The Innkeeper

Watching the many drones coming to attack him, Lex was honestly impressed. He was fairly certain that his strength was near the pinnacle of this realm, so for this random creature to put up so much of a fight against him was extremely remarkable. It was no wonder that none of the other natives had survived its wrath.

That was still taking into account that Lex could also tell that the creature was not yet accustomed to its new power. Given enough time, it may have put up a greater fight. The hundred drones that had been released, Lex could tell, were some kind of self defense mechanism. They were mindless, and acted on instinct.

Some were running away, some were refueling and some were attacking. If ever one of the hundred managed to escape, the creature could be reborn much in the same way he was reborn after being crushed into meat paste.

The black energy they wielded was also interesting. Lex could tell that the source of the danger he felt was this energy. It contained some kind of law that he had not encountered before, yet it was potent enough to cause him harm.

While his body was extremely resilient against all physical, soul and spirit attacks, it seemed it could not escape the influence of laws.

The threat he was feeling from this creature diminished considerably, but it was not gone. Honestly speaking, Lex found this totally unacceptable. He was convinced that if he were still cultivating Regal Embrace, it would have found some way to increase his defense even against laws. It seemed he had been focusing too much on increasing his strength and not enough on other aspects of cultivation. To be fair, it was only after he had become a Nascent soul cultivator that his perception and awareness of laws was increasing so rapidly.

Feeling somewhat peeved, Lex spread his spirit sense and locked onto each and every drone. He did not need to rush to them. Lex Blinked and appeared behind the first drone, using Inferno Blade to cut it in half.

He planned on using Blink to attack every single one of the drones, and finishing the battle off in the next few seconds, but the drones turned out to be more dangerous than he thought.

The moment he sliced the first drone, his instincts spiked, sensing danger. He Blinked away just in time to avoid the drone erupting into a massive explosion of black energy. As if a chain reaction had been set off, countless other drones began exploding too, causing Lex to repeatedly Blink away.

But while he managed to avoid the blasts, he discovered the entire region was covered in a cloud of black energy, hiding the remaining drones from his senses. The black cloud was not dissipating either, and instead began to grow as it corroded the countless corpses on the ground.

A light flashed through Lex's eyes as he realized that he had been tricked, by mindless drones moreover.

If it had been anyone else, this move would have worked wonders. After all, the strange black energy was extremely dangerous for anyone if it could pose a danger even to Lex. It had covered a wide enough region where it could hide the movements of the remaining drones, and it could block spirit senses as well. In a way, it immediately created an impasse.

But Lex had too many ways in which he could get around this. He could, for example, just force his way in. Even if the black energy would harm him, it would not be lethal, and he could recover eventually. But Lex was not a brute, and did not need to rely on such unrefined methods.

Then, he could use his soul sense to locate all the drones. Although the energy blocked out spirit sense, it did nothing to the soul sense. After locating them, Lex could use reverse Blink to teleport the drones to him, and then finish them off.

Or, if he so wished, he could use Evisceration on them from a distance after locating them. Although the technique was surely weaker in the Nascent realm, it would still hurt, and eventually kill them off. There were countless more ways for him to resolve the issue, long before he even considered using arrays.

But since he was being exposed to laws in a new way, he wanted to test out how he could counteract them. How would two, unrelated laws behave when pitted against each other?

He held out his hand and used Space Warp once more.

Space began to bend under his control, and gravity spiked once more. But oddly enough, the gravity did not affect Lex, or the drones, or anything else. Instead, it seemed to only affect the black energy.

The black energy seemed to resist, but regardless of any resistance it put up it was dragged into the warped space.

Lex felt a strain on him as his energy consumption spiked. He even felt his technique unraveling, and Space Warp on the verge of collapsing.

Lex turned his open palm into a fist, and Space Warp strengthened. The effect of gravity was not greater, but the resistance from the black energy seemed weaker nonetheless.

Lex was intrigued by this behavior, but before he could study it, he had to deal with the drones first. No matter what, he had sensed that the creature possessed the will and ability to act against him, so he was not going to let it live.

He pulled out his Divine Butter knife, the one he created himself, and began to Blink to the drones. The second test he wanted to conduct, while killing his enemies, was how divine energy reacted with laws. As it turned out, it was much easier to suppress the eruption of black energy as long as he used the Divine energy within the Butter knife.

Only a few seconds later, all but one drone were killed. With one drone left alive that he had captured, and a ball of strange black energy trapped within his own ability, Lex could now take his time and experiment.

Back in high school, he had learnt about the scientific method when testing things. But first, he had to decide exactly what aspect he wanted to test. If it was still laws, then he needed a number of different laws, all with different strengths.

Lex rubbed his chin. Did sword intent count?