100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 500 - Monster

Seraphine entered the hut, pulling the door shut behind her.

Instantly as the wood connected, the nostalgia she'd kept suppressed crashed over her with fearsome intensity.

It went beyond mere emotion now.

It pressed down like a weight.

Yearning. Comfort. Joy. Sorrow. That peculiar pain from reclaiming something absent so long she'd forgotten how to label the void.

Her palm lingered on the door a moment too long.

Then her system stirred.

A golden alert flickered into her view.

Before she could scan past the opening words, a radiant glow erupted from within her.

The Will of the World.

It flowed out in gentle gold, saturating the hut's interior. Simple walls began to shine. The ground shifted. The quiet grew denser.

Suddenly, the entire hut changed.

The atmosphere turned into recollection.

Vivid, lifelike scenes filled the barren space, no longer like mere illusions. They expanded in full dimension and fluid movement surrounding her, making Seraphine feel no longer like an outsider in the hut.

She felt as if she'd entered a existence.

An existence she'd never anticipated witnessing.

•••

Outdoors, Lucien remained oblivious to all this.

He stayed put where she'd abandoned him, positioned in the meadow under the gentle, languid breeze of that peculiar small realm.

Lucien maintained Structural Insight, cautiously extending his perceptions across the field. He traced the faint orderly patterns with mounting intrigue.

This realm had been crafted with intent.

Each span seemed selected. Each hush appeared positioned. Every void space felt deliberately vacant.

What captivated him most was the sense of nostalgia.

The realm itself embodied it.

It lent the location an intimate closeness.

Lucien deemed that exquisite.

A spot such as this... after sufficient years, anyone would require it.

He contemplated it then with rare gravity.

Should no obstacles block his ascent and he kept advancing, eventually he'd endure an immensely prolonged existence. Maybe one so extended that even grand triumphs faded into stale tales, and those tales would gradually lose their emotional heat from endless retelling.

A location that safeguarded the pang of memory... a location that restored the significance of what once held value... such a spot wasn't indulgence.

It served as remedy for endless time.

A defense versus the wear of extended existence.

Lucien offered a subtle smile to himself.

Indeed.

He aspired to fashion something akin to this someday.

Something enabling the ancient to glance back without dulling.

Something reawakening survivors of excessive trials that mere endurance was never the goal.

Next, his focus turned once more, directing toward the hut.

He continued ignorant of the events within.

•••

Within, Seraphine froze motionless as the initial vision commenced.

A young girl resembling her occupied the hut.

The identical hut.

Yet tinier, more destitute, and more isolated.

The outside world differed as well. A settlement lay nearby, visible from the entrance if one ventured out far enough, but even from afar Seraphine sensed the harsh reality of that spot.

The settlement rejected the young girl.

The awareness arrived wordlessly and pierced sharper than shock.

Right then, recollections flooded Seraphine’s thoughts, rendering her completely mute.

She beheld herself as that youngster.

Slim. Silent. Keen-gazed. Overly perceptive from too young an age. No companion shared the hut with her.

Just her alone.

The youngster proceeded with an unnatural serenity for her years.

It wasn't tranquility.

It was premature self-reliance.

As the visions progressed, the Will of the World restored the recollections to her, settling them like facts reclaiming their proper place.

Her mother perished in childbirth.

Her father, the village healer, endured until her sixth year.

He had cherished her.

That element impacted deepest.

Not from the realm's declaration.

From sensing it in the minor remnants.

The mended coverlet. The neatly bundled herbs. The healing records inscribed by a weary yet accurate script. The small timber stool set precisely so a child could access the workbench.

Then he passed as well.

Following that, the settlement defined her fate.

A doomed offspring. A entity that slew her mother at birth and her father shortly thereafter. A fiend astute enough to mimic a girl's form.

Seraphine observed her child-self traverse a frosty dawn clutching an oversized woven hamper, her countenance unnaturally blank for one so tiny.

