The Innkeeper

The serpent man’s robes had not changed, for he appeared majestic and grand regardless of what he wore. But while in the previous mural he seemed solemn while facing some unseen danger, this time he was almost bored.

The throne he was seated on was at the head of a courtroom, and what a grand courtroom it was. It was incomparable to anything Lex had seen, for it wasn’t gold and jewels that decorated the halls, nor did marble make the tiles. Instead, it was a court that spanned… well Lex chose to view it as galaxies, but he had a feeling it was meant to represent the universe.

The planets and stars, and realms of all sizes had been arranged to form pillars that held up the roof which, in the context of the mural, must have been Heaven. A carpet made of cosmic dust was sprawled down the center of the hall, though upon closer inspection one would notice that each particle of dust was a galaxy of its own.

It was a good thing that most of the throne was blocked from view, or else Lex could not have even imagined what it would be made out of.

The entire court, Lex realized, was a formation on an absolutely unbelievable scale, and it was very much needed, for the serpent man wasn’t alone there. Countless blurry figures filled the courtroom, kneeling before the serpent man.

As soon as he got a gist of what the image contained, Lex looked away, lest he start noticing the finer details of the mural. Instead, he focused on the wrongness that pervaded the public well, and tried to understand it more deeply.

Fortunately, doing this did not add any weight to his soul, so he could really dedicate himself to this task.

The issue was that he did not understand the 64 characters too well, and could only vaguely refer to their descriptions according to the Book of Changes. To then try and figure out how he would use those characters to correct the wrongness was not going to be an easy task. He finally understood what Kaemon meant when he said that the challenges were not easy to do, which is why they mostly avoided them altogether.

Lex sat down cross legged, losing himself as he diverted most of his attention towards solving the problem, so much so that he didn’t even notice the difference in the flows of time.

Within the ruins, his clone experienced an entirely different flow of time, one much slower than the outside.

That meant that as Lex lost himself in his contemplation, entire days passed around his main body, whereas only a few hours passed for his clone. Fortunately it was not the other way around, for his processing speed was heavily dependent on the flow of time his main body experienced, not the clones.

So focused was he on his task, Lex had no idea that the castle had started to attract attention, and had already suffered a few rounds of attacks. The defenses of the castle ensured that there was nothing wrong, but the waterfall outside the castle needed defending which was an arduous task.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, if Lex took more than just a few days in the ruins then night would descend. Defending the waterfall at night, with those mysterious enemies who were specifically hunting Lex, would be an additional challenge. No one complained though.

The mercenaries, better than anyone else, understood the immense risk Lex was taking all so he could help them.

When Lex’s clone finally opened his eyes, many days later, he remained lost deep in his thoughts for a few moments. His eyes, Lex realized, looked identical to the vision that had spread throughout the universe when he became an Earth immortal. It was as if those eyes could see all the secrets of the universe, and held endless answers.

But as his awareness returned, so too did his eyes return to normal.

His long duration of contemplation allowed him to come to a few conclusions. Some were regarding the space of the ruins, and how Abaddon treated it. Most of his realizations, however, had to do with arrays.

It was no surprise that the 64 characters he had learned could be used to form arrays. What did surprise him was that he sensed that these characters… they were far more powerful than any character he had ever used.

When he learned about arrays to begin with, he also learned that arrays theoretically had no upper limit in power. That theory was never realized. The concept was that since the arrays directly use the energy of the universe, an array that was diverse and properly curated, could demonstrate any level of power.

In reality, a few things caused a bottleneck to the actual power an array could demonstrate. The fact that the type of energy used to power arrays was random played a significant role. At lower levels it didn’t matter, but at higher levels of power, a sufficiently powerful energy type was required. A weak energy type used to power an array would obviously, at most, demonstrate a power level at the early levels of an Earth Immortal.

Besides energy type, the rarity and power of the array characters also made a huge difference. Lastly, the fact that most array characters were just a denomination of laws representing a single aspect of a law meant that arrays could never match the true versatility and raw power of laws.

It was only recently that lex discovered some characters that were… well, they represented larger aspects of laws. That presented the possibility that some characters might even contain whole laws.

At first, when he learned these sixty four characters, he assumed that these characters were as such. They either represented a large part of, or possibly even an entire law.

But after days of contemplation Lex realized that he had absolutely no concept of what they represented. It certainly wasn’t like any law he had felt before, so maybe they were the laws that Heaven or Celestial immortals could sense. Or maybe it was something else entirely.

That was irrelevant. What was relevant was that the power these characters held… once again, Lex had no way to conceptualize it. This was far beyond his scope of knowledge. In that case, the only way to be sure was to try it out.

He held out his finger, as if it was a pen, and began to draw an array character like he had done so long ago, when he started using arrays for the very first time.

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