The Innkeeper

A few hours later, Rafael found himself being pushed in a wheelchair by his mother, who was grinning ear to ear. When she wasn't grinning, she was talking to her boy nonstop, and Marlo was walking alongside them silently. He may be a King in his own domain, but right now it was his wife who was giving the orders, and so for once, he suppressed himself and simply followed along.

Rafael, though, was currently lost in his own thoughts. Firstly, he was in a wheelchair because after 15 years of not moving at all, he had lost nearly all the muscle mass in his body and even moving his arms put him out of breath. The Recovery pod could do nothing for his strength and stamina as long as he was technically healthy.

Secondly, though he had come back far, FAR into the past, the timeline had already changed drastically despite his inaction.

In fact, the timeline had already changed so much that he was having serious doubts if he could use a lot of the information he knew for his benefit. He had asked his parents what he had missed in the past 15 years, and while they only gave him a few minor details to fill him in, he was sure that he held almost no advantage when it came to his knowledge of future events relating to Earth for at least another few years.

He had strong suspicions about what had caused the timeline to diverge, he just could not understand how the effect of it was so big. In his original timeline, he had never suffered from the grave injury that caused him to be suspended in life support for 15 years.

The reason for that was simple. While Marlo suspected his injury was caused by a breakthrough gone wrong, but the truth of the matter was, he was injured by the treasure that had travelled back in time.

The treasure that was currently in his heart was one he could easily control in the future. But his current body was too weak, and so the fusion process of the treasure, along with Rafael's memories from the future, almost ended up killing him.

So, technically speaking, the only difference between his original timeline and this one should have been his 15 years in a coma. What he could not have imagined was how such a simple thing affected the world in a subtle way that ended up drastically changing the future.

First of all, in his original timeline, since Rafael never got injured, Marlo never had the moment of self-reflection. This was fine for Rafael, as though Marlo was a harsh dad, it was his training that actually allowed Rafael to get so far in life.

Without that self-reflection, though, Marlo never ended up becoming Alexander's teacher, and he never hosted his self-defense lessons, which caused him to meet Lex.

Without his delicate touch in training Alexander, his personality developed in a different way. Instead of being open-minded and humble in his approach to power, Alexander developed a ruthless arrogance that was rightfully fed from his relentless training and strength. That minor yet prominent shift in personality reflected in how he influenced the Morrison family to develop, and how they interacted with the rest of Earth.

Furthermore, because Lex was never trained by Marlo, his experience at Vegus Minima was extremely different, during which he nearly died and had to be treated in the Recovery pod as well as ORR, which prompted him to take a drastically different approach in developing the Inn.

He was much slower in developing the Inn, despite the quests and prompts from the system, and waited many years until his own cultivation was much higher before he started spreading the Inn to the rest of the universe.

The Butterfly effect was a theory in science on Earth that, when simply explained, stated something as simple as a flap of a butterfly's wing can, through a series of events, cause a hurricane. Similarly, Rafael had no way of knowing how far-reaching the effects of him being injured truly were.

With Lex developing the Inn slower, he would never have been able to help Tiffany, the little girl from Nibiru, never saved Chen and Blane, never influenced the war in the Vegus system, never give Ragnar the opportunity to record Loretta's energy signature, never met Loretta's father, never have saved Fenrir and so many other, seemingly minor things that would one day have monumental effects.

With his limited knowledge, however, Rafael did know a few simple changes that had happened. When the Council of New Order attacked the five families in his timeline, the effects were extremely drastic - to the point where the ecosystem of the entire planet had changed. His father, who never got an opportunity to complete his new cultivation system, died during that war since he could not recover from his wounds.

North America had become all but a desolate land. Massive shifts in tectonic plates under the pressure of countless battles ended up causing super volcanic eruptions on the continent that not only killed most of the population, it would have clouded the Earth in dust for years without the aid of technology.

The war, which had been dubbed World War 3, had also affected the mortal population so badly, which, followed by the subsequent food shortages, caused the global population to drop below 1 billion.

When the situation was still not resolved, Fernanda ultimately revealed herself to the world and not only killed the five family heads for their incompetence, but all members of the council. She then became Regent of Earth, ruling with the world with an unquestionable strictness.

Many called her a tyrant, but under her rule, Earth made tremendous progress. Many, many more things happened, but of course they were much farther in the future. Rafael neither had any way of knowing if the events he knew of would still happen, nor was he currently focused on them.

With the timeline changed, many of his initial worries were already resolved. All he needed to do now was wait for the treasure in his heart to fully heal his body till it was no longer crippled on the path to cultivation, something he knew for a fact it would be able to do, and then raise his cultivation.

Though many problems had inadvertently been fixed, there were a few upcoming events in the future he strongly believed would not change.

This mysterious place known as the Midnight Inn would help him tremendously, though had never actually been here in his previous timeline.

But instead of relying on something he could on fully understand, he planned on getting close to a few people he knew would be prominent in the future. If Lex had somehow been able to read the list of names he was going through, he would have been surprised to learn that he personally knew quite a few of them, or had at least heard of them.

Larry Dershaw and Matilda Ross had been Lex's class-fellows, and Marlo's students, though Rafael didn't know that yet. But while their names were high on the list, the name highest on the list was Andrew Sigmund, Helen's older step-brother and new CEO of Sigmund crop.

But, before he could start planning, he needed to understand the current timeline, and that would not be a short endeavor.

*****

Back on Earth, Vera Joel, more commonly known as RussianPrincess77, was silently cursing her luck. She had told Alexander that he would lose someone important to him, so that he would venture into the Minor realm and prevent Helen from being teleported away. While Alexander was distraught that he had been unable to save Helen, Vera was also upset because that portal was supposed to be her way out of Earth.

But that was the drawback of being an oracle. She could not always accurately predict the future. What's more, her peculiarity as an oracle made it even harder for her to give accurate predictions to other people because, quite simply, she could only see her own future! If she had been able to see other people's futures, she would have given Alexander better information.

Instead, all she saw was that for her to escape Earth, Alexander needed to save someone in the Minor realm.

She let out a disappointed sigh. Well, there will be opportunities in the future. She turned just in time to see a few guards escorting someone new through the compound where they stayed as 'guests'. This new person happened to be Heidi.

The spoiled girl, as much as she didn't want to, had to report what happened to her, to her Father. As much as she feared his punishment, she knew keeping secrets would result in something even worse, so she had to fess up.

When she was finally brought to his room, he was surprised to see her father was actually in a very good moon. He was humming to himself as he tied his tie before fixing his collar and putting on his blazer.

"Good morning, father," she said, with a bright smile, hoping to improve his mood.

"Ah, Heidi. You're here. I have wonderful news, the Williams family is finally letting me out of this hellhole of a planet. Today is going to be a good day."