100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 693 - The Impossible Rankings

Lucien did not reveal the Law Anchor immediately.

The formation worked. The racial variants were complete. Seraphine’s medicine was already undergoing its final tests.

But Lucien wanted the Thousand Races to understand why any of it mattered before he placed another solution in their hands.

So he waited.

Then he quietly pushed the Law Interweaver in a different direction.

Lootwell’s people began mentioning something.

The Law Interweaver worked inside the Echo Crucible. More specifically, it worked against the impossible enemies.

The first few comments appeared in ordinary discussion channels.

Someone mentioned lasting longer after bringing an Interweaver into a challenge.

Another claimed that switching between stored Laws had allowed him to land an actual attack.

A third insisted that the so-called impossible echoes were considerably less impossible if they could not predict which authority would appear next.

Lucien did nothing else.

He simply let curiosity handle the rest.

...

He smiled.

The impossible enemies they spoke of were the Primordial Incarnations.

Not only the hostile ones.

After creating the Remembrance Trial, Lucien had asked the Silent Monastery for permission to include echoes of the Silent Guardians as well.

They had agreed.

So for some time now, the Echo Crucible had allowed challengers to face both enemy Primordial Incarnations and the Silent Guardians who had once fought beside the Thousand Races.

That had become especially useful now.

Among the Thousand Races were practitioners who carried the same Laws as both hostile Primordial Incarnations and Silent Guardians.

Those challengers could experience genuine suppression and authority interference from a higher bearer of the same Law.

•••

The Echo Crucibles filled rapidly.

People had challenged the impossible enemies for a long time.

Most attempts ended predictably.

The challenger entered. The echo appeared. The pressure descended.

Then everything went wrong.

Their Laws hesitated. Techniques failed. Domains twisted. Sometimes their own authority turned against them before they understood what had happened.

Even with the echoes reduced to the weakest settings permitted by the Crucible, defeating them remained absurdly difficult.

That had not changed.

What changed was that people could finally fight back.

A practitioner whose original Law began behaving strangely could switch to a stored authority.

For the first time, the impossible enemies were being struck..

People who had spent months being crushed by the same echoes suddenly discovered that they could make them move.

One step was apparently all the encouragement the Thousand Races needed.

The Crucibles became crowded.

•••

Lucien had not expected victories.

The first appeared three days later.

He was reviewing ordinary reports when a report from the Echo Crucible caught his attention.

A challenger had defeated one of the impossible echoes.

Lucien opened the record.

Then he watched it twice.

The echo’s strength had been lowered to match the challenger.

Even then, the difference in authority control remained enormous.

The challenger had simply refused to fight normally.

Every time his original Law became unstable, he abandoned it immediately.

He switched to another stored authority, then merged another with his own Law, then returned to physical combat when the reserves weakened.

He attacked only during the brief moments when the echo adjusted.

It worked.

Lucien smiled.

The scoreboard changed.

That caused considerably more trouble than the victory itself.

For months, the upper portion of the impossible challenge ranking had barely moved.

Now a new name sat near the top.

The five continents noticed.

Within hours, everyone wanted to know how it had been done.

Then a second victory appeared.

Then a third.

Different methods followed.

One challenger used three defensive Laws and simply exhausted the echo’s attack pattern before countering.

Another built her entire strategy around switching ratios inside the Interweaver.

A beastman ignored Law combat almost completely and used the borrowed authorities only to create openings for his body.

The rankings began moving again.

•••

By the end of the week, the Echo Crucibles had become one of the busiest places in Lootwell.

Staff members had to establish queues.

Additional waiting areas were opened.

Challenge records were projected publicly because too many people wanted to study them.

Some came to win.

Others came merely to see whether they could survive longer than their friends.

Several factions began treating the rankings with far more seriousness than Lucien had intended.

Old rivals discovered entirely new reasons to dislike one another.

And through all of it, the same problem kept appearing.

The Law Interweaver gave challengers alternatives.

It did not stop their original Laws from being controlled.

If they reacted quickly enough, they could abandon the compromised authority and switch.

If they reacted too slowly, the echo still punished them brutally.

The frustration grew.

People now knew they could fight.

That made losing control of their own Law even more irritating.

Lucien waited until that frustration became impossible to ignore.

Then Lootwell made another announcement.

•••

Communication devices across the five continents lit up.

The official Lootwell channel opened.

A simple formation appeared on the screen.

It was small. Three concentric structures surrounded a central resonance mark.

Different versions followed.Several major racial structures appeared one after another.

Then the title arrived.

[LAW ANCHOR FORMATION]

The discussion channels went quiet for approximately three breaths.

Then they exploded.

Lucien’s explanation followed.

[The Law Anchor is a body-bound formation designed to reinforce the connection between a practitioner and their integrated Law.]

[When foreign authority begins interfering with that connection, the formation detects the deviation automatically.]

[If control continues to deteriorate, the Law Anchor guides the affected Law back into the bearer’s established pathways and places it into temporary dormancy.]

[The Law cannot be used while dormant.]

[The purpose is not to defeat the foreign authority.]

[The purpose is to prevent your own Law from being turned against you.]

That final sentence changed the mood immediately.

People understood exactly what it meant.

Anyone who had challenged the impossible echoes understood even faster.

