100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 698 - Message

Lucien remained inside the underground chamber for a long time.

Then he expanded his senses again.

His perception spread through the stone, through the buried passages, and farther outward until it covered more and more of the preserved region.

He searched carefully.

Anything that could explain what the Primordial Slime had preserved so desperately.

He found nothing.

The ancient battlefield impressions remained scattered across the region.

Creation still wrapped around the land like an invisible shell.

But only this chamber contained something distinctly connected to the Human Ancestor.

A lingering aura. It was faint beyond reason. Yet somehow untouched by time.

Lucien frowned.

There was no soul here, no sleeping consciousness waiting to awaken, and nothing that resembled the Human Ancestor himself.

That created an uncomfortable possibility.

Had the Primordial Slime succeeded?

Perhaps it had protected the remains of the Human Ancestor long enough to use the Reincarnation Disc afterward.

Lucien’s thoughts stopped there.

He deliberately refused to continue.

There were too many unknowns.

The Human Ancestor’s death had never appeared ordinary to begin with.

The Primordial Slime’s actions were even less ordinary.

If Lucien continued stacking guesses on top of guesses, he would eventually create an entire history with no evidence supporting half of it.

Alanthuriel might know something.

Lucien could ask him later.

For now, there was something real in front of him.

That was enough.

•••

Lucien walked toward the center of the chamber.

The four elemental women remained behind him.

None of them spoke.

The closer Lucien moved toward the place where the Human Ancestor had died, the clearer the lingering aura became.

It was weak. A normal person probably would not have noticed it at all.

Lucien did. Worse, he found himself drawn toward it.

The familiarity made no sense.

He had encountered the Human Ancestor only through the Mural World.

Perhaps experiencing those old impressions had made the aura recognizable.

Lucien accepted that explanation because he currently had no better one.

He stopped directly over the place he remembered.

In the Mural World, the Human Ancestor had fallen right in this very area.

The Primordial Slime had been beside him.

Lucien looked down.

It was then that the aura moved.

His expression changed.

Before he could retreat, the faint trace rose from the ground and entered him.

Lucien froze.

Then the entire chamber lit up.

Creation spread through the stone.

Ancient lines appeared beneath Lucien’s feet.

One after another, runes emerged from a floor that had looked completely ordinary moments earlier.

The four women froze.

Lucien stared.

He recognized the nature of the power immediately.

The Primordial Slime.

The runes gathered into words.

It was... a message.

Lucien’s attention sharpened.

The first line appeared.

[By the time you are reading this, I might already be dead.]

Lucien nearly choked.

Of all the things he had expected from an ancient message left by the embodiment of Creation, apparently a painfully familiar opening was not one of them.

He stared at the line.

"That is incredibly cliché."

Marina covered her mouth.

Then the next lines appeared.

His amusement disappeared.

[Live as the person you became.]

[Do not look for me.]

Lucien’s eyes narrowed.

Another line formed.

[This land is yours.]

[It has already served its purpose.]

Lucien stopped breathing for a moment.

Then more runes emerged.

[You told me your death was natural.]

[I disagreed.]

[So I kept what I could and went looking for the rest.]

[If you returned, then I was right.]

The chamber became completely silent.

Lucien read the message again. Slowly this time.

Then once more.

Something inside him tightened.

He could not explain it. The words felt wrong.

Not because they were strange, but because they felt personal.

As though the message was not merely being displayed in front of him.

As though it had been waiting specifically for him to stand here.

Lucien’s fingers curled slightly.

He immediately rejected the thought.

The message was obviously intended for the Human Ancestor.

That made far more sense.

The preserved aura must have mistaken him for the intended recipient.

Or perhaps his Living Creation had resonated with the Primordial Slime’s Creation strongly enough to satisfy whatever condition had been left behind.

That explanation was reasonable.

Still, the uncomfortable feeling remained.

Live as the person you became.

The sentence stayed in his mind.

Why did it bother him so much?

He shook his head.

