The Innkeeper

Chapter 1386  Arra-kiss

Lex watched and waited, no longer taking his time to admire the treehouse, but rather waiting for the system's evaluation. From afar, the treehouse was not exactly visible, covered by the leaves. But once someone came close enough to view it from underneath, the actual treehouse would become visible.

Quest complete: As the Inn grows, and its reputation spreads, so too must your capabilities as the Innkeeper. Build a new tavern with your own hands, without any help, fitting to be used as a subsidiary of the Midnight Inn.

Quest Reward: Increase in number of taverns by 1.

Remarks: Look at you, not mooching off of others. How fast kids grow.

New Quest: Integrate a tavern into the history of a world.

Quest Reward: Subject to performance.

Remarks: Do not go down in history for an epic case of food poisoning, or burn the beards of all the residents on a new world!

Lex coughed, and resisted the urge to facepalm. Instead, he just focused on the fact that the treehouse had just been accepted. Moreover, he was not bummed about the fact that there did not seem to be any additional reward for all the effort he put into making the treehouse.

He knew that even if the system didn't specifically state it, the system rewarded additional effort and achievements. While it did not specifically state that the new quest was as a result of the treehouse being awesome, the fact that the next quest had an open ended reward was definitely a result of his previous efforts.

Fortunately, he was already working on having the tavern be a big part of a world's history, just because he liked controlling the flow of a story. Now, he just needed to get some staff for the second tavern, send it to a new world, and kick things off.

With that done, he could focus on the Midnight Games, the audit report, shutting off the teleportation in the Origin realm and…

Lex had to pause and rub his eyes. He was forgetting something. What was he forgetting? The problem with remembering everything was that sometimes, it was hard to discern which thing he had to be paying attention to which basically just resulted in the same outcome as not remembering something at all.

Although Lex had his suspicions that such things were not normal, and that he was just multitasking too much, he was going to operate on the belief that immortals weren't forgetful, but remembered too much, leading to the same outcome.

"Dungeons! Right, that," said Lex as he snapped, and made a mental note to follow up on that soon. Ereboth was a mean planet, he hoped he wasn't giving Luthor a tough time.

With everything in order, Lex sent out a notice to the Inn workers asking if anyone wanted to volunteer to work at the new tavern. Once he had enough workers, he bought a ticket for a new planet, and tore it, sending himself and his new treehouse to an unknown planet.

One thing he had learned about the system was that while many things seemed random, the system never actually did anything randomly.

Just in the way Lex often found himself coincidentally running into people being hunted, or crown heirs to powerful empires, secretly on the run, or random Demi-Dao Lords orchestrating a conspiracy to overthrow a realm, he would never actually appear somewhere he couldn't technically survive.

The planet or environment he would end up at would be, in some way, work for him and his tavern. His newfound faith in the system…

Lex froze as he looked out at the planet. Disbelief struck him, and it struck him so hard he flew into the air and spread out his spirit sense, yet no matter how far he looked, he found no change.

No, how could this be? Lex had a whole new, positive attitude towards the system? How could it betray him like this? It was… oh wait… it wanted the most entertaining results. Right.

Just to be sure, Lex flew all the way to space to observe the planet, only to confirm something that the system interface could have told him easily.

Planet: Arra-kiss

Planet Rating: 1 Star

Planet Environment: Desert planet Lex had arrived with a 400 feet tall treehouse tavern onto a desert planet that had no trees whatsoever! Well, at least the treehouse would be easy to find at least. He just needed to position it in a place where it would easily encounter flow of traffic.

Originally, he thought it would be nice for the tavern to be in a town, or even a city… but… a giant tree appearing suddenly might be a little startling.

Lex pulled up a holographic map of the world, and studied it for a while. The map displayed all large cities, towns, trade routes, migration patterns, treasures and anything else that might be relevant to him.

After a while, Lex decided on a spot, and teleported over.

Ah, well, how bad could things be? He was sure that he'd find something interesting to do on this planet - he was sure, because having a system would more or less ensure it.

During his free time, Lex decided to start working on the schematics for the system he would make himself. The first thing he had to decide was what kind of system he wanted.

The planet Arra-kiss was a desert all around, but that did not mean it was entirely covered in sand, or everything was hot. The tree reappeared in a barren desert, where the ground was hard and cracked for countless miles, with the most distinguishable feature nearby being a large mountain range made entirely of rock. As it happened, on the other side of the mountain range was a cold desert, and the tips of all the mountains were covered in glaciers.

As such, throughout the year, a number of streams flowed down the mountains, forming a lake near which the planet's largest city was built.

One day when the tree suddenly appeared within view of the city, all the residents within were confused, and afraid. The city entered lockdown - but not before a single person escaped the city, wounded and bleeding.

But seeing as how the gates sealed right behind him, he managed to gain some time while running from whoever was chasing him. But all was not well. He would need to reach the city before sundown, or bad things would happen.

Yes, among the entire populace, Tatsuya Seigan was the only one who knew what a tree was, and so didn't fear it.

Even if he didn't understand what it was doing here, he was not one to judge. After all, he himself was from X-142 - the very same planet that Lex used to visit the Emporium.