The Innkeeper

In fact, the only meaningful thing he learned from Jack was that it had been over a decade since Lex actually went to sleep within the Hollow.

”Trust me kid, this doesn’t feel like a war. It feels like an extermination. Things will be even more dangerous for us moving forward, so unfortunately I won’t be able to let you go off on your trip to get that treasure that little whale wanted. But I know you promised to give it to him, so I just grabbed it for you. Give it to him wherever you want - it’s the Beast Core of a genuine, dead Primordial World Shell Turtle.

”Although the name has turtles in it, it’s a now extinct race from which whales originated. The World Shell Turtle is like a kind of whale with a turtle shell. They were direct descendants of the being that developed the Dao of Worlds. It’s quite the noble lineage.”

Lex was stunned, and not just because of what he had just heard. The weight of the knowledge about the ancient Daos - the ones that had nurtured and developed the budding laws of the universe itself - was too great for him to take so easily.

In fact, merely hearing about it put Lex in a kind of trance where he saw what the universe had been like before the Dao of Worlds was developed. Flat plains, great land masses, existing as islands within Chaos Seas within the boundary of realms.

The vision barely lasted a fraction of a second, and Romulus woke Lex up from the vision before he could see much more, as if to protect him.

”It would have been more meaningful if you got it yourself, but we can no longer take any risks. The Hollow’s retributions are becoming more severe and I need to complete my mission before we can leave. You’ll have to stay within the Fortune stronghold in the meantime.”

After saying that, Romulus grabbed Lex and threw him inside a ruby ring he was wearing, except the ruby of the ring was actually a realm within which he had put the Fortune stronghold.

Yet even within the stronghold, he appeared within the Fortune castle where a live projection showed him everything that Romulus saw as the qilin began to head deeper into the Hollow.