100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 719 - First Trial

The first qualification groups reached their staging sectors.

Across the preserved region, enormous formation gates began closing behind them.

The excitement changed almost immediately.

For hours, the gathering had felt like a festival. Now the competitors were finally standing inside the grounds.

The qualification sectors differed greatly in appearance. Some crossed ruined valleys and broken mountain paths, while others passed through forests, underground chambers, artificial ruins, or vast formation fields built over the preserved terrain.

The underlying objective, however, remained the same.

Reach the endpoint.

Everything between the participant and that endpoint existed to test what happened when the easiest answer stopped working.

There were hostile constructs, environmental obstacles, preserved battlefield pressure, controlled suppression, and restrictions that changed according to the route and the participant’s performance.

Defeating everything was unnecessary.

In some places, fighting was the correct choice.

In others, avoiding a battle entirely was better.

Certain obstacles existed only to waste time and energy if someone was stubborn enough to insist on destroying them.

Lootwell wanted to know who could tell the difference.

That was also why the qualification was not divided simply by who possessed the highest realm.

Every participant had already been classified according to their realm, race, physical structure, Law development, and several other relevant factors.

The formations adjusted accordingly.

A weaker participant would not receive the same raw pressure as an Eternal.

An Eternal would not be allowed to walk through a trial designed for someone several major realms below them and call it talent.

The Authority Resistance Fields could regulate the pressure placed upon each route, while the hostile constructs and environmental difficulty scaled within predetermined limits.

Lootwell was not making everyone equally powerful.

It was making the challenge fair enough that performance could actually mean something.

A person’s ranking would reflect what they accomplished relative to the difficulty assigned to them, how efficiently they did it, how well they adapted, and how they handled changing conditions.

That interested Lucien far more than discovering which Eternal could crush the largest number of constructs.

Spectators saw only limited portions of each route.

Several trial conditions remained hidden so competitors in later waves could not simply memorize the correct answers.

Complaints appeared almost immediately.

Lootwell ignored them.

A competition supposedly measuring adaptability became rather pointless if the audience could write a complete solution guide after the first hour.

Lucien approved wholeheartedly.

•••

He stood within the central command platform as the qualification network reported readiness.

Thousands of primary sectors were active.

Within them were far more individual routes, separated through formation layers, spatial partitions, terrain divisions, and controlled scheduling.

The first wave alone contained an absurd number of participants.

And it represented only a fraction of those who had registered.

Lucien looked across the network.

For a moment, he remembered a time when Lootwell had been small enough that he could recognize nearly everyone gathered beneath its banner.

Now he was looking at a system designed to evaluate and train a meaningful portion of the Big World.

The realization settled strangely in his chest.

Then he smiled.

The authority network responded.

Across the qualification grounds, the background pressure increased.

Only slightly.

But this time, nobody could mistake it for nervousness.

Laws became heavier to manifest.

Domains that normally unfolded almost instinctively required more deliberate control.

Weapons connected to Laws responded with a fraction of delay.

Beast bloodlines stirred as something external pressed against their natural authority.

Internal energies still moved, but no longer with complete freedom.

Some competitors immediately slowed down and studied the sensation.

Others adjusted their circulation.

A few grinned.

And, inevitably, some tried to overpower it.

Lucien already knew which group was about to learn the first lesson.

Above the central plateau, Vivian’s projection appeared once more.

"The first individual qualification is ready."

Across the preserved region, formation gates began glowing.

Participants adjusted their weapons.

Beasts lowered their bodies.

Mages gathered their energy.

Veterans studied the terrain instead of the people beside them.

Unknown independents stood in different sectors from heirs whose names were famous across entire continents.

For the duration of the qualification, reputation meant very little.

The route did not care.

Lucien checked the final safeguards.

Extraction formations were active. Medical teams were ready. Suppression thresholds were stable.

Every sector answered correctly.

Vivian raised the megaphone.

"The Lootwell Grand Intercontinental Competition officially begins."

The gates opened.

•••

The first surprise came almost immediately.

A considerable number of participants ran.

Lucien watched several projection feeds simultaneously.

Some charged straight toward the endpoint as though speed alone would settle everything.

