The Innkeeper

"Wait, you're saying the King prevented you from killing Kraven?" asked Lex, realizing he had finally touched upon the real secrets of this realm.

"Yeah," replied Aegis, not at all phased by the severity of what he was revealing. "I was very young back then, like maybe 11 years old, so old pops never really knew who I was yet. But when I started killing too many Kraven, he had to come and stop me. He said I was too young, and wanted to hide my potential."

Lex calmed down a bit upon hearing that. If it was to protect and hide a very promising child, then preventing him from killing Kraven made sense. It was still not incriminating enough.

"He said I should hide properly until I'm stronger and just focus on cultivation because it wasn't really easy. I got really excited when he said that. I never knew what it meant for something to be hard, everything was always so easy. But in the end, it turned out to be a lie. My cultivation was slowed because I was cultivating the True path, but I still easily reached the immortal realm.

"Everything I did was too easy. Learning was easy, fighting was easy, cultivating was too easy, killing Kraven was too easy, finding a girlfriend was too easy. Life was just so boring. In the end, I gave up. There was nothing fun to do at all. I even considered taking on the Kraven in a war, but old pops stopped me again."

At this point, Aegis stopped, his drunken visage retreating a bit and his expression turning serious.

"When I told old pops about my conundrum, he offered me a new solution. He wanted me to defeat him, and if I did, I could become king. He said the challenge of running a country was immense, since it did not depend just on my efforts, but on the efforts of all its people. The offer finally enticed me. So we fought.

"It shouldn't have been hard. I had never lost a fight before, and pops and I were in the same realm."

At this point, Aegis trembled.

"But man oh man, a single slap from the old man nearly killed me. All the bones in my body broke and, in fact, shards of my ribs filled my lungs. To top it off, my spirit was completely disoriented and my soul seemed to lose its shape.

"But it wasn't all bad. I was excited, in fact. I finally found something that wasn't easy."

He paused again, and looked at Lex with red eyes full of tears.

"Can you imagine? Finally, for the first time in my life, I found a challenge. I found something that I couldn't accomplish with just a little bit of effort. I found something to work towards. I trained like a mad man, and improved beyond what I could have even thought, yet still only a single slap put me out of commission.

"But, instead of being deterred, I was even more excited. I worked, for years and years and years, training and growing beyond anything anyone can imagine. I fought Kraven and Crystal race alike until I could find no threats, I fought monsters born in caves so deep underground they've never seen light for as long as time has existed. My strength grew and even my realm grew, until I reached the very peak of the Earth Immortal realm, surpassing my father who was still somewhere in the middle.

"After all of that, when we finally fought again, this time he didn't even need to slap me." Aegis started laughing as tears streamed down his face.

"He didn't need to slap me. He simply blew a whistle, the tune of which caused my spirit to collapse, putting me in a coma for years."

The drunk began laughing as if he told the funniest joke ever heard, yet the tears never stopped rolling down his face.

"Can you imagine the feeling of finally finding something to look forward to, but it's not a challenge? Instead, it's an impossibility!"

For a long time, Aegis continued to laugh, while Lex felt slightly bad for him. Based on the little he heard, Aegis seemed to be some kind of never before seen genius, learning everything with ease. But the first time he encountered a challenge, it was instead an impossible wall to overcome.

But fortunately, if this is what caused him to start drinking, he had a few ideas on how to solve it. But first...

"Why did the King continue to stop you from killing the Kraven even after you became an immortal?"

"He said that, instead of the strength of one man, humankind needed to grow strong in its entirety. He said that even if I killed all the Kraven, some other threat would replace them. The only real answer was that if the entire human race started producing geniuses like me more frequently."

Lex frowned. One need not be a genius to know that the King was just providing a barely logical sounding reason to prevent the Kraven from being eradicated. This was such a strong contrast between the ideology he spread amongst the common people of the nation that Lex could not identify what the real reason behind it was.

"Do you know if any of the other races do the same thing, by preventing the truly strong cultivators from eradicating the Kraven?"

"I'm not sure. All I know is that the Kraven no longer try to invade the Crystal race. The last time they did, the Crystal race retaliated so strongly that the Kravens war with all the races was affected. Unfortunately, the Crystal race isn't too interested in the state of the realm, since no one can really affect them.

"The truth is, although I said that no one in the Crystal race could fight me, that was only counting Crystals around my own age. As an immortal race, they have way too many unbelievably strong cultivators just randomly sleeping around.

"For the rest though... maybe on average, humans aren't as strong as them, but humans have their own advantages. We are not pushovers either."

Lex pursed his lips as he thought hard. The old man from the Crystal race told him that those that needed to know the truth of the Kraven knew it, and the way for him to learn was becoming important enough to have them tell him.

He could tell that Aegis was on the periphery of that list, but not quite on it. He had not earned the trust of his father, or proven himself enough, and quite frankly, Lex could understand why. He had not hesitated at all to sell out the trust of his father, or maybe he never even perceived this information as a secret at all to begin with.

Whatever the case, it made sense that he had not been brought into the fold.

Yet Lex was not ready to give up so quickly. Maybe he didn't know about the Kraven, but his position still exposed him to many secrets. Lex would thoroughly take advantage of this situation.

"What do you know of the Noel family?" Lex asked, diverting the topic.

"Joseph Noel was a common adventurer who stumbled onto some huge secrets," Aegis replied just as casually as before. "But he was smart about it. Instead of trying to hoard everything for himself, he made a pact with old pops and gained his protection. In exchange for his protection, he offered old pops a lot of immortal grade treasures. I don't know all the treasures he provides, to be honest, but I know a few. In fact, I'm pretty sure that there is an ancient Trelop graveyard under this town, full of immortal grade fruits. I remember right before I became an immortal old pops offered me one of the fruits. It really helped with my breakthrough."

Lex's eyes lit up as he thought of many ideas. A secret garden full of valuable fruits. He wondered if he could find anything that would be useful to him.

Moreover, since Joseph had proven himself a smart and capable partner of the Kings, Lex wondered if he was exposed to the secrets of the Kraven.

Lex asked a few more questions and when he was satisfied, moved onto actually trying to remedy Aegis' alcoholism. Though the man was 88 years old, Lex felt that in many ways, he was actually still a kid. His exposure was limited and so was his thought process.

"Listen here," said Lex, leaning forward over the table as he looked him in the eyes. "I'm about to reveal the secret of why you can't beat your father to you, so pay attention."

Lex's words struck Aegis hard, and he immediately started paying attention even though in his mind he was skeptical. He had simply accepted his father as all powerful.

"The way Joseph discovered some secrets, so did your dad," said Lex, completely making something up. "And now its your luck kid, because you've encountered your lucky chance as well."

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