100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 637 - Remaining Fragments

After the mourning period ended, the world did not immediately become cheerful.

The grief remained.

But something inside the thousand races had changed.

They no longer mourned as if mourning itself was the end.

The processions had given shape to what many could not say. The dead had been named. Their sacrifices had been recorded. Their families had been answered. Their allies had been connected across continents by more than emergency orders and battlefield reports.

The sorrow did not vanish.

It found direction.

Lootwell’s procession had worked.

Not because it removed grief.

Because it taught the living where to put it.

•••

The five-continent stabilization project continued soon after.

This time, the work moved more smoothly.

The continents still carried wounds, but the wounds had stopped tearing themselves open with every breath.

And at the center of that work were the slimes.

That fact spread faster than any official report.

At first, many older factions did not know how to react.

Then they watched Skittles flatten himself over a damaged leyline node, listen to the rhythm beneath the stone, and correct a false beat that thirty formation masters had been arguing over for six hours.

After that, the adjustment happened quickly.

Oreo stabilized corrupted light and darkness.

Nyxis smoothed folded distances and loosened moments trapped in the array’s pulse.

Sprayn and Drayn balanced places where life had thinned and death had gathered too heavily.

The Nihility Slimes entered the worst scars and made false rhythm irrelevant.

Even the most prideful observers learned to stop using words like harmless.

A slime might look harmless.

That did not make it harmless.

By the end of the third day, several sect elders had begun speaking of slime rhythm theory with the grave seriousness usually reserved for lost inheritances.

By the fourth day, one formation master submitted a formal request to study under Skittles.

Skittles accepted.

•••

While the continents stabilized, Lootwell’s own machinery also returned to order.

The war had stretched every branch, every division, and every shadow route. Lootwell had not broken, but it had been forced to reveal how much of its strength came from constant motion.

Now that motion became structure again.

Reports arrived on schedule.

Supply routes reopened.

Captured Keeper batteries were installed in approved facilities.

The Intercontinental Teleportation Array also returned to public discussion.

Lucien had never revealed the truth behind the earlier leyline surveys.

The world believed Lootwell had required those surveys to prepare the array.

The world did not need to know that Lootwell had never truly needed such broad surveys to begin the work.

The surveys had been bait, pressure, and a net to force hidden hands to move.

That truth would remain buried.

Some secrets protected pride.

Some protected strategy.

This one protected both future plans and past victories.

So Lucien only announced what mattered.

Lootwell would continue the creation of the Intercontinental Teleportation Array.

The announcement spread across the five continents before sunset.

This time, the world’s reaction was different.

After the war, everyone understood what connection really meant.

Soldiers thought of reinforcements.

Survivors thought of friends they had made through communication devices but never met face to face before those friends died.

Some people cried when they heard the announcement.

Because they wanted to visit graves across the sea.

Because they wanted to stand before memorial tablets in other continents and say the names of people who had saved them without ever sharing a meal.

Others praised Lootwell for consistency.

Some old factions praised Lootwell very loudly, which usually meant they were still calculating how to benefit.

Kael sent Lucien a list of those names without being asked.

Lucien read it and smiled faintly.

The world was still the world.

Even after grief, some people remained practical in unattractive ways.

That was fine.

The Intercontinental Teleportation Array was not being built for the sincere alone.

It was being built because the next disaster would not wait for travel time.

•••

Later that day, Lucien entered the Origin Core Shrine.

The shrine was quieter than before.

The merged Origin Core floated at the center.

Lucien raised his hand.

The projected map of the five continents unfolded before him.

This map had become one of Lootwell’s most valuable assets.

It existed because of too many people to name quickly.

The shadows had gathered routes, boundaries, hidden roads, and movement records.

Marie, Kaia, Sylra, and Marina had contributed elemental readings from the land, fire veins, waters, winds, and buried structures of the world.

The merged Origin Core fragment had made the projection more than a map.

It was not omniscient.

Lucien would never trust any map enough to call it that.

But it was close enough to make most rulers uncomfortable.