Another message appeared.

[The formation may be applied temporarily or permanently.]

[Temporary versions may be drawn using approved formation materials.]

[Permanent versions may be etched into the body by a qualified formation specialist.]

[Use only the variant corresponding to your racial structure.]

The complete designs followed.

Free.

Again.

At this point, some major factions had stopped being surprised by Lootwell releasing valuable things without charge.

They were still not accustomed to it.

•••

Suspicion came first.

That was natural.

People were considerably more willing to wear a bracelet than permanently etch a formation into their bodies.

So most began with temporary versions.

Formation specialists suddenly became extremely busy.

Friends who knew basic formation work discovered that acquaintances they had not spoken to in years apparently remembered them very fondly.

Lootwell’s own formation practitioners began offering paid inscription services at branches across the continents.

The price covered labor and materials.

Nothing more.

Temporary Law Anchors began appearing on arms, backs, chests, shoulders, cores, shells, scales, and stranger places depending on the race.

Some people tested the formation cautiously.

Others had already suffered enough inside the Crucible.

They went directly for permanent versions.

Lootwell warned them repeatedly that permanent inscription should only be performed after confirming compatibility.

A surprising number of people interpreted that warning as encouragement to test faster.

Lucien chose not to think too deeply about it.

•••

The first batch returned to the Echo Crucible.

The challengers entered.

The impossible echoes appeared.

Authority pressure descended.

Then the familiar sensation came.

The Law hesitated.

For months, that sensation had meant trouble.

This time, something on the challenger’s body responded first.

The Law Anchor lit. The second ring activated.

The practitioner felt the foreign direction entering the manifestation, then the formation pulled.

The Law rushed backward through the established pathways.

The echo attempted to seize it, but there was nothing left outside to seize.

The Law settled into dormancy.

The challenger froze.

For the first time, the impossible enemy had reached for his Law and failed to take it.

The challenger laughed.

Then the echo attacked him in the face.

He remembered that surviving the takeover did not make the enemy harmless.

The recording spread almost immediately.

So did several others.

The results were consistent.

The Law Anchor did not allow practitioners to continue using the threatened Law.

That was the price.

Once the formation completed the withdrawal, the authority remained dormant.

But it belonged to them.

That meant that it could not be used against them.

That was already enough to cause a sensation.

Then someone activated a Law Interweaver.

•••

The original Law remained dormant. A different authority emerged from the bracelet.

The echo hesitated.

The challenger attacked. The stored Law passed through the Interweaver.

The echo attempted to respond, but the challenger changed ratios.

Another stored authority joined the manifestation.

The battle continued.

People stared at the recording.

Then every formation researcher, combat fanatic, strategist, and stubborn fool across the five continents arrived at the same conclusion.

The Law Anchor and Law Interweaver were meant to be used together.

The Crucibles became unbearable.

•••

The rankings changed violently.

People who had previously spent half the battle desperately preventing their own Laws from betraying them no longer needed to waste that attention.

When the takeover began, the Anchor handled the withdrawal.

The practitioner handled everything afterward.

Some switched immediately to stored authorities.

Others abandoned Law use altogether and fought through their bodies, artifacts, weapons, or racial abilities.

Teams began experimenting with which Laws were safest to store against specific echoes.

Support specialists became unexpectedly valuable.

A practitioner carrying three completely unrelated Laws could force the echo to adjust repeatedly.

One fighter used his Law Anchor to seal his original authority, then deliberately fought with nothing but borrowed Laws.

He lost.

He immediately challenged again.

The second attempt lasted twice as long.

The third produced a victory.

The scoreboard changed, then someone defeated his time, then someone defeated that person’s time.

The original group of challengers who had managed to defeat the impossible echoes before the Law Anchor’s release complained loudly that the new rankings were unfair.

They had earned their victories the difficult way.

Several demanded separate historical rankings.

Lootwell eventually gave them one.

That satisfied their pride for approximately half a day.

Then most of them had Law Anchors etched onto themselves and returned to challenge the new rankings.

Apparently, principles were important.

So was first place.

•••

The impossible echoes remained monsters.

Even at reduced strength, they possessed terrifying instincts, authority control, and combat experience.

The Law Anchor did not erase any of that.

The Interweaver did not erase it either.

But the battles had changed.

The challengers were no longer entering with a weapon the enemy could simply take away.

They finally had choices.

The number of victories slowly climbed.

More importantly, people began learning something Lucien had wanted them to learn from the beginning.

When their Law hesitated strangely, they stopped forcing it.

When the Anchor reacted, they allowed the withdrawal.

When dormancy began, they did not panic.

They changed methods.

They kept fighting.

The Crucible was teaching their bodies and instincts before they even realized they were being trained.

Lucien watched another ranking update from his office.

A challenger had just defeated an impossible echo using a combination no one in Lootwell had tested before.

Another record arrived immediately afterward.

Someone else had beaten the time by six breaths.

Lucien smiled.

The Law Anchor had been revealed as another way to conquer the Echo Crucible.

That was all the public needed to know for now.

They did not need to understand why Lootwell had suddenly become so interested in teaching the entire world how to resist higher authority.

They only needed to keep challenging, keep failing, keep adapting.

And eventually, make the correct response instinctive.