100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 696 - Discovery

Marie, Kaia, Sylra, and Marina entered the dead region together.

Behind them came tens of thousands of spirits.

The younger spirits were clearly excited.

The four women allowed the excitement for a while.

Then Marie looked back.

The spirits immediately became much more professional.

Soon, their investigation began.

The first thing they checked was exactly what they had checked during their previous visit.

The leylines.

Marie extended her senses through the earth.

Sylra followed the movement of energy beneath the landscape.

Kaia examined the elemental circulation around the deeper layers while Marina traced every underground waterway they could find.

The spirits spread outward under their commands.

...

Hours passed.

They found nothing.

The leylines were not damaged. There was no enormous formation buried underneath the land and no obvious foreign energy corrupting the region.

Everything that should have explained the dead land refused to cooperate.

Marina stared at the cracked plain ahead.

"This place is irritating."

Kaia glanced at her.

"That means you want to know even more."

Marina did not deny it.

The land was enormous.

If there was an answer hidden somewhere inside it, then they would simply have to search harder.

The spirits scattered farther.

The four women went deeper.

•••

Marie closed her eyes. Her consciousness descended into the earth.

Stone passed beneath her perception.

She felt the scars of battle almost immediately.

Some were shallow. Others reached so deeply that even after millennia, the earth had never completely forgotten the force that had struck it.

But there was something beneath those scars.

Marie frowned.

The land felt... familiar.

Not in the way Earth itself was familiar to her.

This was personal, as though she had once touched this soil with hands she no longer possessed.

Elsewhere, Kaia stood silently over a blackened stretch of stone.

There should have been nothing warm here.

The ground had been dead for longer than most civilizations had existed.

Yet when she extended her senses downward, a faint warmth answered.

Something that made an old, almost forgotten feeling rise inside her before she understood why.

Kaia slowly opened her eyes.

Sylra had stopped moving as well.

The wind passing through the dead region was strange.

It carried no voices.

But the deeper she listened, the more she heard patterns.

Sylra’s expression changed.

She had heard that rhythm before. Long ago.

Then the wind shifted. Something almost like a name passed through it.

Sylra’s eyes snapped open.

At the same moment, Marina froze beside an underground spring.

She had dissolved part of herself into the water to trace where it flowed.

The spring should have been ordinary.

Instead, the moment her consciousness entered it, she felt an inexplicable sense of nourishment and comfort.

It’s the sensation of returning somewhere after being away for too long.

Marina withdrew from the water.

Her lips parted slightly.

The four women looked up.

Then, without speaking, they all turned toward the same direction.

•••

Their bodies dissolved into their elements.

Earth folded.

Fire flashed.

Wind vanished.

Water scattered.

Four figures appeared thousands of kilometers away almost simultaneously.

Before them stood the remains of a cliff.

Or perhaps it had once been one.

Most of its face had collapsed long ago.

Stone filled the bottom of what had clearly been a waterfall.

Only a thin stream remained, slipping between broken rocks before disappearing underground.

Behind the ruined falls was darkness.

A cave. Or what remained of one.

The entrance had partially collapsed.

For several seconds, none of the four women moved.

Marie stared at the entrance.

Kaia’s hands slowly tightened.

Sylra stopped breathing.

Marina took one step forward, then another.

There had once been flowers near the water.

Marina remembered that first.

Not their names. Not even their colors clearly.

Just that she had liked floating among them.

Kaia remembered a place beside the cave entrance where the sunlight stayed longest in the afternoon.

Sylra remembered wind passing through the opening and making strange sounds against the stone.

Marie remembered the floor inside. There had been one place where someone always sat quietly. For hours. Sometimes without moving.

Their eyes reddened almost at the same time.

This was it.

They had searched for this place before.

They had always wondered whether their first home still existed.

The continents were different now.

Entire civilizations had risen where empty wilderness once stood.

They had eventually assumed the place had been destroyed.

They had never imagined it was here. Inside a region everyone avoided. Inside a battlefield that refused to heal.

Marina’s vision blurred.

She blinked quickly, then she looked across the ruined cave.

"This is really it."

No one answered immediately.

They did not need to.

Marie placed her palm against the stone.

Kaia looked toward the collapsed entrance.

