The Henali representative walked out of the Innkeeper's office feeling especially pleased. The past few months had been extremely stressful for the Henali, for more than one reason. While the Governor had taken drastic actions, preventing the surprise of war from devastating the Origin realm, a decisive victory was still a ways off.

This meeting with the Innkeeper could prove to be absolutely crucial, having immense strategic value if they could dictate where the taverns would be located. To his dismay, the Innkeeper refused to allow the taverns to be located at any battlefields or sensitive locations. Instead, there were quite clear instructions that the taverns would be placed in community centers, and in stable and secure settlements. While that reduced the military value of the taverns somewhat, having access to the Inn, and the possibility of transporting certain people across galaxies using only the taverns still made them more than worthwhile.

After presenting the Innkeeper with several options, he decided to place three taverns inside the Origin realm, spread out and placed on key planets with immense commercial and strategic value.

The taverns would be opened in a week, and all the guests inside the Inn who were from the Origin realm could use them to begin returning to their realm if they wished. Of course, returning to their specific planets, or even galaxies, would be an immense undertaking if they did it on their own, so Lex believed that most would not return any time soon, and would wait until normal teleportation abilities resumed.

While Lex could lift the lockdown on the Inn, he avoided doing that because while it could allow guests to return to the Origin realm at will, the rest of the universe would still suffer from the restrictions.

After the Henali representative left came one of the Inn workers, and one by one the many departments of the Inn began to report to the Innkeeper. Despite everything, having hundreds of billions of guests within the Inn was an immense burden.

Every day millions of guests died, and even more guests gave birth to children. The increasing number of deaths actually contributed greatly to the Midnight Inn owing to the Beyond the Grave feature. It allowed a guest to exchange their personal wealth for an opportunity to continue living inside the Inn as a Spirit.

While those dying inside the Inn usually constituted of mortals, there were a number of immortals who would end up succumbing to old injuries and

wounds that even the Midnight Inn could not heal.

Those Immortals became the true source of wealth for the Inn. As per the rule, any single item that was contributed with a worth over 1 MT would not be converted into income, but instead would be retained as is.

Thus, not only did the Inn gain a lot of wealth, occasionally they would gain random items of considerable wealth. For example, when Lex manifested the Innkeeper projection inside the Inn, he discovered that the Midnight Realm had gained several hundred moons.

Each of the moons had varying levels of value, since some of them contained rare and useful materials and resources.

For a moment he was stunned for he felt like this was a cheat. Couldn't he, slowly and steadily, kidnap the planets from the Origin realm like this? As it turned out, a moon or a planet could only enter the Inn through the payment from Beyond the Grave if certain conditions were met. First, the planet or moon could not contain any living beings. Second, the ownership over the planet or moon needs to be recognised as complete ownership by the owner of the Origin realm, otherwise that ownership would merely be considered a long-term lease rather than actual ownership.

In the case of a lease, what could be contributed to the Midnight Inn was the worth of the lease rather than the individual planet or moon. While so far, that had not resulted in the addition of a planet to the Midnight Realm, it was still possible.

Furthermore, since the Midnight Realm was rapidly developing these days, the addition of hundreds of moons also began to affect the laws of the realm. The realm that originally existed in the form of a single, uninterrupted expanse slowly began to morph towards a structure similar to a star system.

However, the unusual part was that instead of the satellites orbiting a star, they revolve around Manera, the continent which housed the Midnight Inn. Of course, this was only a trend that had started, and it would take a long time for it to properly manifest.

Beyond the moons, there were two things that Lex valued most from these guests who decided to use the Beyond the Grave feature. The first was their contribution to the Inheritance Lounge. The originally sparse lounge now housed dozens of powerful inheritances that could help someone all the way from the mortal realm all the way to the Celestial realm.

This was important because not all races had fixed methods of raising their cultivation, and could not do so without such inheritances. In fact, even humans, most of the time, could not reach the Celestial Immortal realm without a suitable cultivation technique.

While progression in the Immortal realms relied more on comprehension of laws rather than through the use of cultivation techniques, various techniques had different benefits that could make the process easier. An example was a cultivation technique which focused heavily on fire, which might allow the cultivator to gain easier understanding of laws associated with heat and fire. The second thing that Lex valued most was the guests themselves! When they became Spirits, they more or less became permanent guests of the Inn for hundreds or thousands of years, yet they had no actual MP. To gain that they needed to work in the Guild room, and so they began contributing to the Midnight Inn community.

The next issue, and it was a genuine issue, that Lex had to deal with was the immense number of guests applying to become workers at the Inn. They had tens of billions of applications all of a sudden.

While this should not be an issue since the system handles recruitment through the tests via the platinum keys, reality was much more complex than that. Certain guests started opening tuition centers to teach other guests how to prepare for the Midnight Inn recruitment tests. While this was something that wasn't strictly illegal, it felt like many guests were being taken advantage of since the tuition centers weren't official, or even officially recognised.

As if that wasn't enough on its own, Lex began to get reports that there was some hidden unrest brewing in the Midnight Realm outside of the territory of

the Inn.

Certain, unusual monsters had started appearing all across the realm. Although reports of sightings of such monsters were few and far between, that was mostly because of how strong these monsters actually were, leaving behind few survivors.

While unrest inside the Midnight realm itself was not something Lex needed to manage, since he didn't normally act as king or overseer of the realm, he needed to at least be aware of what was happening in the realm. If there were unusual or unsettling trends within the realm, it would affect the growth and development of the realm, so he needed to monitor them.

In fact, one of the most important reasons Lex took notice of this was because the reports reminded Lex of a monster he'd personally faced inside the Midnight Realm when he first moved in.

He had faced a Centipedal monster that used some kind of black energy that, back then, Lex could not properly identify.

Now, though, looking back, Lex could see through the traces of that black

energy. It was a mix of pure Death energy and corrosion. Such energies were highly unusual in a newborn realm such as the Midnight Realm, and hinted at something sinister happening beneath the surface.

Yet whatever the source of these monsters was, it was well hidden because even Lex could not discover it easily. At least, without looking at the monsters directly he wouldn't be able to trace their origins, especially since he was currently only a projection.

Unfortunately, having the projection go and find these monsters was not so simple, especially since these monsters never appeared inside the territory of

the Inn.

This was something Lex wanted to pay close attention to, but could do nothing about for now.

While these were the most significant developments happening across the inn and the realm that Lex needed to pay attention to, there was no shortage of minor and smaller problems that people brought to him. For example... the growing number of Dramacat colonies that were developing across the

Midnight Realm.

As if that was not bad enough, some of the cats had somehow found a way

from the Midnight realm into the Origin realm, slowly spreading their

influence.

That... could only result in good things, right?