The Innkeeper

The absurd feelings that enveloped Lex did not last long, and as his body slowly stabilized they dissipated. After all, how could Lex be arrogant enough to feel that the universe was mundane?

But that was not to say that Lex did not feel himself filled with awesome power. He truly felt as if he had surpassed what it meant to be human. The urge of common protagonists to punch a random rock to test out his strength filled him, but there were no rocks available in his meditation room.

That could be fixed easily. He summoned a massive, 20 feet ( 6 meters) large boulder and placed it right in front of himself. Before acting cool and actually punching it Lex rubbed his hand on it, to feel the cold firm surface. But… things did not go according to plan. As easily as if he was running his hand through running water, his fingers dipped into the rock, causing massive cracks to form across the boulder's surface. He froze, before he tried again.

This time, holding out his index finger, he pressed directly into the boulder. There was a brief moment of resistance, before his finger started digging into the rock in a smooth manner. It was as if Lex was poking a hole in a cake instead of a rock. Cracks spread deeper and wider along the surface of the rock as he pushed his finger in. When his finger had dug in all the way, and his fist touched the surface, Lex continued to push, and it continued to go in as easily.

A single loud 'crack' resonated in the room as the boulder was split into two, with the sides falling to the left and right side respectively.

Lex remained standing still as he tried to grasp his mind around what he had just done, but there was no time for him to calmly gather his thoughts. He had taken a major step along the cultivation pathway, and had evolved into a higher being. How could something as paltry as brute strength be all he gained?

As he was looking at the boulder, his mind still taken aback by his strength, the first of his new abilities revealed itself. His spirit sense emerged from his body and completely wrapped itself around the boulder, so that he was not only looking at it with his eyes, he was observing every fiber of it with his senses.

Every single groove in the rock, every layer in the minerals that composed the rock itself, every shade and pattern, every crack and fissure, all revealed themselves to Lex within his mind.

For a moment he was startled, thinking it was too much information, before he once again froze. No… no it wasn't! The degree of detail with which his spirit sense was feeding him information was immeasurably beyond anything Lex could have withstood before. Having so much information actively in his thoughts all at the same time would have caused him to nearly collapse. His brain would have been working in overdrive, his blood pumping like he was running a marathon, and his spirit energy draining as if through an open faucet to support his mind containing so much information all at the same time. Yet now, he barely felt the amount of detail worthy of notice.

A thought ran through his mind wondering just how complex an array he could create now that his mind was capable of holding so much more information. But it was only a fleeting thought, as his current focus was on his spirit sense. He had no idea how to control it!

It was as if a new limb suddenly appeared on his body, and while it reacted to his subconscious thoughts, consciously he did not know how to maneuver it.

Moreover, from his research, Lex knew that spirit senses could do a lot more than just allow Lex to observe things. It could be used to physically manipulate items as a funnel to channel his energy, to communicate with others secretly and more. He just had to figure out how to do all that.

For now, though, he settled on gaining a better understanding of the observation ability his spirit sense allowed. He continued to observe the boulder wrapped in his spirit sense and began taking in the various details. That's when he noticed the anomaly.

The information he was receiving from his sight, and the information he was receiving from his spirit sense should have provided him with two different streams of information to parse through, but when he actually paid attention… there seemed to be one more.

At first this confused Lex, especially since he was having a difficult time adjusting to having so much information directly streamed into his brain that he could essentially 'see' the item wrapped in his senses. Except, this vision did not come from a single direction, such as a person observing something from a particular angle, but was all-encompassing. The fact that he was not overwhelmed by it was also messing with his thought process. He was just not used to the new capacity his brain allowed.

But then, as if responding to his concern, his brain automatically filtered the information from the different sources into separate categories so that he knew what information he was 'sensing' and what he was seeing.

It was then that he realized that… his vision seemed to be providing him with two different feedbacks. One was looking at everything at surface value, the way normal vision worked, and the other… was looking at something more ethereal.

He… closed his left eye, and discovered that the ethereal vision disappeared, leaving only the boulder in his sight. Then he reopened the left and closed the right, and finally figured out the source of the extra information. The only problem was… he could not understand what he was seeing.

He saw a boulder, but somehow he also saw through it. He saw everything that made it up, and saw the possibilities of how it could interact with its surroundings. He was reading how the rock would behave, react, exist, disappear, and be destroyed in various conditions. It was as if he was reading the rock's personality… if that was possible.

For reasons he couldn't understand, his left eye was feeding him even more information than his spirit senses.