Sylra closed her eyes.

For a moment, they simply stood there. Just four people who had unexpectedly found the remains of their first home.

Marina wiped beneath one eye, then she frowned.

Something else bothered her.

"This place called us."

The others looked toward her.

Marina glanced beyond the cave, toward the enormous dead region surrounding them.

Her voice became quieter.

"Could this entire region be remembering something?"

Silence followed.

Because all four of them had reached the same thought.

•••

They remained inside the cave for a while.

The past hurt differently now.

The person who made somewhere feel like home was with them again.

They could speak with him, argue with him, follow him into ridiculous situations, and watch him somehow discover problems wherever he went.

The broken cave was precious. But it was no longer the only place they could call home.

That made leaving it easier.

Marie was the first to turn around.

"We still have work."

Kaia nodded.

Sylra smiled faintly.

Marina looked around one last time before following them outside.

Their expressions settled.

The investigation resumed.

This time, however, they knew what they were looking for.

They began examining the deeper structure of the region.

The spirits were redirected.

Earth spirits searched beneath collapsed terrain.

Water spirits followed forgotten underground channels.

Wind spirits entered cracks too narrow for physical bodies.

Fire spirits traced places where ancient energy had altered the temperature of the land.

The four women worked with them.

Days passed.

And slowly, a pattern emerged.

•••

The battlefield impressions were not random.

That was the first discovery.

Ancient attacks had certainly scarred the land.

Domains had collided here.

Countless Laws had been released.

Deaths had soaked the region with memories powerful enough to survive millennia.

But something else surrounded all of it.

A preservation.

Marie felt it first beneath the deepest layers of soil.

Whenever the earth changed too much, something subtly guided it back to a particular state.

Kaia found the same pattern in the residual warmth.

Sylra found it inside the wind.

Marina found it through the waterways.

Then their systems reacted.

The response was faint, but unmistakable.

Creation.

The four women gathered above a ruined valley.

For the first time since arriving, none of them looked excited.

Kaia stared toward the ground.

"This isn’t natural recovery. The energy is familiar."

Marie nodded slowly.

Something had touched this region with Creation so deeply that thousands of years had not erased it.

Marina whispered what all of them were thinking.

"The Primordial Slime."

The air became still.

The embodiment of Creation itself had done something here.

And whatever it had created had never stopped functioning.

•••

The next clue came from the younger spirits.

An earth spirit shot out of the ground so quickly that it nearly overturned itself.

Several others followed.

Their excitement immediately drew Marie’s attention.

The little spirit gestured wildly toward the eastern portion of the region.

Something underground felt wrong.

The four women exchanged glances.

Then they followed.

The spirits led them through several kilometers of broken land until they reached what looked like an ordinary depression between two ridges.

Marie touched the ground.

Her expression changed.

"There is space below."

The earth opened.

Stone shifted aside under her authority, revealing a passage that should have collapsed thousands of years ago.

Yet it had not.

The deeper they descended, the quieter the world became.

The passage was ancient.

Parts of it were natural.

Others had clearly been shaped with power.

At the end waited a sealed underground cavern.

Marie moved the final layer of earth.

The opening widened.

Just then, all four women stopped.

Something reached them.

An aura.

It was faint beyond reason, yet they recognized it before thought could catch up.

Marina’s breath caught.

Kaia’s eyes widened.

Sylra covered her mouth.

Marie simply stood there.

For a moment, no one entered.

They did not need evidence. They did not need a system to identify it. They had spent too long beside that presence once.

They had followed it when they were little more than spheres of element.

They had stayed beside it through silence.

They had watched it slowly learn to smile again.

They could never mistake it.

Their eyes reddened.

Marina looked back toward the passage they had traveled, then toward the unseen land above them.

The strange mountains.

The diverted rivers.

The battlefield scars that never faded.

The cave they had thought lost forever.

The Creation surrounding everything.

Understanding arrived slowly.

"This whole place..."

Her voice failed for a moment.

She tried again.

"It remembers him."

No one corrected her. Because now they could feel it too.

The land was not simply refusing to heal.

It was preserving something.

The Primordial Slime’s Creation had wrapped itself around this region so completely that even after eras passed, the world had never been allowed to erase what happened here.