The Innkeeper

Lex could not help but sigh. Regardless of how much trouble it gave him, he would never be able to deny how incredibly useful the Regal Embrace was.

He began going through the list again. Due to how much he loved Talk to the Hand, he picked up another technique that deployed a shield. Or in this case, shields.

Unlike the original Talk to the Hand, which would forever have its barrier be placed firmly against the palm of his hand, the new technique he learned could allow him to build any number of shields, at any distance from himself. The only premise was that his spiritual energy had to be able to reach the place he wanted to establish it.

Another caveat was that unlike Talk to the Hand, which continuously fed off of Lex\'s energy, this shields established now would be one off. That meant that as soon as the shield was deployed, Lex\'s connection to it would be cut. So unlike Talk to the Hand, which would retain its maximum durability for as long as it was deployed, this one would slowly and steadily become weaker as it blocked more and more attacks. But in exchange, was it much easier to deploy, not to mention it was much stronger than Talk to the Hand to begin with. All of that was before Lex even altered the technique!

Once he upgraded the technique, he gained the ability to reconnect to any shield he had already deployed, move them around as well as recharge them. Moreover, if it was hit with a weak attack, instead of being damaged by it, the shield could absorb its energy to replenish itself. A seemingly simple addition to the technique he also gained was that he could change its appearance. Unlike Talk to the Hand, which was invisible, these shields would take on the silverish gold color his arrays appeared in, as a reflection of his spirit energy. Yet he could manipulate its appearance to look any way he wanted. This could be a useful technique to block out and camouflage openings and entrances he wanted to hide.

Lex did not dare to associate with the original name of the technique, for it was actually quite perverse, and so instead decided to call it the Imperial Shield. There was no deeper meaning to it and he only kept it because it sounded cool to him.

With these two techniques taking care of the most obvious needs, he then started learning more targeted defensive techniques. For example, he learnt techniques that specifically guarded against soul attacks, fire attacks, cold based attacks, electric attacks, attacks on the mind and many, many more.

In fact, it was while he was learning his tenth technique that he realized once again how scary regal Embrace was. Not only was he learning these techniques in a snap and improving them, he could employ a lot of them on others as well. That meant he was transcending just protecting himself, and now beginning to truly gain the ability to protect others.

While he was doing this, Lex was also studying and trying to understand why exactly it was so easy for him to learn these techniques. If he could glimpse at the logic behind it, he would finally be able to figure out why he had such issues learning offensive techniques.

Just as he was about to finish up, and transition to other kinds of techniques, he came across one more that caused him to pause. The original technique, called Impervious Hands, was quite strong in its own right and had no obvious flaws unlike the techniques he had seen previously. But when his mind figured out how to upgrade it… Lex suddenly felt something shift.

Spiritual techniques were techniques that used spirit energy to bring forth various effects. That was both an oversimplification of the process, yet somehow accurate enough to get the point across.

In the way that there were spiritual techniques, there were also soul techniques and body techniques. No doubt there were true path techniques out there as well.

But not all techniques were the same, and were ranked according to the strength they could display. Much like the Regal Embrace was a SSS+ rank cultivation technique, spiritual techniques had similar ranks.

Actually, different worlds, sects and organizations ranked them differently, but Lex\'s universal translator equalized them all and portrayed them in the simple rank denoted by a letter. The lowest possible rank was G and simply based on what he had seen from the system, Lex guessed the highest rank was either SSS+ or Destiny rank or something.

This grading system had never been too relevant to Lex, for he never really spent any considerable time in any one realm, and Regal Embrace often upgraded the rank of his defensive techniques anyway.

If Lex had to guess, he would say that all the techniques he upgraded using Regal Embrace always reached A+ rank.

The reason Lex guessed those techniques reached A+, and not higher, was because when his mind automatically upgraded Impervious Hands, he felt an odd resonance between the technique and his spirit energy. His intuition told him that Impervious Hands, this seemingly ordinary technique, had reached a new realm he had never accessed before, at least in terms of techniques.

The original technique was fairly simple. Instead of concentrating on defending his body, he would channel his technique into only defending his hands, thereby making them seemingly impervious to all attacks just because of how robust they became. If he could use the technique properly and with skill, he could use only his hands to block all incoming attacks, thereby protecting himself.

After the upgrade though…