Lex played with a pen in his fingers as he scrolled the Midnight Realm Management Panel, feeling like his newfound wealth was not actually as great as he thought. To start with, he checked the price for the upgrade called Voidwoven. Previously, he could not even view the price since he had not unlocked the ME currency. Now when he looked at it... he sighed.

The price for equipping the realm with Voidwoven was 999,999,999,999 ME, meaning it was just 1 ME short of 1 trillion ME. In short, that was an upgrade for the future. However, while some of the drastic upgrades to the Inn were still out of his financial reach, there were plenty of upgrades that he could still afford. Moreover, the very presence of the Primordial Sun Crow had made many upgrade options much cheaper.

Yet he did not begin his upgrades immediately. Instead, he took some time to outline his plan. Nuwa had told him to study the Masterless technique, and he would not underestimate her advice in the slightest. But he was not in any rush to hurry to the Origin realm just yet.

Instead, after various considerations, he decided that he needed to take some time to digest some of his recent gains and increase his strength.

The premonition of danger was ever present in the back of his mind, and he would not ignore that either.

He decided that he would head out after Piere and Brenda got married, which gave him one month. Was one month really enough to convert all his gains into strength? Not really, which is why he would need to do something about that. Lex cracked his back, neck and knuckles as he prepared to spend some money. What was the purpose of the Dao of capitalism? To acquire wealth? No, acquiring wealth was merely one step. The purpose of the Dao of capitalism was to spend his wealth like a baller.

Lex felt pretty cool for about 0.5 seconds before the cringe of that thought slowly crept in. Fortunately, no one could read his thoughts so that embarrassing moment would not be known to anyone.

Ordinarily, when Lex bought stuff from his system, he just did it mentally. Not today. Today, he put some Celestial level treasures in his diffuser, put on Waltz No. 2 in the background to really set the mood, and then used his physical hands to open up the system in front of him.

This was actually something he'd almost never done, which is what made it special.

He glanced at his income. He had 12 ME, 999,991,000,000 MT, and 999,999,999,999 MP.

After nodding once, he purchased the Blessed Boundary upgrade for his realm for a minor 31 billion MT. This upgrade affected the boundary of the realm, making it more efficient in absorbing Chaos energy from the Void, as well as making it better at sustaining the pressure from the Void.

One benefit of this upgrade was that over time, as the effects of this upgrade started to appear, it would reduce the price of the Voidwoven upgrade. Another benefit was that as the realm became better at resisting the pressure from the Void, the realm itself would expand and grow faster in size.

The actual size of the realm had little to do with the maturity of the realm, as some Mature realms were actually quite small. In fact, realms that could grow too big, such as the Origin realm, were an anomaly.

The system began to work, taking the spent currency and using it to begin upgrading the realm. Naturally, such changes to the realm itself would not be instantly completed, and they would take time to complete. The fact that his system had recovered a considerable amount, however, did speed up the rate at which the system could complete these upgrades.

The second upgrade he bought was called Tempered Rains for a whopping 200 billion MT! The Tempered Rains upgrade did only one thing, really. It made the realm itself stronger so that the Midnight Realm could tolerate stronger tribulations. But the thing about making the realm stronger was that it had many other, unintended benefits. Combined with the ongoing upgrade of Blessed Boundary as well as the improvements being actively caused by the Sun Crow, the upper limit of the Midnight realm would quickly increase from the Earth Immortal realm to the Heaven Immortal realm. While the Inn itself allowed cultivators of a much higher level than even that, the rest of the realm could not bear their presence. That would soon change.

As it happened, the synergy from these two upgrades happening simultaneously, alongside the nurturing effect of the Sun Crow, meant that the total time taken for these upgrades to be completed had dropped drastically.

What a wonderful coincidence - almost as if someone had meticulously planned this. Lex grinned, enjoying the pleasure of spending his money. Sometimes, spending a lot of money hurt, but when the benefits of spending it were so obvious he only felt pleasure.

The guests inside the realm did not feel any difference at all, mainly because the system kept the environment inside the Inn very steady. The natives of the realm, however, all felt a shift in the very air of the realm itself, alongside an unknown tingle within the spiritual energy of the realm itself. It was almost like the energy in the realm itself was excited.

Yet they did not ponder what caused these changes. Everyone just attributed it to the Sun Crow in the sky.

Seeing that there was nothing going amiss, and that everything was fine, Lex continued to upgrade his realm. Following in the pattern that he had started, every upgrade he chose strengthened the realm in some way.

The Crimson Horizon upgrade, one of the options in the panel he never looked at because it was too expensive, painted the west end of the Midnight Realm in a permanent hue of red and and orange, as if in a state of eternal sunset. It cost an amazing 349 billion MT, and created a phenomenon by which the energy of the entire realm was recycled perfectly, always without an ounce of wastage. While that sounded simple, in truth...