The Innkeeper

Obsidian was unlike the rest of the Inn, where the architecture was grand and lively. No, to emphasise on the elements of the unknown and mystery, Lex had gone to great lengths.

Obsidian was exactly 50,000 acres large, and surrounded by a wall dividing it and the rest of the Inn.

The wall was not made using formations, but a division tool in the event panel, meaning that it was created using the Systems powers. Normally, this would have been enough to ensure Lex that none of the inhabitants within Obsidian would be able to exit it, but since a System was the System's weakness, he further strengthened the barrier through countless formations.

If one approached the wall, they would not see what was on the other side - instead they would see an infinite and ever expanding void so large that it was basically impossible to cross. That was a result of a formation that trapped an infinitely large space within a very small one - so if anyone ever got past the Systems barriers, they'd be stuck in an endless void. Of course, there were ways to get by that as well, which is why Lex had many other formations in place as well, all dormant until they were needed.

Lex could not hide the fact that Obsidian was a part of the Midnight Inn, nor was that the goal. It wasn't the Midnight Inn that was mysterious, but Obsidian, both for its members and those watching it from the outside.

The sky within Obsidian was forever trapped in twilight, though one might expect the theme of Obsidian to have a dark sky. Lex felt that compared to a plain, dark sky, twilight evoked numerous thoughts and emotions.

Just looking at the darkness slowly transitioning to light, turning into hues of pink and purple and orange, Lex felt melancholic, and yet at the same time a reverence for the beauty of nature. He felt like within the sky there was a veil between worlds somewhere within those changing colors, and that veil forever blanketed Obsidian.

On the ground, Obsidian was formed of thousands of small hills with a sea of clouds filling the valleys, leaving only the very tips of the hills exposed, hiding everything else from view. Let alone eyes, even spirit senses would be unable to probe within the clouds, and if anyone tried to enter the clouds, they would not be stopped. Instead, as soon as they entered deep within the clouds so that they were no longer visible, they'd be teleported to the opposite end of the same hill, making it seem like they were returning to where they came from, but from a different angle.

The only way to get from one hill to another was to fly over, or use one of the bridges. Yet if one actually tried to fly, they'd discover that they would be caught in an inescapable forcefield that pushed them into the sky infinitely until they were teleported to the island once more. So then the only way for them to actually traverse from one island to another would be to use one of the bridges.

But the bridges were broken, and on each island there were only two stone pillars to mark where the bridges would begin and end.

Beyond that, each hill had large, elaborate courtyards built in a japanese style, arranged to surround a stone temple at the very tip of the hill.

On a particular hill, within one of the courtyards, Hargreaves appeared, wearing his most expensive wizarding robes and holding onto a powerful wand.

The reason he hadn't used the black key was because he wanted to make preparations before entering some unknown place. He'd learned already that nothing his System gave him was simple, or as it seemed.

So while Obsidian sounded like a nice place, there was no guarantee.

Hargreaves immediately took stock of his surroundings, and detected no immediate danger, though what he found left him hyperventilating.

He was standing under a tree with beautiful, pink petals, falling gracefully to the floor, forming an arch. As it happened, he had teleported right in the middle of the arc.

That is not what surprised him. What surprised him was that his System immediately identified each one of those pink petals as a grade 4 treasure! A grade 4 treasure was an item that could only be used by rank 4 wizards and above!

Right now, he could not even absorb that treasure if he didn't want to die! According to his system, he needed to be at least in the Golden Core realm before he could safely absorb even one of those petals - and even then, the medicinal potency of those petals would be so strong that he would need days or weeks to absorb it.

Yet here there was an entire tree with tens of thousands of such petals, gently waving in the wind.

His System pinged again, identifying the wood of that tree as a grade 5 treasure!

But that was only the beginning. His System began to send him notifications one after another, almost going crazy, as it identified items which could help him as a cultivator.

The dirt on the ground was of such a high level that his system authority wasn't high enough to identify it. The dew on the blades of grass were counted as grade 3 treasures, while the grass itself was grade 4!

There was a path made of stone tiles leading him towards the inside of the building, but his eyes were glued onto the tiles! Just the dye used to color the tiles was grade 5, let alone the tile itself which his authority was not high enough to identify!

Each random flower around him was an earth shattering treasure that would ignite a war back in the Prometheus empire, and here, they were merely placed as decorations!

When Hargreaves finally saw something grade 2 - meaning a grade that he could actually use - he finally lost himself. He immediately used a feature of a system to summon a clone of himself to go probe the treasure, making sure there were no traps.

Yet when his projection neared the grain of sand in the zen garden - the only grain of sand that wasn't grade 3 - he discovered that he couldn't pick it up at all!