The Innkeeper

Lex's spirit sense spread out around the graveyard, over the abominations, and into the literal endless pile of corpses. His spirit sense traveled until it eventually reached the ground, which had hardened like one continuous piece of rock, and then went deeper.

It also rose into the air, through the cloud of abominations and above it, searching for the actual sky. His left eye, especially, was activated far beyond what it had been in a long time as he studied the laws governing every aspect of this graveyard.

He could see traces of what once was. He could see the decaying laws that usually accompanied a thriving populace and large nations. He could see how they had been eroded, over time, and eventually replaced by a dark desolation.

Protected by his army of dragonfire creatures, Lex completely changed his focus to his surroundings, gaining a thorough and nuanced understanding of the graveyard that was out of reach at a simple glance.

His purpose was simple. Lex had experienced many things and encountered unfathomable powers, but maintained a firm belief that the forces of nature were of the strongest in existence. Natural disasters could literally change the topography of continents. If viewed on a border, more universal scale, natural disasters could destroy planets and cause stars to explode. Natural disasters could give birth to blackholes, which were at the apex of destructive power. So to kill all the abominations here, he wanted to give rise to the necessary circumstances for a natural disaster to occur.

Due to his natural affinity for volcanoes, Lex naturally considered that first. But as his spirit sense reached deep into the ground, to the very limits of his spirit sense, he could find no lava.

Despite the massive weight and pressure that the deep underground of this place must experience, it was not able to turn into lava due to the deep infiltration of Yin energy. In fact, the deeper he went, the colder it seemed.

It was tragic, but it was not the end. He could use the abundance of the Yin energy in this place to give birth to a new kind of natural disaster. Although, by definition, instigating the disaster himself made it an artificial disaster, the point of the matter was to use the abundant resources available here to power the disaster instead of doing it himself.

Since Yang energy could nourish Yin, then under the right circumstances, the reverse could also be true. He just had to set the stage for that to happen naturally and organically himself.

After gaining a deep and thorough understanding of the patterns of the graveyard, it was pretty easy. It was like setting off a forest fire. If the weather was dry, and there was enough kindling, and the wind was blowing just right, a single, half extinguished match could be the start of catastrophic devastation.

Heavy winds began to blast through the graveyard as Lex's body started to rise, and suddenly the aura of danger his body gave off increased drastically. In fact, it wasn't just the abominations who felt it - the contestants did too.

Yet the strange thing was he had long since ceased attacking. Instead, he was building an array. The array wasn't even massive, oddly enough. The characters were painted on almost a microscopic level, so that he could safely build the array around him, yet even so thin lines of spirit energy became visible around him, forming what looked like an endless maze.

Yet the lines of that maze were the characters themselves.

It was interesting, because despite the size of the array, it only had one purpose, which was to force the Yin to nourish the Yang in his dragonfire, instead of fighting it. But the complexity of the array surpassed any array he had ever built before.

The greatest problem was that Lex felt he lacked vocabulary as far as array characters were concerned. After the original few he learned initially, as well as the few he identified himself the past few years, he knew no other characters.

He needed to supplement his knowledge, but there was no readily available source that didn't overlap with his existing knowledge base. So he had to make do with more complicated arrays.

But Lex had radical ideas about arrays - ideas which, if panned out, could drastically improve his strength. But to even begin testing them out, he would need to become an immortal. Once that happens, and he gained enough self confidence in surviving truly cataclysmic disasters, Lex wanted to go observe supernovae and blackholes to see if he could find any characters in or around them.

Eventually, Lex's body floated to the very middle of the ground and the black curtain of abominations in the sky, and the array around him continued to grow stronger. Anyone with strong instincts or self protective abilities began to sense that something was terribly wrong, as Lex began to radiate an aura similar to fatal danger. The abominations sensed it to, and began attacking him from every side.

Even Immortal abominations, which had been holding back so far, attacked with full ferocity. For the first time, the dragonfire monsters were pushed back. They changed their tactic from attacking abominations to simply protecting Lex, but even then the radius of the circle they formed around Lex continued to get smaller.

But with each passing second, more and more abominations attacked, so much so that the other contestants ran out of opponents to fight. They all looked towards Lex, who was attracting every single abomination within range.

In fact, a few moments later, Lex was no longer even visible. A massive black orb began to float in the air as the abominations encircled him perfectly, and continued to squeeze tighter on his defenses.

Dragonfire was formidable, but the sheer force of abominations throwing themselves at the flames began to eventually snuff them out. They kept closing in until eventually the shape of the dragonfire changed from creatures into a sphere that simply surrounded Lex. Seconds turned to minutes which turned into hours. He was getting closer to being exposed.

Yet instead of triumph, the abominations oozed a greater aura of desperation. Everyone looked around feeling confusion and apprehension. Some even considered joining in with the abominations for the aura from within that sphere was too dangerous.

But it was too late. They took too long to come to a decision. The aura from within the sphere peaked, and then Lex opened his closed right eye.

There was a single Glyph painted over his pupil, and comparatively speaking, it was a fairly simple one. It was one of dragonfire.

The array around him hummed as it suddenly reached completion, and energy from the universe around it surged in to fill the array, like air rushing in to fill an exposed vacuum.

The array suddenly vanished, and turned into a gold aura that surrounded Lex. He immediately extinguished the dragonfire around him, briefly exposing himself to the tide of abominations.

Then a beam of red fire shot out of his eye, coated perfectly by the gold aura. The abominations threw themselves at the flames, ready to douse it as they had done with the others. But as their bodies touched the gold aura, they paused. When they finally touched the flames, instead of extinguishing it like a rainstorm putting out a puny bonfire, they fed it, as if someone had thrown fuel into an open flame.

In a fraction of a second, too quick for even Lex to follow, the flame spread across every abomination in the sphere around him.

Lex suddenly activated his Heavens furnace technique, shutting himself in. The timing was opportune, for the sphere suddenly exploded with such awesome might that it completely transcended Lex's own realm of power.

Where previously Lex had struggled to barely crack space, now cracks spread for hundreds of miles around him. Where previously a black curtain of abomination covered the entire region, now a curtain of dragonfire, coated in an aura of golden, burned above the graveyard.

Each and every contestant cursed together, and all of them started to retreat and run away, but where could they run?

A rain of liquid golden dragonfire burst from the clouds in the sky, turning the graveyard into the largest crematorium to have ever existed.

All hope was lost. The contestants could not escape. Just as the first of the dragonfire was about to fall onto the first of them, it suddenly changed direction and fell beside them.

From a massive hole in space, leading to the Void, where the original sphere surrounding had been, Lex emerged, not so much as an extra wrinkle or crease on his clothes.

He kept his right eye active, consciously keeping all the contestants safe. From his left eye he observed the newborn disaster that was quickly spreading across the entire graveyard. In case it ran into any unexpected problems, he would need to act.

But there was nothing that could prevent this spreading fire. It was almost funny. When Lex came here, his first impression of the graveyard had been of hell, so he lit the whole place on fire and turned it into purgatory. Did that make him the devil?

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