"Captain, are there Abyssals outside?" River suddenly asked, his voice taking on a deep tone that startled the captain.

He looked towards the spirit doctor, and finally noticed that he had a shield strapped to his arm. His body did not have much muscle, but it still exuded an aura of sturdiness that felt somewhat reassuring.

"I can’t be certain. We didn’t kill all of them, that’s for sure. I just don’t know if the rest followed us or ran away," he answered.

River nodded, and then looked out into the darkness. No matter what happened, he had to protect the Guest House. Only by cultivating within the basement could he ensure that she recovered from the curse plaguing her quickly, and help her grow stronger. This was quite literally directly linked to bettering her life, so there could be no compromise.

"Let me go gear up, I’ll help keep watch during the night," River said.

The captain only nodded, readily accepting River’s offer. In his opinion, River had to be at least a late Qi training level cultivator to live out in the wilderness all alone, so he would not turn away his help.

The night, surprisingly, passed in peace and the soldiers left at first light. The next few days passed with relatively little excitement, though there was one development. River realized that having an inn at the road intersection allowed him to meet all sorts of people, and hear all sorts of news.

It became surprisingly easy to hear the latest information from all around, to the point where River started keeping a ledger recording news that he thought was interesting or pertinent, and marking it with dates.

Just as it seemed like everything was going great, the Guest House was attacked by Abyssals one night. River and Pearl were alone, and four different Abyssals attacked. That was also the night River discovered that Pearl was stronger than him - by a lot.

This strength was clearly newfound, which showed just how incredible the cultivation technique given to her by Cliff was. The next day, they displayed the corpses of the four Abyssals outside the tavern, attracting a crowd and building the Guest house’s reputation.

River got very little feedback, because Pearl herself had done most of the heavy lifting in that fight, which caused him to realize that unless he did something big, his strength would be stuck as if at a bottleneck.

Many events continued to occur at the small Guest House, bringing bits of excitement in the otherwise mundane life of the young couple. It was a simple, but happy life - if only because they remained blissfully unaware of the brewing storm.

Weeks turned into months, and winter finally came.

Meanwhile, within the Dream realm, Daekol looked at Lex’s body and studied the barrier around him. No matter how he ordered the barrier to disperse, it did not obey his commands. Lex, too, had displayed a surprising level of resistance to his orders earlier on.

Although the conclusion remained the same, the process was still noteworthy. Daekol surmised that the reason Lex had been able to resist, and the reason the barrier did not disperse was intricately linked to Lex’s Dao Body!

While Daekol himself did not cultivate a Dao Body, he had a basic understanding of it. It should not have allowed Lex to use techniques or create barriers that approached the boundary of the Dao, and yet it happened.

Such an event clearly outlined how diverse, complex and mysterious the universe was, because he could not think of any explanation for why such a thing happened. It served to demonstrate the limited information of even large organisations when it came to such secrets.

Daekol found it mildly annoying that he had to manually break the barrier, but such things as emotions and feelings were entirely irrelevant to him and his pursuits.

He only used this opportunity to note that if he ever faced Demi-Dao Lords or those with a Dao Body in the future, and he had not yet attained the Dao himself, they may be able to resist his commands.

While he himself had chosen not to become a Demi-Dao Lord, that did not mean he was actually stronger than them. The frustrating thing about Dao was that it was above everything else, and could even resist the commands of Sovereigns.

Pushing all irrelevant thoughts out of his mind, he began to whittle down the barrier around Lex’s body. As long as it existed, he could not begin to alter the system hidden within his soul.

Daekol began to muse about how he’d control the second system without having it shut down or restart. He might need to take control of Lex’s soul and use it like a puppet.

The thought of possibly controlling two systems excited him to a great extent, making him feel like he was about to embark on a unique path. Little did he know that after defeating the Murder System, Lex himself had been offered the option of acquiring multiple independent systems, or or just using them to empower his existing one. He had chosen to empower his own system.

Daekol, unfortunately, had never encountered such an option because the rank of his own system was too low. The dream he was working towards was something Lex had already dismissed long ago.

Then again, Lex had been offered a weak system, and not something at the level of the Midnight Inn system. Had that been the case, he might have acted differently.

Slowly destroying the barrier was no easy task. Since it had been created using Lex’s Dao Body, it was created through a manipulation of laws so complex its consequence was similar to acting through the Dao. In short, damaging the barrier, in return, harmed Daekol slightly as well. It was still manageable though.

Yet he had only just begun to work when the entire Dream realm trembled under a furious roar that tore through the barrier separating the Dao beings and the non-Dao beings.

"DIE YOU DAMN MONKEY!"