With only a few hours remaining before the auction officially began, the Midnight manor replica already housed around 380 million guests. Similar to the second segment of the auction, if one wanted to attend the first segment of the auction from within the manor replica, they needed to deposit a security fee of 10,000 MP.

That deposit could be returned entirely once the auction was over and the guest left, or it could be adjusted into any purchases made by the guests. This was a way to limit the number of guests within the replica manor, and even then the number of guests were so high.

If everything went well, Lex expected an income of hundreds or thousands of MT simply from the 1% charge to host items for auction. Then there was the income from his own auction, not to mention the resources he would get in exchange for some of his items.

As Lex walked through one of the halls of the replica manor, he could feel the excitement and anticipation bubbling in all those around him.

Ranging from common but unavailable due to location, to actually rare and sometimes even unheard of, the items for sale on the auction could change lives forever. The anticipation for that potential to change might even be greater than actual entertainment events.

It was also because of how important, and how sensitive, this auction would be that Lex was not actively participating at all. He would simply watch as his workers, who had been thoroughly briefed, did everything. He didn’t want to risk the Go board messing things up for him at this critical juncture. At the same time, he remained close enough to react if anything should go awry. For the most part, though, he’d let his staff take care of things.

He walked slowly through the halls of the manor replica, taking in the brilliance of the excruciating detail with which the Planning Division had mapped out this building.

When the blueprint had been presented to him, all he had done was simply spend money to create it. The cost of the building hadn’t reached 1MT, but it was 70% of the way there, which in itself was amazing.

The actual reason was the materials with which the building was supposed to be built were extremely valuable and sturdy.

The Planning Division had really impressed him, and if they weren’t addicted to creating even greater and more complex structures and cities, he would have given them a break. Unfortunately for them, they enjoyed their work way too much to want to stop. If he tried to give them a break, they might riot.

Lex made his way to the inner most layer of the building: the auditorium where the actual final auction would take place. It was entirely dark, with only a weak, yellow spotlight shining down on stage, where Mary would host the auction from.

Surrounding that was pitch darkness, though hidden within the darkness were private rooms. 99 private rooms directly in front of the stage reserved solely for those from within the second segment who rented these specific rooms. Being here offered no special benefits, except for being within the auction room. Furthermore, to rent each room, one would need to cough up 10 MT per room.

The rooms were luxurious, yes, but offered no real value except as a display of wealth and prestige. Suffice to say, all 99 rooms had been rented out as soon as they were made available.

The 100th room was permanently reserved for the workers of the Midnight Inn - not that anyone else would ever know that. Everyone else only ever saw 100 rooms, unaware of who was renting the others.

Lex naturally made his way into the 100th room, and found a couple of others already waiting for him.

"You’re here early. There’s still a few hours left," said Harry, looking at Lex.

"You guys were here even earlier than me," said Lex, looking towards Z who was sitting with his eyes closed on a reclined chair in front of Harry. It seemed like he had been getting a haircut.

"We had time to kill and thought it might be nice to get freshened up before the start of the big show. What do you say? Want a nice shave? I’ve improved a lot since that first shave I gave you all those years ago."

Lex looked at Z, who looked like he had unconsciously dozed off, and then at Harry.

"A shave doesn’t sound bad, but first..." Lex pulled out one of his most lethal weapons: the black permanent marker!

It was not magical or spiritual. It was just a permanent marker that was very, very difficult to remove.

After carefully drawing some glasses, a moustache and a mole on Z, Lex sat comfortably in front of Harry.

"How are things at home? How’s Michael doing?" Lex asked. Michael was Harry’s son who was a mischievous little fellow.

Although he was not a cultivator - not yet at least - he was born with an abnormally strong body, so he liked nothing more than to climb onto the backs of various animals and beasts within the Inn and secretly run away.

He had started to do that before he had even turned one years old.

"Everything else is fine. It’s just the potty training a kid that can jump ten feet high and run like a rabbit that’s almost impossible to do. Let’s talk about something else - I don’t want to suffer from PTSD while I’m relaxing. Last week I had to go buy a formation that would automatically eviscerate poop before it touched the ceiling. Can you imagine the look on the face of the guy who sold me that formation?"

"I don’t think I want to imagine... wait, doesn’t your house have a self-cleaning function? Why do you need the formation?"

"Just as the house doesn’t remove my scissors when I put them in a cup, it doesn’t remove the poop because... I think Michael thinks he’s putting it there and will come back for it later. I don’t even want to imagine. Best to just get rid of it before I have to find out."