of them were awards for eating the most in competitions.

"Mary, there are… there… I need to talk to the Innkeeper immediately!" he exclaimed. "There are hundreds of system users just on Main street. There might be thousands or tens of thousands of system users within the Inn right now."

Mary did not hesitate, her expression turning serious as she disappeared to talk to Lex. Lex himself was watching the mercenaries test the purple liquid secretly, and he could already tell crossing it would be a problem.

The liquid has strong hallucinogenic properties, so much so that the mercenaries themselves had not realized that they had begun to act oddly. Kaemon had to send a second team to rescue the first team.

When Mary informed him of what John told him, Lex was first confused. But almost instantly he realized that all the security they got were probably system users! That made sense, since the Reaving Dread, their regular security, was also a part of the system.

He remembered that the Fancy Monocle was an old version of a product that the Infinity Emporium used to sell - something he suspected was a system.

By now, he was almost certain that all systems were somehow connected. Maybe the staff that he hired for the system were also created through some system.

Lex needed to think of how he could take advantage of this opportunity. The problem was, the 10,000 MT he had spent was for security of the Death match event, which would end in the next few hours within the Inn. He had no time to waste at all.

This was even more so since the next few hours in the Inn might be mere seconds in Abaddon - or it could be weeks. There was no telling. Lex's mind started to work in overdrive, making use of the full capacity that being an immortal had afforded him.

He immediately went through the list of all the new security that had been hired, and noticed that they ranged from Qi training all the way to the very peak of the Celestial realm. In fact, speaking of the Celestial realm, Lex recognized the Celestial bodyguard he had hired once.

After identifying all the new security guards, he immediately began to review every action they had taken since they entered the Inn.

Within Abaddon, Kaemon noticed that Lex had started to sweat, and smoke was rising from above his head. An immense amount of energy was running through his body.

A solemn expression covered the Magma Lion's face as he realized that Lex was probably using some powerful technique to probably figure out a way to find the chalice. He really was a swell guy. No wonder the Midnight Inn was so popular - the service was really over and beyond.

The sweat on Lex's brow began to evaporate as he pushed himself to his limits, reviewing the actions of millions of guards. Yet he quickly came to the conclusion that such an action was impractical. If he had more time, he would have been able to do it. But since he couldn't afford to waste a single second, he decided to refine the process.

He once again went over the list of all the security, and then narrowed down the list by prioritising certain system users. He decided to check up on the absolute strongest, and the weakest. There was a certain logic behind that.

He needed to watch out for the actions of the strongest, and see if they had any ulterior motives. As for the weakest, they were potential targets for Lex to possibly hire to the Inn. It was also possible to find, among them, some that might not want systems. As long as they were below the Nascent soul realm, he could remove their systems from them easily.

"Mary, I have an idea," Lex said. "I want to create a distinct group of customers - guests who can be considered to be members of a certain level of the Inn. It'll be like the Inn Prestige level, but different, because only select members can get it - people I choose. Can you make the system make it happen?"

"You know that's not how it works. At the very least, you'll need to complete a quest for the system to do something for you first."

Lex's mind ran through a few possibilities, and quickly came up with a solution. Even though he had spent 10,000 MT on security, he more than made up for it in the following hours, not to mention in the income from the bets on the actual match. At the moment, he had 31,001 MT accumulated!

This was an opportunity he could not miss, so he quickly came up with an idea for a new, exclusive event, and quickly began going through the event panel. He was more than ready to pay a huge amount for this event, but in the end discovered that for everything, he'd only need to spend a single MT!

His understanding of money was really screwed up if he thought of 1MT as 'only' but now was not the time to focus on that.

He selected the list of security guards, and then initiated the event.