The Innkeeper

As soon as Lex woke up his mind was clear, without the usual grogginess that comes after a long nap. He noticed that he was not in his bathtub, the last place he remembered being. He was in the familiar white room.

A grin painted his face when he realized what had happened and jumped off the table, ready to test out his increased strength. The focus of the second procedure was his spirit, but naturally an increase in his cultivation realm would also increase his basic physical capabilities. He felt stronger, but he would need to test out his strength in the Training room to get a clear understanding of how much stronger he really was. The change that felt most obvious to him was his mind. He could not say that he had gotten smarter, but that he could do more. An easy way to explain it was that if Lex had to do a math equation mentally that would take him five seconds to solve, he could now solve it one. His mental capability had improved, but if Lex did not know how to solve that math equation in the first place no amount of improvements would change that. Although, perhaps he'd be able to learn how to solve the equation with greater ease now. He should test out the theory by going over some of his old college material. Since he'd forgotten almost all of it, it could be treated as if he was learning that stuff for the first time. It would give him a decent benchmark to test how much his learning capability had improved.

Naturally, there was more to his improvements than just that. With an increase in his spirit, he would be more resistant to spirit attacks or invasions, and would more easily be able to see through illusions. It would take time and experimentation to learn exactly what else his increased spirit allowed him to do.

"Congratulations," said Mary, appearing before him. Something that surprised Lex was that Mary had changed her clothes, and now appeared to be wearing the white Taekwondo uniform.

"Thank you, I'm relieved that the upgrade happened. I don't know how much longer I could have taken getting beaten up by those dummies."

"Haha your training is far from over young man. After your latest increase in cultivation, your spirit is unstable. Before you can increase your cultivation again, you need to wait for your spirit to stabilize. You can speed up that process by meditating, so that'll be your next task. For some people, that's even worse than getting beaten up by a dummy."

Lex groaned, thinking about that. He had never tried meditating before, but he couldn't imagine it would be easy. He checked how much his next upgrade would be, and predictably the price had increased to 10,000MP! He needed to figure out a way to increase his income.

"Mary, how can I increase the number of guests that I receive? My income is too low, it can't keep up with my expenses."

"If you want to increase your income, your focus should be on completing quests. You haven't even started the farming quest yet, let alone the one for repeat guests. Completing quests will directly help you improve the Inn and increase your authority. The greater your authority, the more things you can do."

Lex cursed, he had completely forgotten about getting the seeds! He would return to Earth as soon as possible to figure that out. But the other quest…

"But how am I supposed to get repeat guests? The only thing I can do there is wait for them to come back."

"That's too passive. Yes, some guests will eventually come back, ultimately fulfilling the requirements for the quest, but if that's all it took then why would the Inn give you the quest. You have to be more active, and figure out how to bring those customers back. You always wait for the system or the Inn to give you things, but never take initiative to figure things out on your own.

"The Marlo quest was the only one you put any effort into at all. Be more imaginative. To be honest, this quest was so, SO easy. I don't want to give you any bad ideas, but all you needed to do was find some poor sap on Earth, give them keys and make them come back to the Inn repeatedly. In fact, you earned a decent amount of money, you could have even paid them directly to buy things from the Inn to complete the quest."

Lex frowned, realizing that he really had been too nonchalant about the quests. Mary was right, his quest that he had been treating as difficult had such an easy loophole. He pulled up his status to look at his ongoing quests.

Quests:

Having a guest come once can be an accident, only repeat guests can reflect an institution's prestige! Have 5 individual repeat guests! (Progress: ⅕ (Repeated guest: Hugo))

Host has encountered a planet extremely suitable for finding guests. Build a connection to Dunya!

With a garden available in your backyard, it's time to improve the quality of your food. Grow spiritual vegetables for the Inns kitchen.

He was happy to see that Hugo returning counted him as a repeat guest. He was expecting Alexander to return soon, and those two teenage love birds definitely planned on using this place as a rendezvous but it was unknown when exactly they would return. He could wait a little to see if he had any repeat guests, but at the moment he was inclined towards using the loophole Mary told him of. Of course, he had to carefully plan out how to do it so that he would not be connected to the Inn. He was already surprised at the extent of surveillance he had encountered on Earth.

As for going to Dunya, forget it! The two planets he had gone to were only 1 star and yet he had nearly died on both of them. There was no way in hell he would be going to Dunya right now, even his brain tumor did not make him stupid enough to do something like that.

The easiest one for now was the vegetable one. He would complete it as soon as possible.

"By the way, while you were asleep Will recovered and has entered the Mystery trail. He has been in there for about an hour now."

"Oh interesting. Is there any way we can see what his trial is?"

"No, but you can ask him about it when he's done. I think it might not be a bad idea for you to go through the trial once as well."

"I'll think about it, but not now. I'm returning to Earth to buy some seeds, keep me updated in case he leaves the trial."

Lex exited the white room and returned directly to Earth. He took out his phone and turned it on, only to receive a dozen or so notifications. He directly ignored most of them, responding only to Moon and Larry. He told his youngest sister by telling her he'd be going on a trip for work so he'd be outside the service area so if she is unable to reach him she should not be alarmed. He messaged Larry thanking him for calling Bluebird, and then messaged him that he dropped out of Marlo's class and that he'd be leaving for a while.

He googled the closest Farmers Market and went there directly and bought a few packets of every kind of seed they had. Then he put up an ad on eBay for four people to help him make a special delivery. He only listed the payment for the ad as $50 per person. He wanted to attract the kind of people who would not ask too many questions and were desperate for cash. He would check the response on the ad tomorrow, and promptly returned to the Inn. Of course, before returning to the Inn he went to a discreet location without any cameras. He didn't want to leave behind any evidence of him appearing and disappearing - especially since he was walking around without his Bluebird token. He didn't want his location being tracked.

He returned to the Inn and teleported directly to the greenhouse. The Gardener had done some decent work, and prepared some support beams for the vines to grow on. He'd divided the area into four different sections, one for vines, one for precious herbs, one for trees and one for the vegetables that Lex would bring. So far the growth was not too prominent, but it had barely been a day. It would take some time at least for the cuttings to regain their vigor.

Lex handed over the seeds and was about to discuss the growth plan with the gardener when Velma appeared beside him, telling him that Helen was asking for him. Apparently she had an important request.