He studied the five continents for a long time.

No Origin Core fragment markers remained

The fragments hidden across the five continents had all entered his custody.

Lucien let that realization settle.

For the first time since the fragment hunt began, the five continents were not secretly bleeding origin authority into enemy hands.

That alone was enough to make the world more stable.

The merged fragments now neared the four hundred mark.

Lucien looked at the growing core.

Its shape had begun curving toward a half sphere.

Close enough for the shrine’s pressure to feel less like a pile of stolen pieces and more like one broken thing remembering its original form.

That should have felt like good news.

It did.

Then Lucien looked beyond the five continents.

The headache arrived immediately.

"The remaining fragments," he muttered.

The map did not show all of them. No, it cannot show them.

The last Origin Core fragments were not scattered randomly across the visible world.

Some were in small worlds. Worlds where Liberators had been assigned.

And the rest were on the other side of the world.

Where the Black Mass was.

Lucien rubbed his forehead.

The Keepers were finished as a war.

The Primordial Incarnations were stirring beneath the seas.

The Black Mass monsters still existed.

And somewhere inside that dark territory lay a vast portion of the Origin Core’s remaining half.

"The world truly had terrible storage habits." Lucien muttered.

He stared at the map.

Although he had taken some fragments from goblins and gargoyles, many were still beyond reach.

That was the next problem.

No.

One of the next problems.

There were too many for the word the to be honest.

The good news was that all five-continent fragments had been secured. If the Black Mass had gained those too, the world might have destabilized again before the seas even opened.

The bad news was that the Black Mass monsters were still actively searching for small worlds.

And Lucien had proof they were not harmlessly failing.

Convergence had already succeeded once.

One Liberator had been taken as a vessel.

Lucien did not know whether that was the only one.

Aurelia could not confirm it yet.

She had tried.

The backlash had nearly turned her divination chamber into a funeral site.

After that, Lucien had forbidden her from forcing another small-world divination.

He looked at the Origin Core map again.

The five continents were clear.

The small worlds were not.

That had to change.

•••

The answer came from the thing he still did not fully understood.

The Reincarnation Disc.

Lucien opened his palm, and the Disc appeared above it.

It turned silently.

He sent a thread of awareness into the Disc.

Not deeply this time.

Only enough to see the roads.

Pale paths branched through the mist of souls, stretching beyond the Disc toward unseen destinations. Some were dim. Some were closed. Some trembled near the edges of small worlds Lucien could not identify.

He smiled slowly.

There it was.

A new way forward.

He could not find every small world through divination.

He could not wait for Convergence or Black Mass monsters to find the worlds first.

But souls had roads.

Reincarnation had paths.

And the Disc could see some of them.

Deadman had used the Reincarnation Disc before.

Virel and Aniel had incarnated into a small world through it.

They had lived there, adapted, and returned.

Lucien needed to understand how that had happened.

More importantly, he needed to learn whether it could be done deliberately.

He needed a method that allowed him to remain alive in the Big World while sending a controlled incarnation, soul thread, or spiritual projection through a reincarnation road into a small world..

Something like what had happened to Virel and Aniel, but controlled.

Preferably with fewer mysteries and less accidental cosmic drama.

He would have to ask Deadman.

If he could use the Disc’s roads to enter unidentified small worlds faster, he could locate the remaining fragments, rescue Liberators, detect vessels, and reach endangered worlds before the Black Mass swallowed them.

It would not be simple.

A reincarnation road was not a teleportation array.

It carried souls according to compatibility, karma, timing, and acceptance.

Forcing it could break the road.

Entering it while alive could damage the spirit.

And if someone strong like Convergence sensed the attempt, it might try to hijack the road.

Lucien’s smile faded.

’Fuck. So it was another race.’

Of course it was.

The world seemed to enjoy arranging races where the penalty for second place was catastrophe.

He closed the Disc slowly.

"Small worlds first," he said.

The Origin Core map shimmered before him.

"Black Mass later."

Then he corrected himself.

"Black Mass soon."

The difference mattered.