There was no point forcing an answer.

Then, the final section appeared.

Lucien looked up.

And froze again.

[PS: The Vermillion Bird is not a Phoenix.]

[Do not forget that in this life.]

[Now you have to discipline my failed creation.]

Lucien stared.

The solemn atmosphere shattered.

A final line formed underneath.

[-Your Friendly Neighborhood Slime]

Silence lasted for several breaths.

Then Lucien laughed.

He tried to stop, but that made it worse.

The ancient battlefield.

The preserved death site.

The mysterious plan involving Creation and reincarnation.

Everything had built toward some profound final message.

And the Primordial Slime had signed it like that.

Lucien bent slightly as the laughter escaped him.

"What kind of Primordial leaves this as his final message?"

Marina finally laughed too.

Kaia’s lips curved.

Even Marie’s expression softened.

Sylra quietly wiped beneath one eye.

Lucien continued laughing.

He did not know exactly when the laughter changed.

At some point, his eyes became wet.

He told himself it was because he had laughed too much.

That was probably true.

He wiped his face.

Yet something warm remained in his chest.

A strange ache had eased.

He had no idea why.

The Primordial Slime’s message had not been written for him.

And yet, for a few moments, reading it had felt like hearing the voice of someone he had missed.

That thought was even more ridiculous than the previous ones.

Lucien pushed it aside.

•••

The four elemental women watched him carefully.

They had been worried when the ancient aura entered him.

Now their tension gradually faded.

Whatever the message had awakened inside Lucien, it had not harmed him.

If anything, he looked lighter.

Marie glanced at the fading runes.

Then at Lucien.

She said nothing.

Neither did the others.

Some questions were better left alone until the person asking them was ready.

Lucien looked around the chamber again.

The message was disappearing.

The Creation surrounding it slowly returned to silence.

One sentence remained in his thoughts.

This land is yours.

Technically, that instruction had been left for the Human Ancestor.

Lucien was not the Human Ancestor.

As far as he knew, anyway.

So the ownership situation was somewhat questionable.

He considered it for several seconds.

Then he made a practical decision.

The Human Ancestor had not appeared. The Primordial Slime was apparently gone. No faction claimed the region.

And Lucien desperately needed an enormous training ground.

He decided to borrow it.

If the Human Ancestor somehow appeared one day and demanded his land back, Lucien would explain everything then.

That sounded reasonable.

Probably.

•••

Lucien left the chamber with the four women.

Once outside, he rose into the air.

The enormous dead region stretched beneath them.

Only now, Lucien no longer saw dead land.

He saw preserved history.

Battlefield impressions remained embedded across enormous distances.

Residual Laws still lingered in the atmosphere.

Old terrain carried traces of wars that no modern formation could reproduce perfectly.

And beneath everything was the Primordial Slime’s Creation, quietly preventing the region from completely losing what had happened here.

Lucien’s eyes slowly brightened.

They had wanted a training ground.

They had found something considerably better.

Lucien did not need to erase the battlefield impressions.

He could use them.

Different regions could be stabilized according to their surviving pressure.

Old Law collisions could become controlled training zones.

The dangerous portions could be isolated.

Safe areas could hold arenas, resting districts, medical halls, teleportation hubs, observation towers, and command centers.

The enormous scale meant entire armies could train here without crowding one another.

More importantly, the land already knew war.

Lucien looked toward the distant horizon.

The Thousand Races needed somewhere they could learn to survive what was coming.

This place had already survived something terrible once.

Perhaps that made it appropriate.

Marie, Kaia, Sylra, and Marina floated beside him.

Their first home was somewhere beneath that ruined landscape.

The Human Ancestor had died here.

The Primordial Slime had preserved it.

And now Lucien intended to fill the same land with people learning how not to die.

There was something strangely fitting about that.

Lucien smiled.

"I think we found our training ground."

The four women looked at one another.

Then they smiled too.

The land had spent ages remembering the past.

Soon, it would begin preparing the future.