The Innkeeper

Suffice to say, Lex’s first month in the academy was extremely busy. Between his various classes, doing his own research for the impending field test, and cultivating when able, he barely had any free time.

That limited free time that he had was often spent in the company of Amelia and a few of her friends. Truth be told, she was as helpful, if not more, in bridging the gap between Lex’s knowledge and common sense in the Crystal realm than many of his classes.

For example, the device that looked like a watch he was wearing today was called PT (personal terminal) which, for all intents and purposes, was like a mobile phone but with more features, given to him by Amelia. He was also better able to get accustomed to the day/night cycle here, as well as understand how the calendar in the crystal realm worked.

Each day was 25 hours long, with five days in a week and six weeks in a month. Since Sol-light did not have a fixed pattern, the plants, the people and the civilizations had adjusted to it accordingly. Not all, but many of the plants as well as insects were luminescent, and many animals had developed extra senses to accommodate for the long periods of time without light.

The humans here, in general, had much better eyesight than Lex, as well as a small degree of night vision. But for academy students, that wasn’t an issue, as apparently the academy had its own dedicated Sol birds. Apparently, the dean had a flock of them as pets, so at least in the academy it was never dark.

Other than that, Amelia also helped him get accustomed to the social norms. As his geography class proceeded, and he began to understand how vast the area controlled by humans really was, he truly began to wonder why everyone suffered from such a sense of crisis when after hundreds of years of war, the Kraven had barely taken over 1% of their land.

The answer, once again, was Cornelius II. As a farsighted man, as well as one of the strongest, if not the strongest, human, he understood the threat of the Kraven early on. After that, well, it was merely a matter of might being right. He forcibly converged all the strength and resources of the humans, created the Hum nation, and organized a unified effort to defend against the Kraven.

Time had proved him right, as only with such a strong and dedicated approach were the humans able to prevent the Kraven from completely destroying them the way they had done to the Poliods. Eventually, human society became accustomed to such a ruthless style of existence – mostly because they had no other option.

This was because King Cornelius II had a personal motto which, as dean of the academy, he implemented here as well.

The motto was simply ‘I don’t give a shit’. You don’t want to fight? No one cared. You don’t like the style of government? No one cared. You think the world is round instead of a flat, endless mass of land? No one cared. The only way to get people to care was to first fulfill your minimum responsibility to the war efforts, one way or another. Then your opinion became relevant, to a degree.

Slowly, and steadily, that motto as well as the singular mentality of doing everything to defeat the Kraven had seeped into the minds and habits of everyone. So long as you cooperated with the system, it was fine, but the moment you stopped cooperating… well, Lex finally understood why no one cared at all about the village that had been destroyed during his assessment. He suddenly realized how dangerous his rant to Vernan about not joining special forces had been.

Even the generally compassionate and understanding Amelia showed no reaction when he mentioned the destroyed village to her, nor did her friends. It chilled Lex at how normal death was here.

During this time, he also focused on managing the Inn when he could. Surprisingly, the husband and wife duo still had not finished their test to join the Inn. But, in a way, it made sense. Since they were the strongest to join to date, they had the toughest test. The one issue he was unable to solve was getting access to more worlds for the incoming expo hosted by Earth. There were some options he could use if push came to shove, but those would be last-minute options. Furthermore, he would also need to use some accumulated energy by the system to access the more advanced features.

He had also given his all to his part-time job, even if he could not understand the forging methods his boss employed.

With all that on his plate, despite Lex managing to deal with his stress, he had an increasing urge to smoke. Unfortunately, smoking did not seem to be a common practice here, and without anything to smoke, Lex could only make do. That did trigger an old habit of his, of playing with something in his fingers.

Since he had no cigarettes, nor pens to play with, without realizing it, Lex had begun to play around with the Inns golden key in his fingers. He was passing it from finger to finger, twisting and turning it around his hand, while not really paying any attention to it. That is, until one day, it occurred to him… to try to use the key to go back to the Inn!

Unfortunately, since this realm had not been anchored to the Inn, the teleportation didn’t work. Furthermore, as the Innkeeper, the system restricted him from using the key himsel

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