100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 724 - Interweaving Trial

The first wave entered.

This time, there was far less reckless movement.

The individual trials had already taught people not to mistake speed for efficiency, and the Law Interweaver itself was hardly new anymore.

For months, factions across the Big World had trained with it.

Many competitors already knew exactly what their preferred reservoir combinations could do.

What the Interweaving Trial would reveal was something harder.

Could they still use those combinations efficiently when the battlefield refused to cooperate?

The teams moved.

Then the suppression began.

It did not descend everywhere at once.

In one sector, Fire became inaccessible.

Another suppressed Motion.

Elsewhere, several weapon Laws weakened beneath a heavier authority.

The reactions were immediate, but rarely panicked.

A Scarlet Sect disciple felt Fire retreat and activated Stone almost at once.

There was no hesitation in the transition.

He had clearly practiced it before.

A low wall rose ahead of him, just enough to redirect an incoming construct rather than stop it completely.

His teammate moved through the opening.

The disciple followed.

The entire exchange lasted only several breaths.

The audience barely reacted.

That kind of competence had become normal.

Then the terrain shifted.

A second construct appeared from the side while the route beneath them began collapsing.

The disciple drew upon Motion from another reservoir and interwove it with Stone.

His body became heavier and more stable without losing mobility, allowing him to cross the breaking ground while maintaining the defensive structure around the beacon.

That drew more attention.

Not because Stone and Motion had never been interwoven before.

What impressed people was how smoothly he had done it while Fire remained suppressed and the battlefield continued changing around him.

That was what the trial was actually measuring.

•••

Across another battlefield, an enormous beast practitioner lost access to its natural reinforcement Law.

Mist filled one reservoir.

Reflection filled another.

The beast had clearly trained with both.

Mist spread first, not as a useless cloud around its body, but in controlled layers across the battlefield.

Several hostile constructs lost track of its exact position.

Then Reflection entered the interweaving.

The beast did not attempt anything elaborate.

It simply used the distorted perception created by Mist to make the timing of its reflective responses harder to read.

Several attacks were redirected at awkward angles while the team advanced behind it.

The spectators watched more seriously.

The beast had not become a master of either Law.

Nobody expected that.

But it understood enough to use both in ways that supported what its own body already did well.

•••

Elsewhere, a mage whose original Law had been suppressed transitioned into Motion without difficulty.

That alone attracted little notice.

Then a rival team attempted to force her away from the beacon.

She merged Motion with Water from another reservoir, using one to redirect her momentum and the other to soften the abrupt changes in direction.

The result was not especially spectacular.

It was simply efficient.

She escaped without wasting enough authority to matter.

That was the kind of performance Lucien wanted.

The Interweaving Trial was not exposing people who knew nothing about Interweavers.

It was exposing the difference between people who had merely practiced with them and people who had begun integrating them into the way they fought.

•••

The more meaningful lesson appeared as reservoir levels began dropping.

Most experienced users already understood that stored authority was finite.

They had trained around that limitation for months.

The relay stations simply made resource management impossible to ignore.

A practitioner could use Stone alone.

They could combine Stone with Motion.

They could interweave Mist with Water.

They could cycle between all three reservoirs depending on the situation.

But every choice consumed something.

And once a reservoir emptied, only the original bearer of that Law could properly replenish it.

At the first relay stations, the stronger teams did not rush to refill everything.

They checked what remained.

They considered the terrain ahead.

Then they replenished only what they expected to need.

That distinction quickly separated experienced teams from merely powerful ones.

Some groups wasted time restoring every reservoir to maximum capacity.

Others recognized that their route heavily favored only two stored Laws and conserved the third for emergencies.

A few teams deliberately kept one reservoir nearly untouched because its Law formed part of their strongest emergency combination.

The recharging process itself remained simple.

The donor transferred their authority into the corresponding reservoir through the Interweaver’s formation, and the device wasted very little during the process.

But the battlefield still mattered.

If the Fire bearer was occupied elsewhere, Fire could not be replenished.

If the Motion practitioner had been extracted, the rest of the team could continue using whatever Motion remained in their reservoirs and could still merge it with other stored Laws.

Once those reserves were gone, however, that option disappeared with them.

That was why the four-person structure mattered so much.

Each teammate was more than another combatant.

They were also the source behind three sets of possibilities carried by everyone else.

•••

The first major upset came from a team nobody had expected to perform particularly well.

None of its four members had ranked near the top of the individual competition.

Their Laws were useful without being extraordinary.

Their Interweaver control, however, was excellent.

They rarely used a stored Law by itself unless that was actually the most efficient choice.

When one member’s original Law became suppressed, they adjusted without needing to speak.

A defensive reservoir stabilized the beacon carrier.

Motion helped another reposition.

Mist covered their retreat when a rival team approached.

None of those actions were remarkable alone.

Together, they created almost no wasted movement.

They reached relay stations with healthy reserves.

They recharged selectively.

And when two reservoir Laws could solve a problem more efficiently than one, they interwove them without wasting authority on unnecessary output.

A rival squad attempted to intercept them near a ruined settlement.

The unknown team could probably have won the fight.

They ignored it.

One member used Wind and Mist to obscure their direction of movement while another carried the beacon through a narrow side route.

The rival squad realized what had happened only after the distance had become inconvenient.

Some spectators still called the decision cowardly.

Several veterans immediately disagreed.

Minutes later, the supposedly cowardly team crossed the endpoint while their pursuers were still engaged with another group.

The argument ended quickly.

Their ranking rose to first within their classification.

Within minutes, people began searching all four names through their communication devices.

Lucien marked them for further attention as well.

None of them looked extraordinary when separated.

Together, they wasted almost nothing.

That mattered far more.

•••

Other teams stood out for completely different reasons.

One group possessed three highly aggressive Laws and a single support-oriented Law.

Everyone expected the offensive reservoirs to dominate their strategy.

Instead, the support Law became the most frequently replenished authority on the team because it improved the stability of several merged combinations.

Another squad had spent months treating one of their teammate’s Laws as little more than a backup option.

Under the trial’s suppression, they discovered that the same Law interwove exceptionally well with another and allowed them to maintain control in terrain that disrupted their usual techniques.

A beast team used a defensive Law not merely to shield their beacon, but as the stable core of a second interwoven Law that redirected incoming force away from it.

...

The spectators became more interested as the trial continued.

People were no longer asking which stored Law was strongest.

They were asking which combinations were efficient, which ones consumed too much authority, and which worked particularly well under suppression.

Rivalries grew more technical as well.

Teams began recognizing one another’s favored reservoir combinations.

A participant noticed that an opponent had nearly exhausted Stone and deliberately pressured him into a situation where Stone would normally be the safest answer.

The opponent saw through it.

Instead of spending the last of Stone, he interwove Wind with a small amount of Water and escaped through a route that appeared less stable but cost him far less authority.

The audience erupted.

The Obsidian Collegium recorded everything.

So did Lucien.

•••

As the hours passed, the Interweaving Grounds began revealing just how far the world had already come with the device.

Months ago, most experts had treated their Law as something deeply personal and difficult to separate from the way they fought.

That had not changed.

Their own Law was still their foundation.

But familiarity with Interweavers had changed how rigidly they thought about everything around it.

They had learned how to take a foreign Law, understand enough of its nature, and fit it into what they already knew.

The trial pushed that further.

The most capable participants were not those who collected the greatest number of impressive combinations.

They were the ones who understood when a combination was worth using at all.

That distinction interested Lucien.