Chapter 2451 - 2nd piece of advice

Lex did not want to lie. Actually, he was pretty sure that he couldn’t lie even if he wanted to at that exact moment, and even if he did it he would be caught immediately. Yet he also did not really want to admit that the Timekeeper was hiding inside Lex’s own forehead.

"Nulli, now is not the time," Eclipse said, although she glanced at Lex for a minute. She almost considered asking him herself, but then shook her head. She couldn’t afford to get distracted.

"Sorry about that, you’ll have to excuse me. Nulli is pretty sure she killed the Timekeeper the last time they met, so if he’s still around that would be very embarrassing for her," Eclipse explained, letting Lex know why Nulli was so curious.

This also allowed him to assess what he wanted to do in the future if he really was associated with the Timkeeper, because it would be quite stupid of him to keep appearing in front of Nulli if he had a relationship with the Timekeeper. That was like asking for trouble.

Lex was slightly surprised, though not from the news about Nulli and the Timekeeper. Two, powerful beings both of whom had an emphasis on time made it very believable that they would either be great allies or committed enemies.

No, he was surprised that hearing the news had no effect on him at all. He was pretty sure that was some kind of massive secret, yet he wasn’t pressured in the slightest. Had he finally reached the level at which he could comfortably learn the secrets he’d been learning all along?

He tried to remember the things he’d forgotten in Abaddon, but the fact that he couldn’t at least told him that he hadn’t forgotten them because his level was too low. Instead, there was some other reason entirely.

"Coming back to the matter at hand, I can see that you have a lot of open karma out in the universe - many things that you want or need to do. I know this is short notice, but I highly recommend you complete all your tasks and return to the Midnight realm within 10 hours and twenty one minutes and fifteen seconds, standard Mature realm time.

"Stay out any longer than that, and you won’t exactly die immediately, but a lot of bad things are going to happen. Immediate and unavoidable death are definitely a possibility among many other things."

Lex froze. This conversation took a turn he wasn’t expecting. A lot of questions came up in his mind, but so did a countdown. That was exactly 37,260 seconds left, and counting down.

Not a lot of time.

He didn’t question why that time limit, or what was going to happen. The timeline didn’t fit the timing of the Nexus event, but it didn’t matter.

"Thank you for telling me. I should probably go," said Lex. He waited one second to see if there was anything else they wanted to say before teleporting back to the Midnight Inn.

Nulli frowned and looked at Eclipse as if she had been wronged.

"Now is not the time," Eclipse said again.

Nulli only sighed, and then nodded. Eclipse was right. The Timekeeper wasn’t an enemy they could afford to face during this critical moment. Ten more hours...

A strange light flashed through her eyes, and a pink blush began to appear in her cheeks.

Lex reappeared inside the Inn and used a single second to orient himself. He thought through all his priorities, everything he needed to do, and then looked through his system notifications.

There were literally thousands of notifications, but most of them were emergency notifications about the Primordial energy. He directly skipped them and focused on anything that required urgent attention.

There were a few. For the first time in a long time, he failed a quest - to open a resort. However, instead of the quest being failed, the quest was updated into a new quest for reasons Lex did not know. The details for the change weren’t provided. He had his own suspicions though.

Chain Quest: Quest 3 Updated!

Updated Quest: Establish a Midnight Resort! -> Establish a Midnight Resort inside Arch-Heaven!

Quest time limit: 100 years -> 1000 years

Quest Reward: New worker race slot! -> New worker race slot + Hiring department building

Quest Failure Punishment: System shutdown for 5000 years -> No punishment

Remarks: The smart, handsome and charismatic system host can do the quest at his own leisure. No need to stress.

Besides that, there were a number of notifications for events that had already happened so there was nothing Lex could do. For example, there were notifications about the Inn getting invaded, but that was long over.

Then there were quests which had been activated due to ongoing universal events, such as the destruction of the realm. Those quests should have failed, but instead they were simply deleted.

Lex had a strong suspicion that his quests were kept from being deleted by one of two things: the system going dormant due to having no access to him for so long, or the system itself was preventing the quests from failing because it did not want to attract any attention to the fact that it was absorbing Primordial energy.

Even the happy remarks by the system quest now seemed like attempts from the system to placate and flatter him simply because it could not resist his influence at all.

In short, there were many things that needed his attention inside the Inn, but none that needed him to act immediately. No, the stage where he was most urgently needed was elsewhere.

Lex held out his hand and grabbed at a string of karma that danced in front of his eyes, as if specifically left there for him to find.

Within that string was a vision of Velma, looking directly at him.

"Please don’t blame me for this, but I had to accept your sister’s demand. We all wanted to go save Z, and she insisted on coming with us through her mirror. But, I knew you’d be worried, so I put a tracker on the mirror in case anything happened to it. And if nothing happened to it, you can find a Devil called Ahjour in the canteen near the central Guild room building. He’ll bring you to the Conquest realm where we all are."

Lex smiled faintly, and appeared inside the canteen. Ahjour was a Devil Lex had met during the first Midnight Games, but that hardly mattered right now.

"I heard you were waiting for me," Lex said to the Devil who had been eating a bowl of noodles.

Ahjour paused, and looked up with an expression of irritation. Yet the moment his gaze landed on Lex, he withdrew all his irritation and put on his best smile.

"Not at all, not at all. We can leave whenever you want."

Lex nodded. 37,250 seconds until Eclipses’ deadline.