Her footwear torn. Her cuffs clumsily repaired. She skirted the village edges, avoiding its heart, since none desired her proximity.

Yet nightly she revisited her father's bequeathed volumes.

That pierced the vision's core.

Not the forsaken state.

That despite desertion, the child yearned to prove worthwhile.

Under the dim flicker of a dying lamp, she pored over medical books. She struggled to pronounce terms far beyond her years. Diagrams were copied by her hand alone. Dosages, herbs, symptoms, and cures were etched into her memory even as hunger gnawed at her.

The young girl wasn't compelled to study.

She delved into those pages because her father had shown her kindness.

She pursued medicine as the final warmth he had bequeathed to her.

And she yearned, with the fierce desperation of an unwanted child, to demonstrate she wasn't the monster the village claimed.

She longed to preserve lives.

She aimed to show that the doctor who cherished her hadn't nurtured a beast.

Seraphine, positioned within the hut as the scene played out before her, sensed a painful knot forming in her chest.

The child possessed no one.

Yet she persisted.

Solely to gain acceptance. Solely to prove her worth. Solely to affirm that the love bestowed upon her hadn't been wasted.

...

The vision advanced.

Seraphine reached the age of twelve.

Then the plague descended.

It arrived as plagues typically ravaged ancient mortal hamlets: starting with fever, progressing to frailty, then coughs, bizarre swellings, and finally a deluge of bodies beyond proper rites.

The village decayed from its core.

One resident after another perished.

Soon a new terror gripped the survivors.

Bodies started disappearing.

The deceased were spirited away.

Initially, villagers murmured of phantoms.

Then fiends. Then divine retribution. Then the accursed child dwelling in the distant hut.

Yet the reality proved far simpler.

And infinitely more horrifying.

The child whom Seraphine observed had started pilfering corpses.

Under cover of night, she hauled the dead with hands too tiny for such labor, dragging them back to her hut.

There, amid wavering candle flames and quivering shadows, she performed dissections.

Seraphine observed her younger self slice into the initial corpse with a trembling hand—not from revulsion, but from the strangeness of handling actual flesh.

The tomes hadn't readied her for the heft. For the feel of tissues. For how illness altered hues, bloating, odors, and inner structures.

But following that first cut, the child pressed on without flinching.

She concentrated.

That focus was what chilled the soul.

Her thoughts sharpened.

She measured her findings against her father's notes. Organ shifts were noted. Disease advancement was charted. Variations between quick deaths and prolonged agonies were tallied. Each cadaver became a message from beyond, not a violation.

One body turned into many. Many swelled to dozens.

The humble hut transformed into a clandestine medical stage no child should have constructed solo.

Death brought her no pleasure.

But discovery ignited her spirit.

Each fresh corpse revealed lessons. Each variance unveiled patterns. Each pattern edged her nearer to the plague's origin.

The grown Seraphine struggled to draw breath while witnessing it.

For the child blazed with brilliance.

And evoked deep pity.

She was far too young for such burdens. Far too isolated. Far too deprived of affection.

Yet her intellect burned vibrantly.

Ultimately, the child uncovered it.

The plague's source.

And in that revelation, she glowed.

For the first instance across the vision, the little girl beamed with unbridled, luminous victory.

It lasted but an instant.

Yet it struck like a thunderbolt.

That smile held no pride.

Just pure elation.

She had seized the solution.

She could rescue them.

What ensued proved even more harrowing.

For hope materialized at first.

Drawing from her father's remedy scrolls, the child foraged ingredients from woods and peaks, experimented with blends, monitored effects, refined proportions, and forged a cure with uncanny swiftness and ingenuity.

Into the village she ventured, cradling it carefully in both arms.

Fear mingled with optimism in her.

Villagers shrank back upon sighting her.

Accusations flew that she spread the plague. Spittle landed near her feet. Commands rang out for her departure.

Nevertheless, she proffered the healing draught.

Rejection met her offer.

