The Innkeeper

Spirits were beings that were extremely sensitive to any kind of energy fluctuation, mostly because they could interact with energy directly with their souls! This was very crucial information to keep in mind when designing a room for them. But the question was… how was Lex supposed to actually use it?

The first thing he did was use the feature of the meditation room to gather spiritual energy and multiplied its effectiveness. But was just raising the concentration of energy enough? That was unlikely, or else spirits would all just congregate in areas of high energy concentration. No, there had to be something more. Something soothing. Something warm and comfortable. Something like… a hot tub!

Lex then used the hot tub room and… turned the entire room meant for spirits into a hot tub. But instead of water, the tub was instead filled with extremely concentrated spiritual energy. Considering the fact that the Inn was now in a 2.5 star ranked realm, that was the easy part. Not only had the ambient spiritual energy increased, it had become cleaner and purer as well.

He couldn't really think of any other features to add to the room, for now, as every further addition would need to be extremely important. That's because the more complicated he made a room, the more expensive it would be to use, as well as to create.

That was because, unlike previous rooms, which were completely calibrated by the system, these would require him to calibrate himself. While he had a theory for how the two features of the room were supposed to work together, he had to make sure they operated according to his theory, which was a delicate process.

Furthermore, there were a few different configurations he could reach for the room balance, but some might cost more than others, so he had to be sure.

Ultimately, he ended up creating a room he was satisfied with, though it was somewhat expensive. The room cost 860 MP a day and literally was just a hot tub of energy, so Lex decided to charge 1000 MP a day for a profit of 140MP.

He placed the room in the village and then had the system send all the spirits a message about the room to notify them.

There was one massive flaw in this plan, which was that spirits would have already expended all their wealth to turn into spirits. Lex had no solution for that. It wasn't even as if the 860 MP was a single time expense which could be shared by all the spirits. That just covered the energy expense for one spirit to be in the room. Were that not the case, Lex even thought about just having the room running for the spirits at all times, but if he had to pay for each individual spirit, it would quickly become infeasible for him.

But whether the spirits used the room or not, Lex was satisfied with the results, so he turned his attention to the tribulation room.

He already knew what features he wanted to add after 30 hours of study, the real trial would be calibrating the room to work as expected. He didn't even care about the costs this time, and would only consider lowering them if everything else already worked as he intended.

The first feature Lex added was a dampening formation. That was a kind of defensive formation that was available for the Inn to use. It would not block any attacks from entering it, but it would absorb a great deal of energy from anything that crossed the boundary of the formation as fuel to keep itself running.

Forcefully absorbing energy, ironically, used up a lot of energy so the formation would never have a surplus of energy. The benefit of this formation over one that would attempt to block the attack directly was that this one would stay in effect as long as the tribulation lasted. Otherwise, if it directly started blocking the lightning, it might last a few hits, but then would eventually break. Moreover, Lex was unsure if the lightning carried any beneficial effects, which is why he didn't dare to block it out right.

The second feature he added was the effect of the meditation room which helped the user concentrate and focus more easily. The third feature was that of the recovery room, which accelerated the natural healing of the user, allowing the cultivator to start healing even as he was being injured. The final feature he added was one he wasn't exactly sure would be beneficial, but he added it anyway.

It was a chilling formation which had to be manually activated. Once it became active, it would rapidly cool down the room to an extreme amount. He was not sure how else to help combat the fire tribulation, for he wasn't able to get an in-depth read of it. He hoped the drop in temperature would be able to provide some kind of relief.

There were only four features, but balancing them out and making sure they work together was far from a simple ordeal.

The real issue was that each feature worked in a certain way. The way the system created an environment that boosted concentration might clash with the way the system promoted self healing. When these two features, which were supposed to exist together, clashed against one another, the simplest way the system resolved it was to brute force it, which would result in an explosion in the price of the room's function.

Lex's part came in when he could reduce or increase the activity of each feature, hoping to create a balance where they don't necessarily clash with one another. It was manageably complicated with 2 features, but with 4 it was a massive headache.

It took Lex another 12 hours of working with full concentration to get the room working, and reduce the price as much as possible. Still, the room cost 74,000MP a day to use. Lex rounded it off to 100,000 MP and sent out the notification. Besides the MP cost, a cultivator would need to have prestige level 3 to use it, though for the duration of this festival, that requirement had been waived.

Now, it was time to see if it was actually helpful or not to begin with. But first, he needed sleep. Just in case, however, he told Mary to wake him up if anything went wrong with the tribulation rooms.