Others attacked the first hostile construct they encountered before even checking whether it was blocking their route.

One particularly enthusiastic swordsman spent nearly a minute cutting apart an enormous stone construct.

He succeeded.

Then the broken construct rebuilt itself behind him.

The actual route had been ten meters to his left.

Several spectators laughed.

The swordsman did not.

Elsewhere, someone simply walked around an identical construct and continued forward.

The first difference in mentality had appeared within minutes.

That was exactly what Lootwell wanted.

The qualification did not punish strength.

Strength remained valuable.

A powerful participant could break through difficult terrain faster, survive greater mistakes, and recover from situations that would eliminate someone weaker.

But power without judgment wasted time.

Power without control consumed resources.

And power that collapsed the moment a preferred Law became difficult to use was not nearly as reliable as its owner believed.

The qualification began exposing those weaknesses almost immediately.

•••

The first restriction changes arrived after the opening sections.

In one series of routes, weapon access disappeared temporarily.

Elsewhere, participants discovered their Domains had been restricted.

Some lost access to their strongest movement techniques.

Others encountered terrain that made their usual combat style inefficient.

The restrictions never arrived without warning.

Each participant received a brief notice before the change activated.

That was deliberate too.

The purpose was not to trick them.

It was to force them to respond.

A famous spear expert stopped when his weapon became inaccessible, stared at his empty hand for half a second, and immediately continued using movement techniques and close combat.

A mage whose Law became temporarily restricted spent far too long attempting to force it back into operation.

Her route pressure increased while she remained stationary.

She eventually abandoned the attempt and began using the secondary abilities she had barely practiced.

By the time she reached the next section, her expression had changed considerably.

Lucien suspected she would practice those abilities more seriously after today.

That alone made the trial worthwhile.

Across thousands of sectors, similar moments repeated.

Participants discovered that abilities they considered essential were merely convenient.

Some learned that their secondary skills were better than expected.

Others discovered embarrassing gaps they had managed to ignore for years because ordinary battles allowed them to overwhelm problems before those weaknesses mattered.

Lootwell recorded everything.

Not to shame them, but understand them.

•••

The observation network became increasingly busy.

Obsidian Collegium researchers monitored performance patterns from dedicated halls.

Judges received condensed feeds rather than attempting the impossible task of personally watching every participant.

The ranking network processed objective completion, time, resource expenditure, pressure endured, restrictions encountered, unnecessary engagements, control failures, recovery, and several other factors.

No single score decided everything.

Lucien had deliberately avoided making the system that simple.

Someone could finish quickly by destroying half a sector and exhausting nearly all their strength.

Another could finish slightly later while preserving almost everything.

Depending on the route and objective, the second performance might be better.

That uncertainty made the audience argue constantly.

Lucien considered that another success.

If everyone could predict the rankings from raw realm alone, there would have been little reason to hold the competition.

•••

Eliminations began as well.

They were not dramatic.

Whenever a participant crossed a safety threshold, suffered potentially fatal damage, became unable to continue, or triggered a mandatory extraction condition, the formation acted immediately.

A flash of spatial light would appear.

The participant vanished.

Seconds later, they arrived at one of the distributed extraction points.

Medical teams were waiting before the injured even understood where they had gone.

Seraphine had taken overall responsibility for the medical network together with several Celestials, experienced healers, and members of the Silent Monastery.

No single medical center could possibly serve an event of this scale, so extraction points had been distributed throughout the preserved region and connected to larger treatment hubs.

Minor injuries were handled locally.

More serious cases were transferred immediately.

Spiritual instability, soul strain, mental contamination, and Law pathway problems went to specialized teams.

The Silent Monastery focused particularly on participants affected by preserved battlefield impressions, mental pressure, or foreign intent.

Lucien watched the first few thousand extractions carefully.

The system held.

A participant disappeared from a collapsing route and reappeared under a healing formation almost instantly.

Another arrived unconscious after forcing a restricted Law far beyond the safe threshold.

A third was physically unharmed but shaking badly after encountering a preserved battlefield impression that reminded him too closely of something from his past.

All three received different treatment.

That mattered.

The competition was enormous, but Lootwell had no intention of treating people as numbers simply because there were too many of them to count comfortably.