Until a frail elder, already on death's edge and weary of fearing curses more than his inner torment, swallowed it down.

And it succeeded.

Emotions surged through the scene enveloping Seraphine.

The elder's fever shattered. His breaths steadied. His body's decline halted.

Rumors flew.

More approached. More imbibed. More endured.

The child Seraphine grinned endlessly, her inner ecstasy uncontainable.

At long last.

At long last, she mattered.

At long last, comprehension would dawn.

At long last, they would recognize her innocence from monstrosity.

For a fleeting, merciless interval, they did.

Conversations flowed her way. Remedies were taken from her grasp. Talent was praised in her. Strangeness acknowledged, yet valued strangeness. Valued enough to endure. Valued enough to draw near.

The love-starved girl traversed the village as if basking in sunlight anew.

And since the Will of the World denied compassion, it compelled Seraphine to feel the full depth of that joy's significance to her.

For how long had she craved it. How scant the effort needed for her to open up to it. How swiftly a young one pardons brutality when even a single act of gentleness appears.

Yet then...

The villagers discovered the method she used to uncover the cure.

She had taken corpses. She had sliced into the deceased. She had probed their innards like some freakish entity cloaked in flesh.

In an instant, her value turned into terror.

Those same lips that praised her medicine now branded her filthy. Those same palms that grasped for relief now gripped rocks, clenched fists, and fury. Those same folks who would've perished without her treatment ruled that true sin lay not in dying.

But in her gaining forbidden knowledge from it.

The assault arrived swiftly.

So sudden the girl failed to grasp it initially.

A blow landed on her cheek. She tumbled down. Boots pummeled her as she attempted words. Saliva hit her amid pleas for understanding.

Seraphine observed her younger self weeping, bewildered and scared yet pleading logic with those who favored dread above facts.

"I helped you," the child uttered.

Nobody paid heed.

"If I didn’t look, how would I know?"

Nobody gave a damn.

"They were already dead."

That worsened it all.

The villagers yelled of blasphemy. Of beasts. Of freakish youths and tainted lineage and souls unrested in graves.

And the truly unbearable truth was the child's lingering blindness to her supposed fault.

Those forms lay lifeless already.

The survivors demanded solutions.

If carving them revealed the fix, how then was it wicked?

If rescuing the hamlet meant dissecting cadavers, why transform rescue into felony once the way was revealed?

The girl's thoughts smashed into mankind's hypocrisy and shattered upon impact.

There lay the real sorrow.

Not merely the thrashing she endured.

Her brilliance sufficed to rescue them, yet her youth barred comprehension of folks who'd guard corpses' honor over confronting the grim reality of survival's cost.

Only the village head's arrival halted the violence.

Not from compassion.

For maintaining peace.

They spared her life.

They exiled her, forbidding return to the village.

Nothing more.

As though banishment equaled kindness. As though erasing her aid spelled fairness. As though the remedy hadn't flowed from her battered grip mere hours prior.

The girl crawled back to the shack.

One eye puffed shut. Lip torn. Limbs quivering. Tome hugged tight against her.

Her father's healing manual.

The sole remnant tasting of affection.

Within the shack, she at last crumpled.

And sobbed.

Desperate, convulsing wails from a youngster whose spirit wasn't just scarred, but remade.

Comprehension of her error eluded her still.

She had acted as any healer must. She had delved into knowledge. She had watched keenly. She had pinpointed the source. She had brewed the antidote. She had preserved them.

Yet they dubbed her fiend.

Deep within, a change stirred then.

Insight.

The girl yearning for welcome started fading in that shack.

Something new took shape instead.

An intellect that would persist in curing. In researching. In unraveling puzzles.

Yet never again naive enough to think utility ensured affection.

Seraphine, poised in the hut bathed in golden glow, clamped a palm across her lips.

Too late.

Tears already streamed.

And beyond, beneath the odd heavens of this fabricated realm, Lucien lingered unaware that within the hut, a solitary girl wept her transformation into the figure he recognized.